TRUMP: PROTECTOR OF WOMEN — OR PREDATORS?
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
Donald Trump proclaimed that he would be the protector of women. That seems to involve anointing creeps from whom women need protection. If you want to see women flying high, dominating the landscape and unmasking a fake wizard, see “Wicked.”
In Oz, women are defying gravity. In America, many have been grounded, under the thumb of a wicked wizard.
Women’s optimism over striking achievements — the #MeToo movement, the anti-Trump marches; perhaps the most effective modern House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; the women elected to Congress in response to Trump; the creditable presidential campaigns of two women, Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris — is melting faster than a water-soaked wicked witch.
The future is a president who dragged women back to the past by overturning Roe. Trump, who was himself found liable for sexual abuse, moved to elevate three men accused of sexual misconduct — one with a minor — to fill three crucial cabinet posts: leading the Justice, Defense and Health and Human Services Departments.
It is a searing affront to women. As Julia Baird writes in her new book, “Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything,” “In truth, we rarely care about violence against women, so foundational is it to our culture.”
When Matt Gaetz dropped out, Trump learned that some people are so repellent, not even he can force them down the throat of craven Republicans in Congress. Some Republicans balk at a Fox News weekend host running our military, much less one who paid a woman who accused him of rape to head off a lawsuit.
“It’s a pretty big problem, given that we have, you know, we have a sexual assault problem in our military,” the Republican senator Kevin Cramer said of Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
And it’s not just men with sordid incidents. Linda McMahon, Trump’s selection for education secretary, has been accused in a lawsuit, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, of allowing a man in their company, World Wrestling Entertainment, to groom and sexually abuse children in the 1980s and 1990s. (In a separate lawsuit obtained by The Athletic, Vince McMahon was accused by a woman of sex trafficking, physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault and negligence.)
In the old days, even a small black mark — smoking pot or not paying taxes for your nanny — could sink you instantly. And, for larger offenses, the fact that you weren’t criminally charged wouldn’t save you. As Carl Hulse wrote in The Times: “What once passed as disqualifying for a presidential nominee seems downright benign in comparison to allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use by his attorney general pick detailed in a secret congressional report, a sexual assault accusation followed by a paid settlement for his choice to head the Pentagon and an acknowledged former heroin addiction by the would-be health secretary.”
Now we’re back using “he said/she said” to dismiss a woman who filed a police complaint, full of lurid detail, against Hegseth. Bill Hagerty, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said the accusations were a “disgrace,” nothing but “he said/she said.”
In putting forward three men accused of sexual misconduct, Trump is conveying that men like himself are the perpetual victims of lies, so it should not be disqualifying.
He is turning what he told Billy Bush on the “Access Hollywood” tape into a presidential mantra: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
Donald Trump proclaimed that he would be the protector of women. That seems to involve anointing creeps from whom women need protection. If you want to see women flying high, dominating the landscape and unmasking a fake wizard, see “Wicked.”
In Oz, women are defying gravity. In America, many have been grounded, under the thumb of a wicked wizard.
Women’s optimism over striking achievements — the #MeToo movement, the anti-Trump marches; perhaps the most effective modern House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; the women elected to Congress in response to Trump; the creditable presidential campaigns of two women, Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris — is melting faster than a water-soaked wicked witch.
The future is a president who dragged women back to the past by overturning Roe. Trump, who was himself found liable for sexual abuse, moved to elevate three men accused of sexual misconduct — one with a minor — to fill three crucial cabinet posts: leading the Justice, Defense and Health and Human Services Departments.
It is a searing affront to women. As Julia Baird writes in her new book, “Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything,” “In truth, we rarely care about violence against women, so foundational is it to our culture.”
When Matt Gaetz dropped out, Trump learned that some people are so repellent, not even he can force them down the throat of craven Republicans in Congress. Some Republicans balk at a Fox News weekend host running our military, much less one who paid a woman who accused him of rape to head off a lawsuit.
“It’s a pretty big problem, given that we have, you know, we have a sexual assault problem in our military,” the Republican senator Kevin Cramer said of Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
And it’s not just men with sordid incidents. Linda McMahon, Trump’s selection for education secretary, has been accused in a lawsuit, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, of allowing a man in their company, World Wrestling Entertainment, to groom and sexually abuse children in the 1980s and 1990s. (In a separate lawsuit obtained by The Athletic, Vince McMahon was accused by a woman of sex trafficking, physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault and negligence.)
In the old days, even a small black mark — smoking pot or not paying taxes for your nanny — could sink you instantly. And, for larger offenses, the fact that you weren’t criminally charged wouldn’t save you. As Carl Hulse wrote in The Times: “What once passed as disqualifying for a presidential nominee seems downright benign in comparison to allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use by his attorney general pick detailed in a secret congressional report, a sexual assault accusation followed by a paid settlement for his choice to head the Pentagon and an acknowledged former heroin addiction by the would-be health secretary.”
Now we’re back using “he said/she said” to dismiss a woman who filed a police complaint, full of lurid detail, against Hegseth. Bill Hagerty, a Republican senator from Tennessee, said the accusations were a “disgrace,” nothing but “he said/she said.”
In putting forward three men accused of sexual misconduct, Trump is conveying that men like himself are the perpetual victims of lies, so it should not be disqualifying.
He is turning what he told Billy Bush on the “Access Hollywood” tape into a presidential mantra: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
TRUMP’S EDUCATION SECRETARY PICK NAMED IN SEXUAL ABUSE LAWSUIT
Linda McMahon, who ran World Wrestling Entertainment for decades, was accused in the lawsuit of not preventing one of the organization’s employees from victimizing children who helped set up wrestling rings.
By Sharon Otterman and Zach Montague, The New York Times
Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for education secretary, has been accused in a recent lawsuit of failing to stop a ringside announcer for World Wrestling Entertainment from grooming and sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ms. McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, ran the wrestling empire beginning in the early 1980s, with Ms. McMahon working as its president and chief executive officer until 2009. Over those years, their company grew into a cultural force, filling arenas and elevating characters like Hulk Hogan and the Rock into household names.
Allegations that underage boys were abused by employees have dogged the organization for decades. The recent lawsuit was filed in October by five former “ring boys” who ran errands and helped set up before matches for W.W.E. in the 1980s.
The lawsuit claims that the five boys were sexually abused by the organization’s ringside announcer and ring crew chief, Melvin Phillips Jr., who died in 2012. It was filed in Maryland against Mr. McMahon, Ms. McMahon, W.W.E. and TKO Group Holdings. The suit accuses the McMahons and the other defendants of criminal negligence by allowing Mr. Phillips to remain at the company for years. The plaintiffs are not named.
The suit says the McMahons were aware of credible abuse accusations against Mr. Phillips and other employees, and tolerated them anyway. It does not accuse Ms. McMahon of sexual misconduct.
“We finally have a chance to hold accountable those who allowed and enabled the open, rampant sexual abuse of these young boys,” Greg Gutzler, a lawyer at DiCello Levitt who is leading the litigation, said in a statement. “That so many were aware of the sexual abuse of the ring boys and did nothing to prevent or stop it is simply unconscionable.” Ms. McMahon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit and its claims.
Mr. Phillips, the complaint says, was himself a ring boy who began working with the company when it was still owned by Mr. McMahon’s father in the 1970s. As Mr. Phillips moved up the ranks, he began supervising other ring boys, staying with them in hotels and traveling with them from state to state, the lawsuit says. Ring boys often came from communities where the organization was holding a show, the lawsuit says. They were able to watch the shows and were recruited with promises of meeting famous wrestlers, according to the complaint.
The five former ring boys who brought the suit each met Mr. Phillips in the early to mid-1980s, when they were between 13 and 15 years old, the lawsuit says. Mr. Phillips met the boys outside the arenas as they waited for shows to begin, and would then invite them in, giving them free seats, according to the lawsuit. Eventually, he would bring them back to his hotel or dressing room, lie on top of them, massage their legs and feet, and abuse them sexually, the complaint says. He gave the boys money after the encounters, which he would sometimes videotape, the complaint says.
According to the complaint, in 1988 the McMahons fired Mr. Phillips after a slew of allegations about him came to light. But it says the McMahons rehired the announcer six weeks later and protected him legally, including by filing a defamation suit in 1992 against a New York Post columnist who wrote about the abuse allegations when two ring boys went public with their stories.
The lawsuit cites a raft of other complaints of sexual harassment and abuse around W.W.E. over the years. Among them are hush money payments of more than $12 million that Mr. McMahon was accused of making to four women to suppress allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Mr. McMahon has denied those allegations.
In 2009, Ms. McMahon stepped down as chief executive of W.W.E. to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut as a Republican. She spent heavily to fund her own campaign, winning her party’s nomination, but she lost to Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and Chris Murphy in 2012, both Democrats.
During her bids for the Senate, Ms. McMahon and her husband were subject to scrutiny over W.W.E.’s treatment of wrestlers, who are classified as independent contractors and do not receive health insurance or Social Security and Medicare contributions.
As the professional wrestling empire she oversaw grew into a billion-dollar operation, critics said the pair routinely prioritized growth and profits over the health and safety of their workers. Ms. McMahon deflected those criticisms at the time by making the unusual admission that most elements of the dramatized combat were largely stagecraft and choreographed fighting.
In 2010, a leaked company memo suggested that she had tried to tip off a doctor who had been charged with distributing steroids to wrestlers about a possible federal investigation. At the time, Ms. McMahon denied having done anything wrong.
The allegations in the recent lawsuit and the long history of questions about the work environment at W.W.E. have raised concerns about Ms. McMahon’s potential nomination. In her role as education secretary, she would oversee the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces laws such as Title IX that protect students from sex discrimination and sexual harassment.
A number of student advocacy groups have reacted to Ms. McMahon’s nomination with dismay, citing the department’s traditional regulatory role over campus safety. “All students deserve to go to school and have the right to learn and grow without fear of harassment or discrimination,” Gaylynn Burroughs, the vice president of education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement after the announcement. “The Department of Education’s sole purpose is to protect equal learning opportunities for all students, and the head of it must be focused on that.”
Linda McMahon, who ran World Wrestling Entertainment for decades, was accused in the lawsuit of not preventing one of the organization’s employees from victimizing children who helped set up wrestling rings.
By Sharon Otterman and Zach Montague, The New York Times
Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for education secretary, has been accused in a recent lawsuit of failing to stop a ringside announcer for World Wrestling Entertainment from grooming and sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ms. McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, ran the wrestling empire beginning in the early 1980s, with Ms. McMahon working as its president and chief executive officer until 2009. Over those years, their company grew into a cultural force, filling arenas and elevating characters like Hulk Hogan and the Rock into household names.
Allegations that underage boys were abused by employees have dogged the organization for decades. The recent lawsuit was filed in October by five former “ring boys” who ran errands and helped set up before matches for W.W.E. in the 1980s.
The lawsuit claims that the five boys were sexually abused by the organization’s ringside announcer and ring crew chief, Melvin Phillips Jr., who died in 2012. It was filed in Maryland against Mr. McMahon, Ms. McMahon, W.W.E. and TKO Group Holdings. The suit accuses the McMahons and the other defendants of criminal negligence by allowing Mr. Phillips to remain at the company for years. The plaintiffs are not named.
The suit says the McMahons were aware of credible abuse accusations against Mr. Phillips and other employees, and tolerated them anyway. It does not accuse Ms. McMahon of sexual misconduct.
“We finally have a chance to hold accountable those who allowed and enabled the open, rampant sexual abuse of these young boys,” Greg Gutzler, a lawyer at DiCello Levitt who is leading the litigation, said in a statement. “That so many were aware of the sexual abuse of the ring boys and did nothing to prevent or stop it is simply unconscionable.” Ms. McMahon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit and its claims.
Mr. Phillips, the complaint says, was himself a ring boy who began working with the company when it was still owned by Mr. McMahon’s father in the 1970s. As Mr. Phillips moved up the ranks, he began supervising other ring boys, staying with them in hotels and traveling with them from state to state, the lawsuit says. Ring boys often came from communities where the organization was holding a show, the lawsuit says. They were able to watch the shows and were recruited with promises of meeting famous wrestlers, according to the complaint.
The five former ring boys who brought the suit each met Mr. Phillips in the early to mid-1980s, when they were between 13 and 15 years old, the lawsuit says. Mr. Phillips met the boys outside the arenas as they waited for shows to begin, and would then invite them in, giving them free seats, according to the lawsuit. Eventually, he would bring them back to his hotel or dressing room, lie on top of them, massage their legs and feet, and abuse them sexually, the complaint says. He gave the boys money after the encounters, which he would sometimes videotape, the complaint says.
According to the complaint, in 1988 the McMahons fired Mr. Phillips after a slew of allegations about him came to light. But it says the McMahons rehired the announcer six weeks later and protected him legally, including by filing a defamation suit in 1992 against a New York Post columnist who wrote about the abuse allegations when two ring boys went public with their stories.
The lawsuit cites a raft of other complaints of sexual harassment and abuse around W.W.E. over the years. Among them are hush money payments of more than $12 million that Mr. McMahon was accused of making to four women to suppress allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Mr. McMahon has denied those allegations.
In 2009, Ms. McMahon stepped down as chief executive of W.W.E. to run for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut as a Republican. She spent heavily to fund her own campaign, winning her party’s nomination, but she lost to Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and Chris Murphy in 2012, both Democrats.
During her bids for the Senate, Ms. McMahon and her husband were subject to scrutiny over W.W.E.’s treatment of wrestlers, who are classified as independent contractors and do not receive health insurance or Social Security and Medicare contributions.
As the professional wrestling empire she oversaw grew into a billion-dollar operation, critics said the pair routinely prioritized growth and profits over the health and safety of their workers. Ms. McMahon deflected those criticisms at the time by making the unusual admission that most elements of the dramatized combat were largely stagecraft and choreographed fighting.
In 2010, a leaked company memo suggested that she had tried to tip off a doctor who had been charged with distributing steroids to wrestlers about a possible federal investigation. At the time, Ms. McMahon denied having done anything wrong.
The allegations in the recent lawsuit and the long history of questions about the work environment at W.W.E. have raised concerns about Ms. McMahon’s potential nomination. In her role as education secretary, she would oversee the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces laws such as Title IX that protect students from sex discrimination and sexual harassment.
A number of student advocacy groups have reacted to Ms. McMahon’s nomination with dismay, citing the department’s traditional regulatory role over campus safety. “All students deserve to go to school and have the right to learn and grow without fear of harassment or discrimination,” Gaylynn Burroughs, the vice president of education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement after the announcement. “The Department of Education’s sole purpose is to protect equal learning opportunities for all students, and the head of it must be focused on that.”
THE SENATE MUST REJECT TRUMP’S DANGEROUS, UNQUALIFIED CABINET NOMINEES
Most of the president-elect's cabinet choices are woefully inexperienced, yet they all possess one very important quality: They are sycophants who put Donald Trump above America.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
To say that Donald Trump’s cabinet picks resemble a clown car would be to defame clowns. Beyond the obvious disqualifications of being sexual predators, anti-vaxxers, Russian sympathizers, and climate change deniers, many lack relevant experience. Most have no business overseeing important agencies charged with keeping the country safe. Some could not pass an FBI background check, while others even pose a national security threat.
Yet they all possess one very important quality for at least one man: They are sycophants who put Trump above America. This should not come as a surprise given Trump’s demand of loyalty to him above all else. But it is still alarming to Americans who support the Constitution, the rule of law, and the Founders’ vision of a government with checks and balances.
One adviser said Trump picked Matt Gaetz to be attorney general because other candidates talked about quaint things like the Constitution, while Gaetz reportedly said that once installed he would start cutting off heads. Gaetz, in what may be a rare example of good judgment on his part, announced Thursday that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for the post.
Yet the former Florida congressman’s disregard for the rule of law was just one of his problems. If he had been confirmed, the 42-year-old would have led the department that investigated him for sex trafficking and obstruction of justice. The House Ethics Committee also investigated him for claims involving drugs, bribes, and sex with a minor. Gaetz denies the charges. But Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) told CNN that Gaetz showed lawmakers nude pictures and videos of women he had sex with.
The Justice Department is not a frat house. Nor should it be run by an alleged lawbreaker. Beyond Gaetz’s alleged crude and deviant behavior, he lacked the legal experience to oversee the Justice Department. During a stint as a lawyer, he tried a handful of minor civil disputes but never served as a prosecutor or judge and was ranked one of Florida’s least effective members of Congress.
Gaetz’s only “qualification” was that he would do whatever Trump wants, which includes using the Justice Department to prosecute enemies. That would undermine public faith in the department’s independence and the rule of law — hallmarks that have long distinguished America from many other countries.
Undermining institutions is part of Trump’s plan to MAGA-fy the government by firing career public servants, closing departments, slashing spending, and eliminating safety regulations.
Elon Musk, who is parading around Mar-a-Lago as co-president and also faces sexual harassment claims, was given a made-up title and wants to cut at least $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion federal budget — a move that would require slashing Social Security, Medicare, and veterans benefits as well as defense spending and many other programs. Musk, whose billions in federal contracts create a conflict of interest for any government oversight role, acknowledged the cuts would result in “temporary hardship” for many people.
Some wonder if the end game is to neuter the government so that many services can be privatized and further enrich the oligarchs supporting Trump. But the immediate result will be to destabilize and weaken America.
Trump’s supporters are enthralled with the reality show theater of it all, as he “owns the libs” by naming D-list apparatchiks to run the government. Trump is also taking sick pleasure by preemptively firing those who sold out by supporting him but cannot be trusted to do right by Trump, denying cabinet spots to people like Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo. Are you not entertained?
Is destroying 248 years of democracy worth the promise of cheaper eggs? The chaos, lies, and corruption of Trump’s previous term — which included two impeachments, tens of thousands of needless pandemic deaths, and a deadly insurrection — may soon seem like the good old days if the Senate bows to pressure and approves the most extreme cabinet ever.
Since Trump’s election, stock indexes have dropped and mortgage rates have increased. The smart money is jittery over Trump’s reckless economic policies and a government run by inept miscreants.
Indeed, the biggest election winner — beyond Trump dodging his criminal indictments — is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants the United States to split apart like the Soviet Union and join it in the graveyard of former superpowers. Putin sees Trump as a useful idiot in achieving his goal. That’s why Russia openly worked to help elect Trump again by spreading disinformation on social media and calling in bomb threats at polling stations in swing states.
Trump, in turn, nominated former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) to be the director of national intelligence. Gabbard has no experience in intelligence gathering. Even more dangerous, she traffics in conspiracy theories and has been a vocal supporter of Russia. State-controlled TV in Moscow celebrated Gabbard’s nomination by referring to her as “our girlfriend.” “Do you really want her to have all the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly been in Putin’s pocket?” asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.).
The same goes for Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, whom Trump nominated to be secretary of defense. Hegseth, 44, brings no experience but lots of baggage. He was accused of sexual assault and paid the woman as part of a nondisclosure agreement, but claims the encounter was consensual. He sports a tattoo that a fellow service member from his time in the National Guard flagged as a possible white nationalist “insider threat.”
Hegseth supports waterboarding, claims the Geneva Convention is outdated, wants to rename the Defense Department the War Department, is opposed to women in combat, and complained about diversity in the military. “The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” he told a podcaster. In addition to his retrograde beliefs and lack of character, Hegseth is uniquely unqualified as he would be the least experienced defense secretary in U.S. history.
Several of Trump’s picks seem less qualified than the next. Like a Bizarro World cabinet, many are poised to do the opposite of what the job requires. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist with no scientific background, is not only unfit to run Health and Human Services but is a public health danger. He is a former heroin addict, sexual philanderer, and prominent vaccine skeptic who spews reckless conspiracy theories. Kennedy, 70, falsely claimed the virus that causes COVID-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese. He falsely linked vaccines to autism and suggested AIDS may not be caused by HIV.
Beyond his disturbing interactions with dead bears and whales, Kennedy’s fringe views put him at direct odds with the career scientists, researchers, and inspectors responsible for the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs, vaccines, medical products, and the nation’s food supply.
Following Kennedy’s advice on vaccines will likely get people killed. Kennedy’s own family has said he is too dangerous to run HHS. Even the New York Post’s far-right editorial board, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, said Kennedy overseeing public health violates the first rule of medicine to do no harm. “His views were a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines,” the editorial board wrote.
Trump has also tapped Mehmet Oz, a physician and former television talk show host who endorsed quack treatments, to lead the agency that oversees Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act, which together provide health insurance to more than half the country. Oz, a wealthy dilettante who ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022 mainly from his mansion in New Jersey, has no experience running a sprawling health insurance operation, which he supports privatizing. Oz would report to Kennedy, making for a dangerous duo of know-nothings.
Trump and his supporters claim he has a mandate to do what he wants. But there was no landslide. Trump got less than 50% of the popular vote and won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by roughly 232,000 votes combined.
Trump is allowed to nominate anyone he wants, but the Senate is not obliged to rubber stamp unqualified and dangerous officials. Trump wants to overwhelm and circumvent the confirmation process with recess appointments because he knows his cabinet picks are unfit. But the Senate must do its sworn constitutional duty: complete background checks, hold hearings, and vote to accept or reject the nominees.
For the safety and health of the country, Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, Oz, and other nominees who pose a danger to American health and security and can’t meet the minimum qualifications should be rejected.
Most of the president-elect's cabinet choices are woefully inexperienced, yet they all possess one very important quality: They are sycophants who put Donald Trump above America.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
To say that Donald Trump’s cabinet picks resemble a clown car would be to defame clowns. Beyond the obvious disqualifications of being sexual predators, anti-vaxxers, Russian sympathizers, and climate change deniers, many lack relevant experience. Most have no business overseeing important agencies charged with keeping the country safe. Some could not pass an FBI background check, while others even pose a national security threat.
Yet they all possess one very important quality for at least one man: They are sycophants who put Trump above America. This should not come as a surprise given Trump’s demand of loyalty to him above all else. But it is still alarming to Americans who support the Constitution, the rule of law, and the Founders’ vision of a government with checks and balances.
One adviser said Trump picked Matt Gaetz to be attorney general because other candidates talked about quaint things like the Constitution, while Gaetz reportedly said that once installed he would start cutting off heads. Gaetz, in what may be a rare example of good judgment on his part, announced Thursday that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for the post.
Yet the former Florida congressman’s disregard for the rule of law was just one of his problems. If he had been confirmed, the 42-year-old would have led the department that investigated him for sex trafficking and obstruction of justice. The House Ethics Committee also investigated him for claims involving drugs, bribes, and sex with a minor. Gaetz denies the charges. But Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) told CNN that Gaetz showed lawmakers nude pictures and videos of women he had sex with.
The Justice Department is not a frat house. Nor should it be run by an alleged lawbreaker. Beyond Gaetz’s alleged crude and deviant behavior, he lacked the legal experience to oversee the Justice Department. During a stint as a lawyer, he tried a handful of minor civil disputes but never served as a prosecutor or judge and was ranked one of Florida’s least effective members of Congress.
Gaetz’s only “qualification” was that he would do whatever Trump wants, which includes using the Justice Department to prosecute enemies. That would undermine public faith in the department’s independence and the rule of law — hallmarks that have long distinguished America from many other countries.
Undermining institutions is part of Trump’s plan to MAGA-fy the government by firing career public servants, closing departments, slashing spending, and eliminating safety regulations.
Elon Musk, who is parading around Mar-a-Lago as co-president and also faces sexual harassment claims, was given a made-up title and wants to cut at least $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion federal budget — a move that would require slashing Social Security, Medicare, and veterans benefits as well as defense spending and many other programs. Musk, whose billions in federal contracts create a conflict of interest for any government oversight role, acknowledged the cuts would result in “temporary hardship” for many people.
Some wonder if the end game is to neuter the government so that many services can be privatized and further enrich the oligarchs supporting Trump. But the immediate result will be to destabilize and weaken America.
Trump’s supporters are enthralled with the reality show theater of it all, as he “owns the libs” by naming D-list apparatchiks to run the government. Trump is also taking sick pleasure by preemptively firing those who sold out by supporting him but cannot be trusted to do right by Trump, denying cabinet spots to people like Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo. Are you not entertained?
Is destroying 248 years of democracy worth the promise of cheaper eggs? The chaos, lies, and corruption of Trump’s previous term — which included two impeachments, tens of thousands of needless pandemic deaths, and a deadly insurrection — may soon seem like the good old days if the Senate bows to pressure and approves the most extreme cabinet ever.
Since Trump’s election, stock indexes have dropped and mortgage rates have increased. The smart money is jittery over Trump’s reckless economic policies and a government run by inept miscreants.
Indeed, the biggest election winner — beyond Trump dodging his criminal indictments — is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants the United States to split apart like the Soviet Union and join it in the graveyard of former superpowers. Putin sees Trump as a useful idiot in achieving his goal. That’s why Russia openly worked to help elect Trump again by spreading disinformation on social media and calling in bomb threats at polling stations in swing states.
Trump, in turn, nominated former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) to be the director of national intelligence. Gabbard has no experience in intelligence gathering. Even more dangerous, she traffics in conspiracy theories and has been a vocal supporter of Russia. State-controlled TV in Moscow celebrated Gabbard’s nomination by referring to her as “our girlfriend.” “Do you really want her to have all the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly been in Putin’s pocket?” asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.).
The same goes for Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, whom Trump nominated to be secretary of defense. Hegseth, 44, brings no experience but lots of baggage. He was accused of sexual assault and paid the woman as part of a nondisclosure agreement, but claims the encounter was consensual. He sports a tattoo that a fellow service member from his time in the National Guard flagged as a possible white nationalist “insider threat.”
Hegseth supports waterboarding, claims the Geneva Convention is outdated, wants to rename the Defense Department the War Department, is opposed to women in combat, and complained about diversity in the military. “The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” he told a podcaster. In addition to his retrograde beliefs and lack of character, Hegseth is uniquely unqualified as he would be the least experienced defense secretary in U.S. history.
Several of Trump’s picks seem less qualified than the next. Like a Bizarro World cabinet, many are poised to do the opposite of what the job requires. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist with no scientific background, is not only unfit to run Health and Human Services but is a public health danger. He is a former heroin addict, sexual philanderer, and prominent vaccine skeptic who spews reckless conspiracy theories. Kennedy, 70, falsely claimed the virus that causes COVID-19 was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese. He falsely linked vaccines to autism and suggested AIDS may not be caused by HIV.
Beyond his disturbing interactions with dead bears and whales, Kennedy’s fringe views put him at direct odds with the career scientists, researchers, and inspectors responsible for the safety and effectiveness of prescription drugs, vaccines, medical products, and the nation’s food supply.
Following Kennedy’s advice on vaccines will likely get people killed. Kennedy’s own family has said he is too dangerous to run HHS. Even the New York Post’s far-right editorial board, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, said Kennedy overseeing public health violates the first rule of medicine to do no harm. “His views were a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines,” the editorial board wrote.
Trump has also tapped Mehmet Oz, a physician and former television talk show host who endorsed quack treatments, to lead the agency that oversees Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act, which together provide health insurance to more than half the country. Oz, a wealthy dilettante who ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022 mainly from his mansion in New Jersey, has no experience running a sprawling health insurance operation, which he supports privatizing. Oz would report to Kennedy, making for a dangerous duo of know-nothings.
Trump and his supporters claim he has a mandate to do what he wants. But there was no landslide. Trump got less than 50% of the popular vote and won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by roughly 232,000 votes combined.
Trump is allowed to nominate anyone he wants, but the Senate is not obliged to rubber stamp unqualified and dangerous officials. Trump wants to overwhelm and circumvent the confirmation process with recess appointments because he knows his cabinet picks are unfit. But the Senate must do its sworn constitutional duty: complete background checks, hold hearings, and vote to accept or reject the nominees.
For the safety and health of the country, Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, Oz, and other nominees who pose a danger to American health and security and can’t meet the minimum qualifications should be rejected.
FOUR WAYS TRUMP WILL UNDERMINE THE AUTHORITY OF CONGRESS
The president-elect is setting the stage for a vast, dangerous and unconstitutional expansion of presidential power
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
While a worried nation tries to make sense of Donald Trump’s spate of unqualified, extreme nominees, the president-elect is setting the stage for an even more alarming takeover: a vast, dangerous and unconstitutional expansion of presidential power. This agenda includes not just emasculating the Senate’s advice-and-consent role but also refusing to spend money that lawmakers have appropriated, curbing the independence of federal regulatory agencies, and eviscerating the nonpartisan civil service.
Political appointees, however appalling, come and go, and the worst of Trump’s picks should be stopped. But we cannot lose sight of more enduring peril to democracy. These aren’t just bad policies — Trump has plenty of those, starting with his threat to conduct mass deportations — these are structural changes. And once these guardrails are demolished, restoring them will be nearly impossible and the damage to the constitutional order might be irreparable.
This might sound overstated — I hope it is. Congress could frustrate some of Trump’s efforts; more likely, although far from assured, courts could step in. Still, it would be foolish not to consider what his plans will do to our constitutional system of checks and balances.
George Washington warned against exactly this in his farewell address, advising national leaders to “confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres; avoiding in the exercise of the Powers of one department to encroach upon another.” That “spirit of encroachment,” Washington cautioned, “tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.” A real despotism. “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” Trump asserted during his first term. Now he is poised to test the limits of that claim.
None of this is a secret. To the contrary, the changes are trumpeted in videos on the campaign website, with titles such as “Agenda47: Using Impoundment to Cut Waste, Stop Inflation, and Crush the Deep State” and “Agenda47: President Trump’s Plan to Dismantle the Deep State and Return Power to the American People.”
The nation cannot afford to ignore what is going on here. “Constitutionally speaking, we are in the fight of our lives,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) told me, and I fear he is correct. What follows is a concerned citizens’ guide to what is coming. These issues might sound arcane; Trump and his allies are no doubt counting on the prospect that the public will tune out. But we should not avert our eyes.
1- Expanding recess appointments.
This might be the most audacious of Trump’s efforts to enlarge presidential authority at the expense of Congress. “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” Trump posted on X and Truth Social.
The Constitution explicitly grants presidents “power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.” That means a recess appointee can serve for as long as two years without Senate confirmation.
But this is a horse-and-buggy-era exception to the general rule requiring that the president nominate senior officials “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Until a 2014 Supreme Court ruling, National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, effectively ended the practice, presidents used recess appointments sparingly, mostly in situations where their nominees had languished in a partisan Senate. Now Trump wants Congress to go into recess so he can engage in a mass end-run around the Senate for nominees who might not otherwise win approval.
If necessary, he would invoke another constitutional provision, never before used, that lets the president “on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” In his first term, during the pandemic, Trump threatened to employ this power but never did.
I find it hard to believe that the Senate would cooperate in this evisceration of its advice-and-consent authority by going into recess. That leaves the question of whether the House, under the craven leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), would comply by declaring a recess to which the Senate would not accede — creating a disagreement between the House and Senate that could open the door for Trump to declare an adjournment. Here, too, there are thin grounds for optimism: the slim House majority, and the presence of enough Republicans who won in swing districts that they might not be willing to cave to Trump’s demand for such extraordinary power.
But if that were to happen? Under the terms of Noel Canning, Trump would probably get away with it. Noel Canning gave the nod to recess appointments that occur within congressional sessions, not between the two year-long sessions. And it said recess appointments weren’t limited to vacancies created during the recess itself, but could also be used for vacancies that arose earlier. Under Noel Canning, as long as there is a recess of at least 10 days, anything goes.
The tricky part is that the conservative justices — Justice Antonin Scalia, who is now gone, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — disagreed with those aspects of the ruling. Scalia denounced the recess power as an “anachronism” that undermines the separation of powers, writing, “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the President to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”
Now there is a six-justice conservative supermajority. Would the conservatives revisit — and overrule — that part of Noel Canning if they have the votes to do so, thereby frustrating Trump’s effort? Or, with the shoe on the other party’s foot (Noel Canning involved President Barack Obama’s recess appointments), would they continue to worry about “ignoble” uses and enabling circumvention of the Senate’s role? I suspect they would stick with the case as decided and let Trump get away with it.
2-Impounding appropriated funds.
Congress, the Constitution provides, controls the power of the purse: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Lawmakers decide how much to spend and for what purposes; the executive branches acts on their instructions.
Since the beginning of the republic, this division of labor has proved inconvenient for presidents who don’t want to spend money as Congress has dictated and have used their asserted power to “impound,” or decline to spend, appropriated funds.
This tension came to a head during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon — among other things, he refused to spend half the money allocated to sewage treatment after Congress overrode his veto of the Clean Water Act. In 1974, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to spend appropriated money unless he obtains congressional approval not to disburse the funds.
Trump has vowed to challenge the law as an unconstitutional “usurpation” of presidential power, and said he will direct agencies, on his first day in office, “to identify portions of their budgets where massive savings are possible through the Impoundment Power.” “For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as Impoundment,” Trump said in a June 2023 video.
This is wrong. In 1988, during the Reagan administration, Assistant Attorney General Charles Cooper, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that “to the extent that the commentators are suggesting that the President has inherent, constitutional power to impound funds, the weight of authority is against such a broad power in the face of an express congressional directive to spend.”
Citing a 1969 memorandum from William H. Rehnquist, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel and later chief justice, Cooper wrote, “This Office has long held that the ‘existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.’ Virtually all commentators have reached the same conclusion, without reference to their views as to the scope of executive power.”
The Supreme Court has never directly addressed the question, although, as Cooper’s memo noted, an 1838 case “can be read to support the proposition that the executive’s duty faithfully to execute the laws requires it to spend funds at the direction of Congress” and lower courts have consistently agreed. But I’m not entirely confident that the current Supreme Court majority, with its evident disdain for Congress and commitment to broad executive power, would go along.
3-Curbing independent agencies.
Starting in the 1880s, Congress established certain government offices as independent agencies, run generally by multimember commissions whose members serve fixed terms, possess particular expertise and are left free to operate outside direct executive control. But conservatives have long chafed at the agencies’ existence, which they consider an unconstitutional “headless fourth branch of government.” They want the president to have power to fire commissioners for any reason — not only for cause, as is the case under current law — and to review their proposed regulations.
Trump is on board. “I will bring the independent regulatory agencies, such as the FCC and the FTC, back under presidential authority, as the Constitution demands,” he said in an April 2023 video, referring to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. “These agencies do not get to become a fourth branch of government, issuing rules and edicts all by themselves.”
What would this mean for such agencies, which also include the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission? “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought, who headed the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration and is up for a senior position this time around, told the New York Times last year. Specifically, Vought said, “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.”
Eliminating the independence of these agencies would reflect a dramatic tilt in favor of presidential authority. There are any number of ways Trump could force the issue. He could attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, who said tersely at a post-election news conference that move was “not permitted under the law.” (Powell can only be fired for cause.) The Post reported that Trump is considering taking the extraordinary step of firing Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board; because of the way the labor agency is set up, Democrats are poised to retain majority control until 2026, if the Senate reconfirms the current chair to another term before it leaves town.
In any event, the issue of the constitutionality of independent agencies appears destined to return to the high court — with or without presidential action.
In a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the court rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to fire William Humphrey, an FTC commissioner, and Roosevelt’s argument that being limited to firing commissioners only “for cause” was an unconstitutional infringement on executive power.
But Humphrey’s Executor has long been in the conservative crosshairs. More than 20 cases raising constitutional challenges to the independent structure of agencies are making their way through the lower federal courts. The justices just declined to hear one such case but that reticence might not last.
Bottom line: Don’t bet on independent agencies’ continued insulation from presidential interference.
4-Politicizing the civil service.
A second term will give Trump the chance for a do-over in his bid to gain authority to remove tens of thousands of “rogue bureaucrats” who currently enjoy protections against being fired for political reasons. He has declared a “Day One” plan to reissue his October 2020 executive order to create a new Schedule F under which the president would have full power to remove any employee “whose position has been determined to be of confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”
This change would upend the civil service system, put in place in 1883 to end the spoils system. Currently, there are about 4,000 political appointees atop a federal workforce of 2.2 million. Trump, in his zeal to root out what he calls the “deep state,” would expand presidential power to fire federal employees at will to an estimated 50,000 or more, depending on how broadly the exemption is interpreted.
“I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump announced in a March 2023 video. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”
One sign of how sweeping the change could be? After Trump left office, the National Treasury Employees Union unearthed documents that it said showed how the Office of Management and Budget “stretched the definition of policy work to cover the vast majority of the OMB workforce, from attorneys to GS-09 assistants and specialists who have nothing to do with setting government policy.”
Trump might find it difficult to institute these changes right away. President Joe Biden not only revoked Trump’s Schedule F order, he also adopted a new rule to shield federal workers against having their civil service protections removed. Undoing that and issuing new regulations is a cumbersome, time-consuming process.
The incoming administration might be tempted to act without going through these procedural hoops. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy suggested as much in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing that the civil service law leaves Trump room to quickly “implement any number of ‘rules governing the competitive service’ that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area.”
But moving so fast would be risky, as shown by the Trump administration’s loss at the Supreme Court when it did a sloppy legal job of trying to revoke protections, from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, for immigrant “dreamers.”
It’s harder to predict how the court would deal with a revived Schedule F on the merits. The Treasury employees union, in a lawsuit challenging the original Trump order, called it “a textbook example of the President acting contrary to Congress’s express and limited delegation of authority to the President.” Still, a court inclined to a broad reading of executive powers might give the president more authority over firing federal workers.
In 1952, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, previously FDR’s attorney general, warned of the consequences of untrammeled presidential power in concluding that President Harry S. Truman lacked constitutional authority to seize control of steel plants during the Korean War. “The tendency is strong to emphasize transient results upon policies … and lose sight of enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic,” Jackson wrote.
In Jackson’s formulation, presidential power is “at its lowest ebb” when he “takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress” — the same sort of measures discussed here. “Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution,” Jackson cautioned, “for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.”
The examples outlined above aren’t the worst of what Trump could do — or the cruelest or the most extreme. Actions such as separating families, deporting dreamers and using the Justice Department to punish political enemies fall into those two categories. Yet these threatened moves represent assaults on the very architecture of democracy — assaults that must be repelled, as Jackson instructed us, lest they permanently warp the constitutional structure.
The president-elect is setting the stage for a vast, dangerous and unconstitutional expansion of presidential power
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
While a worried nation tries to make sense of Donald Trump’s spate of unqualified, extreme nominees, the president-elect is setting the stage for an even more alarming takeover: a vast, dangerous and unconstitutional expansion of presidential power. This agenda includes not just emasculating the Senate’s advice-and-consent role but also refusing to spend money that lawmakers have appropriated, curbing the independence of federal regulatory agencies, and eviscerating the nonpartisan civil service.
Political appointees, however appalling, come and go, and the worst of Trump’s picks should be stopped. But we cannot lose sight of more enduring peril to democracy. These aren’t just bad policies — Trump has plenty of those, starting with his threat to conduct mass deportations — these are structural changes. And once these guardrails are demolished, restoring them will be nearly impossible and the damage to the constitutional order might be irreparable.
This might sound overstated — I hope it is. Congress could frustrate some of Trump’s efforts; more likely, although far from assured, courts could step in. Still, it would be foolish not to consider what his plans will do to our constitutional system of checks and balances.
George Washington warned against exactly this in his farewell address, advising national leaders to “confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres; avoiding in the exercise of the Powers of one department to encroach upon another.” That “spirit of encroachment,” Washington cautioned, “tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.” A real despotism. “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” Trump asserted during his first term. Now he is poised to test the limits of that claim.
None of this is a secret. To the contrary, the changes are trumpeted in videos on the campaign website, with titles such as “Agenda47: Using Impoundment to Cut Waste, Stop Inflation, and Crush the Deep State” and “Agenda47: President Trump’s Plan to Dismantle the Deep State and Return Power to the American People.”
The nation cannot afford to ignore what is going on here. “Constitutionally speaking, we are in the fight of our lives,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) told me, and I fear he is correct. What follows is a concerned citizens’ guide to what is coming. These issues might sound arcane; Trump and his allies are no doubt counting on the prospect that the public will tune out. But we should not avert our eyes.
1- Expanding recess appointments.
This might be the most audacious of Trump’s efforts to enlarge presidential authority at the expense of Congress. “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” Trump posted on X and Truth Social.
The Constitution explicitly grants presidents “power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.” That means a recess appointee can serve for as long as two years without Senate confirmation.
But this is a horse-and-buggy-era exception to the general rule requiring that the president nominate senior officials “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Until a 2014 Supreme Court ruling, National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, effectively ended the practice, presidents used recess appointments sparingly, mostly in situations where their nominees had languished in a partisan Senate. Now Trump wants Congress to go into recess so he can engage in a mass end-run around the Senate for nominees who might not otherwise win approval.
If necessary, he would invoke another constitutional provision, never before used, that lets the president “on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” In his first term, during the pandemic, Trump threatened to employ this power but never did.
I find it hard to believe that the Senate would cooperate in this evisceration of its advice-and-consent authority by going into recess. That leaves the question of whether the House, under the craven leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), would comply by declaring a recess to which the Senate would not accede — creating a disagreement between the House and Senate that could open the door for Trump to declare an adjournment. Here, too, there are thin grounds for optimism: the slim House majority, and the presence of enough Republicans who won in swing districts that they might not be willing to cave to Trump’s demand for such extraordinary power.
But if that were to happen? Under the terms of Noel Canning, Trump would probably get away with it. Noel Canning gave the nod to recess appointments that occur within congressional sessions, not between the two year-long sessions. And it said recess appointments weren’t limited to vacancies created during the recess itself, but could also be used for vacancies that arose earlier. Under Noel Canning, as long as there is a recess of at least 10 days, anything goes.
The tricky part is that the conservative justices — Justice Antonin Scalia, who is now gone, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — disagreed with those aspects of the ruling. Scalia denounced the recess power as an “anachronism” that undermines the separation of powers, writing, “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the President to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process.”
Now there is a six-justice conservative supermajority. Would the conservatives revisit — and overrule — that part of Noel Canning if they have the votes to do so, thereby frustrating Trump’s effort? Or, with the shoe on the other party’s foot (Noel Canning involved President Barack Obama’s recess appointments), would they continue to worry about “ignoble” uses and enabling circumvention of the Senate’s role? I suspect they would stick with the case as decided and let Trump get away with it.
2-Impounding appropriated funds.
Congress, the Constitution provides, controls the power of the purse: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Lawmakers decide how much to spend and for what purposes; the executive branches acts on their instructions.
Since the beginning of the republic, this division of labor has proved inconvenient for presidents who don’t want to spend money as Congress has dictated and have used their asserted power to “impound,” or decline to spend, appropriated funds.
This tension came to a head during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon — among other things, he refused to spend half the money allocated to sewage treatment after Congress overrode his veto of the Clean Water Act. In 1974, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to spend appropriated money unless he obtains congressional approval not to disburse the funds.
Trump has vowed to challenge the law as an unconstitutional “usurpation” of presidential power, and said he will direct agencies, on his first day in office, “to identify portions of their budgets where massive savings are possible through the Impoundment Power.” “For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as Impoundment,” Trump said in a June 2023 video.
This is wrong. In 1988, during the Reagan administration, Assistant Attorney General Charles Cooper, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that “to the extent that the commentators are suggesting that the President has inherent, constitutional power to impound funds, the weight of authority is against such a broad power in the face of an express congressional directive to spend.”
Citing a 1969 memorandum from William H. Rehnquist, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel and later chief justice, Cooper wrote, “This Office has long held that the ‘existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.’ Virtually all commentators have reached the same conclusion, without reference to their views as to the scope of executive power.”
The Supreme Court has never directly addressed the question, although, as Cooper’s memo noted, an 1838 case “can be read to support the proposition that the executive’s duty faithfully to execute the laws requires it to spend funds at the direction of Congress” and lower courts have consistently agreed. But I’m not entirely confident that the current Supreme Court majority, with its evident disdain for Congress and commitment to broad executive power, would go along.
3-Curbing independent agencies.
Starting in the 1880s, Congress established certain government offices as independent agencies, run generally by multimember commissions whose members serve fixed terms, possess particular expertise and are left free to operate outside direct executive control. But conservatives have long chafed at the agencies’ existence, which they consider an unconstitutional “headless fourth branch of government.” They want the president to have power to fire commissioners for any reason — not only for cause, as is the case under current law — and to review their proposed regulations.
Trump is on board. “I will bring the independent regulatory agencies, such as the FCC and the FTC, back under presidential authority, as the Constitution demands,” he said in an April 2023 video, referring to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. “These agencies do not get to become a fourth branch of government, issuing rules and edicts all by themselves.”
What would this mean for such agencies, which also include the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission? “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought, who headed the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration and is up for a senior position this time around, told the New York Times last year. Specifically, Vought said, “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.”
Eliminating the independence of these agencies would reflect a dramatic tilt in favor of presidential authority. There are any number of ways Trump could force the issue. He could attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, who said tersely at a post-election news conference that move was “not permitted under the law.” (Powell can only be fired for cause.) The Post reported that Trump is considering taking the extraordinary step of firing Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board; because of the way the labor agency is set up, Democrats are poised to retain majority control until 2026, if the Senate reconfirms the current chair to another term before it leaves town.
In any event, the issue of the constitutionality of independent agencies appears destined to return to the high court — with or without presidential action.
In a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the court rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to fire William Humphrey, an FTC commissioner, and Roosevelt’s argument that being limited to firing commissioners only “for cause” was an unconstitutional infringement on executive power.
But Humphrey’s Executor has long been in the conservative crosshairs. More than 20 cases raising constitutional challenges to the independent structure of agencies are making their way through the lower federal courts. The justices just declined to hear one such case but that reticence might not last.
Bottom line: Don’t bet on independent agencies’ continued insulation from presidential interference.
4-Politicizing the civil service.
A second term will give Trump the chance for a do-over in his bid to gain authority to remove tens of thousands of “rogue bureaucrats” who currently enjoy protections against being fired for political reasons. He has declared a “Day One” plan to reissue his October 2020 executive order to create a new Schedule F under which the president would have full power to remove any employee “whose position has been determined to be of confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”
This change would upend the civil service system, put in place in 1883 to end the spoils system. Currently, there are about 4,000 political appointees atop a federal workforce of 2.2 million. Trump, in his zeal to root out what he calls the “deep state,” would expand presidential power to fire federal employees at will to an estimated 50,000 or more, depending on how broadly the exemption is interpreted.
“I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump announced in a March 2023 video. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”
One sign of how sweeping the change could be? After Trump left office, the National Treasury Employees Union unearthed documents that it said showed how the Office of Management and Budget “stretched the definition of policy work to cover the vast majority of the OMB workforce, from attorneys to GS-09 assistants and specialists who have nothing to do with setting government policy.”
Trump might find it difficult to institute these changes right away. President Joe Biden not only revoked Trump’s Schedule F order, he also adopted a new rule to shield federal workers against having their civil service protections removed. Undoing that and issuing new regulations is a cumbersome, time-consuming process.
The incoming administration might be tempted to act without going through these procedural hoops. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy suggested as much in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing that the civil service law leaves Trump room to quickly “implement any number of ‘rules governing the competitive service’ that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area.”
But moving so fast would be risky, as shown by the Trump administration’s loss at the Supreme Court when it did a sloppy legal job of trying to revoke protections, from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, for immigrant “dreamers.”
It’s harder to predict how the court would deal with a revived Schedule F on the merits. The Treasury employees union, in a lawsuit challenging the original Trump order, called it “a textbook example of the President acting contrary to Congress’s express and limited delegation of authority to the President.” Still, a court inclined to a broad reading of executive powers might give the president more authority over firing federal workers.
In 1952, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, previously FDR’s attorney general, warned of the consequences of untrammeled presidential power in concluding that President Harry S. Truman lacked constitutional authority to seize control of steel plants during the Korean War. “The tendency is strong to emphasize transient results upon policies … and lose sight of enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic,” Jackson wrote.
In Jackson’s formulation, presidential power is “at its lowest ebb” when he “takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress” — the same sort of measures discussed here. “Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution,” Jackson cautioned, “for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.”
The examples outlined above aren’t the worst of what Trump could do — or the cruelest or the most extreme. Actions such as separating families, deporting dreamers and using the Justice Department to punish political enemies fall into those two categories. Yet these threatened moves represent assaults on the very architecture of democracy — assaults that must be repelled, as Jackson instructed us, lest they permanently warp the constitutional structure.
THE GAETZ REPORT REMAINS SECRET. PRECEDENT SUGGESTS IT SHOULDN’T BE.
The Ethics Committee’s failure is not the final word on the probe into the attorney general nominee.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of findings in the panel’s investigation of former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). Instead, the committee voted to shelve its report, which is not yet final. Fine. But the committee, which meets again next month, needs to release the material well before the Senate considers Mr. Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general.
Some Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana), argue that the committee should bury its report, because Mr. Gaetz resigned from the House last week. “The jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee is limited to those who are serving in the institution,” Mr. Johnson said, warning against a “dangerous” “breach of protocol.”
In fact, suppressing the report would conflict with the committee’s tradition of releasing findings even after lawmakers resign, when doing so is in the public interest. This is clearly one of those times.
Consider Rep. Donald “Buz” Lukens (R-Ohio), who had sex with a 16-year-old on Nov. 6, 1988 — two nights before he won reelection. He resigned three months before the end of his term. Committee members voted to release their findings anyway.
In 2006, Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) resigned over inappropriate text messages sent to House pages, but the Ethics Committee chose to investigate what he’d done and whether anyone covered for him. The same went for Rep. Eric Massa (D-New York) in 2010. The Ethics Committee even released the findings of its probe into Rep. John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania), though he had died.
To be sure, some Ethics Committee investigations have ended abruptly after targeted lawmakers resigned. The committee dropped its probe into Anthony Weiner (D-New York) after he stepped down in 2011. But he then ran for New York mayor and continued his sleazy behavior, transmitting lewd images to women. Even after his attempted comeback collapsed, he got caught sending explicit photos to a high school girl in 2016 and was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. Maybe a fuller public accounting of his behavior five years earlier would have been better for all involved.
When lawmakers resign amid an ethics scandal, they often slink out of public life. In this case, Mr. Gaetz wants to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and potentially run for governor of Florida in 2026. And what’s at issue is serious. The Post reported that the committee’s investigators obtained records showing that Mr. Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the committee, some of which they said was for sex. One woman testified under oath that Mr. Gaetz paid her for sex and that she saw the congressman having intercourse with a 17-year-old at a party, according to the woman’s attorney. (The Justice Department, citing witness credibility issues, opted not to bring charges against Mr. Gaetz, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing.)
So far, Mr. Gaetz has shown no signs of dropping out. Accompanied by Vice President-elect JD Vance, Mr. Gaetz spent Wednesday on Capitol Hill, meeting with Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, whose votes he would need to win confirmation. Though, in private, several GOP senators don’t want Mr. Gaetz to be confirmed, and though President-elect Donald Trump has acknowledged that his nominee might not make it through the Senate, other Republicans are expressing public support for a deeply flawed pick as a show of loyalty to Mr. Trump. “His coattails turned a 49-51 Senate to a 53-47 Senate,” Mr. Vance wrote on social media, pressuring potential holdouts. “He deserves a cabinet that is loyal to the agenda he was elected to implement.”
Mr. Trump is not vetting his nominees for top government jobs as rigorously as his predecessors did. He is bypassing the traditional General Services Administration transition process and FBI security clearance checks. These facts make it all the more vital that the House Ethics Committee take more seriously its responsibility to the public and that the Senate fulfill its constitutional obligation to review presidential nominees.
Fortunately, Wednesday does not need to be the final word. Even if the Ethics Committee’s members never agree to release the Gaetz report, Democrats can bring a privileged resolution to the House floor to force a vote by the entire House on whether to unveil the findings. If that doesn’t work, the committee should at least allow senators of both parties to review the report behind closed doors. If senators are denied even this degree of access, they should invite the witnesses who spoke to the Ethics Committee investigators to testify publicly during Mr. Gaetz’s confirmation hearings.
The Ethics Committee’s failure is not the final word on the probe into the attorney general nominee.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of findings in the panel’s investigation of former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). Instead, the committee voted to shelve its report, which is not yet final. Fine. But the committee, which meets again next month, needs to release the material well before the Senate considers Mr. Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general.
Some Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana), argue that the committee should bury its report, because Mr. Gaetz resigned from the House last week. “The jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee is limited to those who are serving in the institution,” Mr. Johnson said, warning against a “dangerous” “breach of protocol.”
In fact, suppressing the report would conflict with the committee’s tradition of releasing findings even after lawmakers resign, when doing so is in the public interest. This is clearly one of those times.
Consider Rep. Donald “Buz” Lukens (R-Ohio), who had sex with a 16-year-old on Nov. 6, 1988 — two nights before he won reelection. He resigned three months before the end of his term. Committee members voted to release their findings anyway.
In 2006, Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) resigned over inappropriate text messages sent to House pages, but the Ethics Committee chose to investigate what he’d done and whether anyone covered for him. The same went for Rep. Eric Massa (D-New York) in 2010. The Ethics Committee even released the findings of its probe into Rep. John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania), though he had died.
To be sure, some Ethics Committee investigations have ended abruptly after targeted lawmakers resigned. The committee dropped its probe into Anthony Weiner (D-New York) after he stepped down in 2011. But he then ran for New York mayor and continued his sleazy behavior, transmitting lewd images to women. Even after his attempted comeback collapsed, he got caught sending explicit photos to a high school girl in 2016 and was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. Maybe a fuller public accounting of his behavior five years earlier would have been better for all involved.
When lawmakers resign amid an ethics scandal, they often slink out of public life. In this case, Mr. Gaetz wants to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and potentially run for governor of Florida in 2026. And what’s at issue is serious. The Post reported that the committee’s investigators obtained records showing that Mr. Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the committee, some of which they said was for sex. One woman testified under oath that Mr. Gaetz paid her for sex and that she saw the congressman having intercourse with a 17-year-old at a party, according to the woman’s attorney. (The Justice Department, citing witness credibility issues, opted not to bring charges against Mr. Gaetz, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing.)
So far, Mr. Gaetz has shown no signs of dropping out. Accompanied by Vice President-elect JD Vance, Mr. Gaetz spent Wednesday on Capitol Hill, meeting with Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, whose votes he would need to win confirmation. Though, in private, several GOP senators don’t want Mr. Gaetz to be confirmed, and though President-elect Donald Trump has acknowledged that his nominee might not make it through the Senate, other Republicans are expressing public support for a deeply flawed pick as a show of loyalty to Mr. Trump. “His coattails turned a 49-51 Senate to a 53-47 Senate,” Mr. Vance wrote on social media, pressuring potential holdouts. “He deserves a cabinet that is loyal to the agenda he was elected to implement.”
Mr. Trump is not vetting his nominees for top government jobs as rigorously as his predecessors did. He is bypassing the traditional General Services Administration transition process and FBI security clearance checks. These facts make it all the more vital that the House Ethics Committee take more seriously its responsibility to the public and that the Senate fulfill its constitutional obligation to review presidential nominees.
Fortunately, Wednesday does not need to be the final word. Even if the Ethics Committee’s members never agree to release the Gaetz report, Democrats can bring a privileged resolution to the House floor to force a vote by the entire House on whether to unveil the findings. If that doesn’t work, the committee should at least allow senators of both parties to review the report behind closed doors. If senators are denied even this degree of access, they should invite the witnesses who spoke to the Ethics Committee investigators to testify publicly during Mr. Gaetz’s confirmation hearings.
THE REAL REASON TRUMP PICKED A SEX FIEND, DOG KILLER, AND ANTI-VAXXER FOR HIS CABINET
The names of Trump's insane cabinet picks aren't even what matters. America's strongman is already creating a new reality.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
In 2024, moving rapidly to cement what the media is calling a mandate even after more than half the electorate voted for someone else, Donald Trump and his inner circle have pushed the button for a shock-and-awe bombardment of America’s political psyche with mostly outrageous cabinet nominations. It’s a rogues’ gallery that in some cases could never pass an FBI background check and that in almost every case supports ideas or holds values that are 180 degrees opposed to the missions of the federal agencies they would lead as soon as January.
If I wanted to, I could write a series of Captain Obvious columns between now and New Year’s Day giving earnest reasons why it’s a bad idea to put the supposed subject of a damning, but not released, House Ethics Committee report about alleged paid sex with a 17-year-old atop the U.S. Justice Department, or why it’s dangerous — and could even get good people killed — to have a propagandist for American adversary Vladimir Putin overseeing our intelligence agencies, or about the craziness of making bizarro-world Jonas Salk the nation’s anti-vax health guru.
The reality-based community is studying judiciously, as you will, Trump's Cabinet picks without any clue that the names don't even matter, that it's all about the destruction of any concepts of U.S. governance or even basic reality as we've come to know them.
It’s urgent to understand that Trump is not selecting his cabinet as much as he is creating his own reality, and daring our broken institutions like Congress, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media to point out that these picks are buck naked as they parade criminally down Fifth Avenue on horseback. The reality-based community — from Maureen Dowd to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to America’s fireside von Hindenburg in President Joe Biden — are all treating the incoming Trump like another president when he is busy turning his unreality into our new reality and ruling as a dictator.
It says so much about the current moment that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — who utterly reviled the American public this summer and took herself out of vice presidential speculation by publishing in her own book that she murdered her 14-month-old family hunting dog, Cricket, and tossed him in a gravel pit (along with a goat, for good measure) — is Trump’s unqualified pick for the critical post of homeland security secretary, and it got like 25 seconds on the news.
To some extent, Trump is following the Steve Bannon model of flooding the zone with a fire hose of excrement, but it’s also more than this. We ought to be paying less attention to the utter absurdities of these nominations and focus more on how he plans to impose them on an American public that mostly just wanted lower prices at Chipotle, not get a health and human services secretary telling them not to eat there. At the risk of making the world’s worst dad joke (which is redundant), the president-elect might be spending every waking moment with the Tesla guy, but he is telling America he plans to rule by Fiat.
For the record, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, proudly wears a far-right Christian Nationalist "Deus Vult" tattoo on his arm. On his chest he wears a Crusaders' Cross, apparently celebrating the slaughter of Muslims in holy war.
There are already plenty of “tells” that Trump plans to exploit every crack and loophole in the democratic “norms” so imperfectly followed by the 44 men who’ve come before him. Prime example: Trump has made it clear he has no intention of following the modern tradition of FBI background checks for prospective cabinet members. After all, Trump — with 34 felony convictions just this year — could never pass one, so why impose this burden on Matt Gaetz, who was once investigated by that same FBI (and cleared) over sex trafficking, or would-be Defense Secretary Hegseth, who paid money to a woman accusing him of a 2017 sex assault in California.
This may come as a shock on Capitol Hill or in the Post’s opinion enclave, but it won’t matter what the presumedly biased private investigators learn about Gaetz, or Hegseth and his Christian nationalist tattoos, or what’s really going on with Gabbard and Russia. Team Trump is playing a game that it can’t lose. The preferred Plan A is probably to bully and pressure at least 50 of the likely 53 GOP senators into supporting his nominations, to establish dominance over Congress and castrate its role as a check on presidential power while making the notion of “advise and consent” an 18th-century anachronism.
Or maybe the real agenda is to jump directly to Plan B, which would be to conspire with House Speaker Mike Johnson — who owes his precarious hold on the job to Trump and feasted on Big Macs with the president-elect aboard Trump Force One this weekend — to gin up a phony adjournment crisis on Capitol Hill against the bipartisan wishes of Senate leaders. That would allow Trump to make a mockery of his Article I powers in the Constitution to impose the Dirty Dozen as recess appointments, who’d have two unimpeded years to wreck U.S. governance as we’ve known it.
Ever since the end of Trump’s chaotic first term, the oxymoron of “right-wing thought leaders” have urged a would-be Trump 47 to rule as an unchecked “red Caesar” crushing any liberal opponents, and the president-elect has taken their ideas to heart. His campaign agenda focused on two things — imposing large new tariffs and an unprecedented mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — that can’t be stopped by Congress or anyone else.
Now that he’s won, Team Trump seems fixated on barely street-legal ways to remove anyone who might stand in his way — especially in the military that blocked his 2021 coup ambitions and is needed now to aid in deportations. It’s floated the idea of a so-called blue-ribbon panel to purge any recalcitrant three- or four-star generals, and maybe even court-martialing the brass involved with the Afghanistan pullout (even though it was originally Trump’s idea). These dictator moves matter more than the confirmation hearings for the outrageous Gaetz which are probably never even going to happen, especially after any protest of the new attorney general is met by tanks in the street.
Does none of this feel real to you? The unreality is the point! The Trump empire is creating its own reality. And when the old fact-based order that’s busy writing investigative articles about Hegseth that too few people will read — or while Senate Democrats try to woo their Republican colleagues for a vote that will probably never be held — finally, belatedly, figure this out, they, and more importantly, the American people, will feel disoriented and become more disengaged, just as many felt waking up on Nov. 6 to news of Trump’s reelection.
“Authoritarian leaders believe they are above the law, and they also believe that they are above the truth in that they reserve the right to determine what is truth and what is fiction,” New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the expert on dictators whose book Strongmen just entered the New York Times best-sellers list, wrote earlier this year. “Just as they transform the rule of law into rule by the lawless, so do they make lies into party and state doctrine.”
Trump is creating an American kakistocracy — that’s a clown government, bro, to paraphrase the punditry of Bryce Harper here — in part to obliterate the layers of government that would prevent a “red Caesar,” in part to speed up the persecution of his enemies list, and in part to clear the road for the corruption of the oligarchs like Elon Musk who helped install the 47th president. But it’s mainly because he can — to turn the fiction that a U.S. president is a king into his reality ... our reality.
It’s going to be very hard to stop this, at first, but I believe this can and will be undone. Eventually. The only thing I can say now with any certainty is this: We’re not getting anywhere until the delusional reality-based community wakes up from the dream state where it currently resides. The truth is going to keep losing until we acknowledge that it’s a new brave world, and we take the fight to the sphere of unreality where an American monarch is rapidly building his castle fortress.
The names of Trump's insane cabinet picks aren't even what matters. America's strongman is already creating a new reality.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
In 2024, moving rapidly to cement what the media is calling a mandate even after more than half the electorate voted for someone else, Donald Trump and his inner circle have pushed the button for a shock-and-awe bombardment of America’s political psyche with mostly outrageous cabinet nominations. It’s a rogues’ gallery that in some cases could never pass an FBI background check and that in almost every case supports ideas or holds values that are 180 degrees opposed to the missions of the federal agencies they would lead as soon as January.
If I wanted to, I could write a series of Captain Obvious columns between now and New Year’s Day giving earnest reasons why it’s a bad idea to put the supposed subject of a damning, but not released, House Ethics Committee report about alleged paid sex with a 17-year-old atop the U.S. Justice Department, or why it’s dangerous — and could even get good people killed — to have a propagandist for American adversary Vladimir Putin overseeing our intelligence agencies, or about the craziness of making bizarro-world Jonas Salk the nation’s anti-vax health guru.
The reality-based community is studying judiciously, as you will, Trump's Cabinet picks without any clue that the names don't even matter, that it's all about the destruction of any concepts of U.S. governance or even basic reality as we've come to know them.
It’s urgent to understand that Trump is not selecting his cabinet as much as he is creating his own reality, and daring our broken institutions like Congress, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media to point out that these picks are buck naked as they parade criminally down Fifth Avenue on horseback. The reality-based community — from Maureen Dowd to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to America’s fireside von Hindenburg in President Joe Biden — are all treating the incoming Trump like another president when he is busy turning his unreality into our new reality and ruling as a dictator.
It says so much about the current moment that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — who utterly reviled the American public this summer and took herself out of vice presidential speculation by publishing in her own book that she murdered her 14-month-old family hunting dog, Cricket, and tossed him in a gravel pit (along with a goat, for good measure) — is Trump’s unqualified pick for the critical post of homeland security secretary, and it got like 25 seconds on the news.
To some extent, Trump is following the Steve Bannon model of flooding the zone with a fire hose of excrement, but it’s also more than this. We ought to be paying less attention to the utter absurdities of these nominations and focus more on how he plans to impose them on an American public that mostly just wanted lower prices at Chipotle, not get a health and human services secretary telling them not to eat there. At the risk of making the world’s worst dad joke (which is redundant), the president-elect might be spending every waking moment with the Tesla guy, but he is telling America he plans to rule by Fiat.
For the record, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, proudly wears a far-right Christian Nationalist "Deus Vult" tattoo on his arm. On his chest he wears a Crusaders' Cross, apparently celebrating the slaughter of Muslims in holy war.
There are already plenty of “tells” that Trump plans to exploit every crack and loophole in the democratic “norms” so imperfectly followed by the 44 men who’ve come before him. Prime example: Trump has made it clear he has no intention of following the modern tradition of FBI background checks for prospective cabinet members. After all, Trump — with 34 felony convictions just this year — could never pass one, so why impose this burden on Matt Gaetz, who was once investigated by that same FBI (and cleared) over sex trafficking, or would-be Defense Secretary Hegseth, who paid money to a woman accusing him of a 2017 sex assault in California.
This may come as a shock on Capitol Hill or in the Post’s opinion enclave, but it won’t matter what the presumedly biased private investigators learn about Gaetz, or Hegseth and his Christian nationalist tattoos, or what’s really going on with Gabbard and Russia. Team Trump is playing a game that it can’t lose. The preferred Plan A is probably to bully and pressure at least 50 of the likely 53 GOP senators into supporting his nominations, to establish dominance over Congress and castrate its role as a check on presidential power while making the notion of “advise and consent” an 18th-century anachronism.
Or maybe the real agenda is to jump directly to Plan B, which would be to conspire with House Speaker Mike Johnson — who owes his precarious hold on the job to Trump and feasted on Big Macs with the president-elect aboard Trump Force One this weekend — to gin up a phony adjournment crisis on Capitol Hill against the bipartisan wishes of Senate leaders. That would allow Trump to make a mockery of his Article I powers in the Constitution to impose the Dirty Dozen as recess appointments, who’d have two unimpeded years to wreck U.S. governance as we’ve known it.
Ever since the end of Trump’s chaotic first term, the oxymoron of “right-wing thought leaders” have urged a would-be Trump 47 to rule as an unchecked “red Caesar” crushing any liberal opponents, and the president-elect has taken their ideas to heart. His campaign agenda focused on two things — imposing large new tariffs and an unprecedented mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — that can’t be stopped by Congress or anyone else.
Now that he’s won, Team Trump seems fixated on barely street-legal ways to remove anyone who might stand in his way — especially in the military that blocked his 2021 coup ambitions and is needed now to aid in deportations. It’s floated the idea of a so-called blue-ribbon panel to purge any recalcitrant three- or four-star generals, and maybe even court-martialing the brass involved with the Afghanistan pullout (even though it was originally Trump’s idea). These dictator moves matter more than the confirmation hearings for the outrageous Gaetz which are probably never even going to happen, especially after any protest of the new attorney general is met by tanks in the street.
Does none of this feel real to you? The unreality is the point! The Trump empire is creating its own reality. And when the old fact-based order that’s busy writing investigative articles about Hegseth that too few people will read — or while Senate Democrats try to woo their Republican colleagues for a vote that will probably never be held — finally, belatedly, figure this out, they, and more importantly, the American people, will feel disoriented and become more disengaged, just as many felt waking up on Nov. 6 to news of Trump’s reelection.
“Authoritarian leaders believe they are above the law, and they also believe that they are above the truth in that they reserve the right to determine what is truth and what is fiction,” New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the expert on dictators whose book Strongmen just entered the New York Times best-sellers list, wrote earlier this year. “Just as they transform the rule of law into rule by the lawless, so do they make lies into party and state doctrine.”
Trump is creating an American kakistocracy — that’s a clown government, bro, to paraphrase the punditry of Bryce Harper here — in part to obliterate the layers of government that would prevent a “red Caesar,” in part to speed up the persecution of his enemies list, and in part to clear the road for the corruption of the oligarchs like Elon Musk who helped install the 47th president. But it’s mainly because he can — to turn the fiction that a U.S. president is a king into his reality ... our reality.
It’s going to be very hard to stop this, at first, but I believe this can and will be undone. Eventually. The only thing I can say now with any certainty is this: We’re not getting anywhere until the delusional reality-based community wakes up from the dream state where it currently resides. The truth is going to keep losing until we acknowledge that it’s a new brave world, and we take the fight to the sphere of unreality where an American monarch is rapidly building his castle fortress.
PENNSYLVANIA SUPREME COURT RULES BALLOTS WITH DATE ERROR SHOULD NOT BE COUNTED
The ruling is a major victory for Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, who holds a very narrow lead over Democratic Sen. Bob Casey ahead of a statewide recount.
By Colby Itkowitz, The Washington Post
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Monday that election officials must abide by an earlier decision and stop counting mail-in ballots that were invalidated because of an incorrect date on the outer envelope — a major victory for Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, who holds a narrow lead over Democratic Sen. Bob Casey ahead of a statewide recount.
The decision comes after Democratic-majority election boards in Philadelphia as well as Bucks and Montgomery counties, two large suburban areas outside of Philadelphia, chose to include those votes, arguing that the handwritten date on the outer envelope is a technical error completely unrelated to the legitimacy of the vote itself.
A fight over that issue has bandied between the courts for several years but has never been fully resolved. Several lower courts have sided with Democrats and voting rights groups that a legal vote should not be thrown away over a clerical error. But the state’s highest court reversed that decision for this election over jurisdictional reasons but has yet to rule on the merits of the argument over whether a misdated or undated envelope is reason to not count a voter’s ballot.
The counties’ decision to move forward with counting those votes anyway came as the state finished tabulating ballots that could alter the outcome of the Senate race. Each county had several hundred ballots that fell under this category.
As of Monday, McCormick’s lead had shrunk to about 17,000 votes. The narrow threshold triggered an automatic recount that begins this week and must be concluded by Nov. 26. The Associated Press already called the race for McCormick, who attended new senator orientation in Washington last week. McCormick has insisted his lead is insurmountable, but Casey has refused to concede until every vote has been counted, and now recounted.
Republicans filed a lawsuit last week asking the state Supreme Court to stop counties from counting ballots with wrong dates on the envelopes, saying it defied the court’s earlier guidance. In 2022, when McCormick narrowly lost the Republican Senate primary, he argued for those same ballots to be counted.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court in its decision said Philadelphia, Bucks and Montgomery “shall comply with the prior rulings of this Court in which we have clarified that mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the requirements of the Pennsylvania Election Code, shall not be counted.” Republicans have previously argued that the law as set by the state legislature says the outer envelope shall be dated and election officials must follow the letter of the law.
After the ruling, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita shared the news on social media and wrote, “ok so now let’s get the state police involved,” seeming to suggest that law enforcement should start investigating. Vic Walczak, the legal director of ACLU of Pennsylvania, which has been involved in most of the litigation around this issue, said commissioners are “justifiably frustrated that the legislature has refused to fix this eminently fixable problem.”
Neil Makhija, a Democratic Montgomery County commissioner, had voted to count the ballots, arguing that he was erring on the side of voting rights. He said Monday that while he respects the state Supreme Court decision, it “unfortunately means that thousands of votes cast by lawfully registered citizens will be thrown out in this election.”
The ruling is a major victory for Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, who holds a very narrow lead over Democratic Sen. Bob Casey ahead of a statewide recount.
By Colby Itkowitz, The Washington Post
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Monday that election officials must abide by an earlier decision and stop counting mail-in ballots that were invalidated because of an incorrect date on the outer envelope — a major victory for Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, who holds a narrow lead over Democratic Sen. Bob Casey ahead of a statewide recount.
The decision comes after Democratic-majority election boards in Philadelphia as well as Bucks and Montgomery counties, two large suburban areas outside of Philadelphia, chose to include those votes, arguing that the handwritten date on the outer envelope is a technical error completely unrelated to the legitimacy of the vote itself.
A fight over that issue has bandied between the courts for several years but has never been fully resolved. Several lower courts have sided with Democrats and voting rights groups that a legal vote should not be thrown away over a clerical error. But the state’s highest court reversed that decision for this election over jurisdictional reasons but has yet to rule on the merits of the argument over whether a misdated or undated envelope is reason to not count a voter’s ballot.
The counties’ decision to move forward with counting those votes anyway came as the state finished tabulating ballots that could alter the outcome of the Senate race. Each county had several hundred ballots that fell under this category.
As of Monday, McCormick’s lead had shrunk to about 17,000 votes. The narrow threshold triggered an automatic recount that begins this week and must be concluded by Nov. 26. The Associated Press already called the race for McCormick, who attended new senator orientation in Washington last week. McCormick has insisted his lead is insurmountable, but Casey has refused to concede until every vote has been counted, and now recounted.
Republicans filed a lawsuit last week asking the state Supreme Court to stop counties from counting ballots with wrong dates on the envelopes, saying it defied the court’s earlier guidance. In 2022, when McCormick narrowly lost the Republican Senate primary, he argued for those same ballots to be counted.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court in its decision said Philadelphia, Bucks and Montgomery “shall comply with the prior rulings of this Court in which we have clarified that mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the requirements of the Pennsylvania Election Code, shall not be counted.” Republicans have previously argued that the law as set by the state legislature says the outer envelope shall be dated and election officials must follow the letter of the law.
After the ruling, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita shared the news on social media and wrote, “ok so now let’s get the state police involved,” seeming to suggest that law enforcement should start investigating. Vic Walczak, the legal director of ACLU of Pennsylvania, which has been involved in most of the litigation around this issue, said commissioners are “justifiably frustrated that the legislature has refused to fix this eminently fixable problem.”
Neil Makhija, a Democratic Montgomery County commissioner, had voted to count the ballots, arguing that he was erring on the side of voting rights. He said Monday that while he respects the state Supreme Court decision, it “unfortunately means that thousands of votes cast by lawfully registered citizens will be thrown out in this election.”
MAKING COWARDLY SENATE REPUBLICANS PAY A POLITICAL PRICE
Voters must understand who is causing their pain
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As justifiably alarmed as Democrats are by President-elect Donald Trump’s radical agenda and his nominations of unqualified candidates for Cabinet positions, these actions may be even more terrifying for Republican senators up for reelection in 2026. (What follows certainly applies to vulnerable GOP House members as well, although they, of course, play no role in confirming nominees.)
The 2026 map is somewhat more favorable to Democrats than it was in 2024. For example, the reelection campaigns of Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina will be two of the most hotly contested races. While they hail from comfortably red states, less rabid Republican Sens.Steve Daines of Montana, Mike Rounds of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas will also face the voters. That raises a host of questions. Will Collins, who said she was “shocked” at Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general, wind up voting to confirm him or, worse, voting to adjourn the Senate to hide from her constitutional obligations? When it comes to mass immigrant roundups, will Cornyn lift a finger to prevent raids that snare hardworking Texans, disrupt businesses and break up families? Meanwhile, Daines, Rounds and other Republican senators from farming states will have to decide whether to remain mute when across-the-board tariffs drive up farm bankruptcies and destroy the rural economy.
In short, Republicans will face a dilemma time and again during the Trump presidency: Go along with the White House or stand up for their constituents. If they choose the latter, they certainly face the potential for a primary challenge from a MAGA Republican. Do they fear appearing too extreme to voters in the general election more than they fear such a challenge? If it’s the general electorate that worries them, they may choose to buck the Trump administration. If they fear MAGA wrath, they are likely to be even more compliant with Trump’s demands.
If senators decide to hold their ground, Democrats may find common cause with them to block some of Trump’s more ridiculous nominees and dangerous policy decisions. You might find progressive Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts teaming up with Republicans such as Joni Ernst of Iowa to block tariff legislation that would devastate exporters. Ukraine supporter Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) may line up with former CIA official and Democratic Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin to block Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for director of national intelligence.
If, as is far more likely, Republicans roll over for Trump, it will be up to Democrats and progressive activists to put intense pressure on those up for reelection in 2026. That will require they immediately begin building the record that Republicans are too extreme for their states, and that a Democratic Senate is needed as a check on the administration.
Exposing Republicans’ extremism requires telling voters who is responsible for any resulting damage. How many kids in a given state got sick because of anti-vaccine propaganda? How many farmers went belly-up because of across-the-board tariffs? How many residents lost benefits because of Elon Musk’s anti-government crusade?
Democrats need to be expert in finding real-life examples as well as tallying up statistics. They must continually engage with state news outlets and networks of interested voters (Farm Bureau members, parent associations, veterans’ groups, advocates for the disabled). They must find nontraditional ways of communicating with voters — whether that is engaging with civic groups, using social media, forming new advocacy groups (how about a “Moms for Safe Medicine,” to start?) or reaching out to affected professional groups (nurses, teachers, etc.).
Consider, for example, the impact of potential administration policies on the disabled community. Eliminating or restricting the Affordable Care Act, abolishing the Education Department, cutting Medicaid and/or repealing cost controls on medications for seniors may have devastating consequences for those living with disabilities — and their families. Democrats’ task will be to connect with just this sort of affected community.
Sometimes, Democrats may block the most harmful legislation; more often, the goal will be to make vulnerable senators pay a significant political price for complying with dangerous MAGA policies. It is one thing for senators to keep their heads down when in the minority or to feign ignorance about the latest Trump tweet; it is quite another to try to duck responsibility for policies that affect real people.
Democrats should mince no words: A vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary is a vote to endanger children. A vote to cut Medicaid is a vote to harm seniors in nursing homes and opioid addicts seeking treatment, and to deprive the working poor of needed coverage. When voters begin to exclaim en masse “We didn’t vote for THAT!,” Democrats will know they are making headway against MAGA policies — and laying the groundwork to return to power in 2027.
Voters must understand who is causing their pain
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
As justifiably alarmed as Democrats are by President-elect Donald Trump’s radical agenda and his nominations of unqualified candidates for Cabinet positions, these actions may be even more terrifying for Republican senators up for reelection in 2026. (What follows certainly applies to vulnerable GOP House members as well, although they, of course, play no role in confirming nominees.)
The 2026 map is somewhat more favorable to Democrats than it was in 2024. For example, the reelection campaigns of Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina will be two of the most hotly contested races. While they hail from comfortably red states, less rabid Republican Sens.Steve Daines of Montana, Mike Rounds of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas will also face the voters. That raises a host of questions. Will Collins, who said she was “shocked” at Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general, wind up voting to confirm him or, worse, voting to adjourn the Senate to hide from her constitutional obligations? When it comes to mass immigrant roundups, will Cornyn lift a finger to prevent raids that snare hardworking Texans, disrupt businesses and break up families? Meanwhile, Daines, Rounds and other Republican senators from farming states will have to decide whether to remain mute when across-the-board tariffs drive up farm bankruptcies and destroy the rural economy.
In short, Republicans will face a dilemma time and again during the Trump presidency: Go along with the White House or stand up for their constituents. If they choose the latter, they certainly face the potential for a primary challenge from a MAGA Republican. Do they fear appearing too extreme to voters in the general election more than they fear such a challenge? If it’s the general electorate that worries them, they may choose to buck the Trump administration. If they fear MAGA wrath, they are likely to be even more compliant with Trump’s demands.
If senators decide to hold their ground, Democrats may find common cause with them to block some of Trump’s more ridiculous nominees and dangerous policy decisions. You might find progressive Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts teaming up with Republicans such as Joni Ernst of Iowa to block tariff legislation that would devastate exporters. Ukraine supporter Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) may line up with former CIA official and Democratic Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin to block Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for director of national intelligence.
If, as is far more likely, Republicans roll over for Trump, it will be up to Democrats and progressive activists to put intense pressure on those up for reelection in 2026. That will require they immediately begin building the record that Republicans are too extreme for their states, and that a Democratic Senate is needed as a check on the administration.
Exposing Republicans’ extremism requires telling voters who is responsible for any resulting damage. How many kids in a given state got sick because of anti-vaccine propaganda? How many farmers went belly-up because of across-the-board tariffs? How many residents lost benefits because of Elon Musk’s anti-government crusade?
Democrats need to be expert in finding real-life examples as well as tallying up statistics. They must continually engage with state news outlets and networks of interested voters (Farm Bureau members, parent associations, veterans’ groups, advocates for the disabled). They must find nontraditional ways of communicating with voters — whether that is engaging with civic groups, using social media, forming new advocacy groups (how about a “Moms for Safe Medicine,” to start?) or reaching out to affected professional groups (nurses, teachers, etc.).
Consider, for example, the impact of potential administration policies on the disabled community. Eliminating or restricting the Affordable Care Act, abolishing the Education Department, cutting Medicaid and/or repealing cost controls on medications for seniors may have devastating consequences for those living with disabilities — and their families. Democrats’ task will be to connect with just this sort of affected community.
Sometimes, Democrats may block the most harmful legislation; more often, the goal will be to make vulnerable senators pay a significant political price for complying with dangerous MAGA policies. It is one thing for senators to keep their heads down when in the minority or to feign ignorance about the latest Trump tweet; it is quite another to try to duck responsibility for policies that affect real people.
Democrats should mince no words: A vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary is a vote to endanger children. A vote to cut Medicaid is a vote to harm seniors in nursing homes and opioid addicts seeking treatment, and to deprive the working poor of needed coverage. When voters begin to exclaim en masse “We didn’t vote for THAT!,” Democrats will know they are making headway against MAGA policies — and laying the groundwork to return to power in 2027.
TRUMP PICKS BURGUM FOR ‘ENERGY CZAR’ — AND INTERIOR SECRETARY
Burgum will oversee sweeping plans to repeal climate rules, scrap clean-energy subsidies and boost oil and gas production.
By Evan Halper, and Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post
President-elect Donald Trump has picked North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) to serve as both interior secretary and “energy czar,” a newly created role that will orchestrate the administration’s sweeping plans to repeal climate rules, scrap clean-energy subsidies, and boost oil and gas production on millions of acres of federal lands nationwide. In Burgum, Trump has chosen a close ally with deep connections to the oil industry CEOs who helped fund his campaign. The czar role does not require Senate confirmation.
Trump has been transparent about what he expects from Burgum: an evisceration of the rules and policies that speed the nation’s shift away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner energy sources. The president-elect’s plans include revoking limits on planet-warming pollution from cars and power plants, ending a “pause” on new exports of liquefied natural gas, and abdicating America’s leadership role in global climate negotiations.
Trump’s priorities on energy are so expansive that his appointees are unlikely to address all of them in the next four years, said Andrew Wheeler, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency for 2½ years during the first Trump administration. “There is a long laundry list,” Wheeler said Thursday at a Washington event held by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. “There is going to have to be a triage.”
Among Trump’s biggest targets are restrictions on power plant emissions and auto industry mandates that push companies to manufacture more electric vehicles. The incoming administration is also expected to heed the oil and gas industry’s calls to repeal a new fee on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks into the atmosphere from drilling operations and pipelines.
Another top priority: clawing back billions of dollars in subsidies for clean-energy technologies used by a wide range of Americans, from consumers purchasing rooftop solar panels and electric cars to oil companies pursuing production that is more climate-friendly.
Trump has dismissed the scientific consensus that a rapid shift from fossil fuels is crucial to avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. He has vowed to reorient the federal government from carbon-free sources of energy, such as wind and solar power, and to pull the United States out of the Paris agreement, a global effort to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
Oil industry groups are already writing draft executive orders the White House can use as a template for reorienting federal energy policy. They are emboldened by a recent Supreme Court decision limiting the regulatory authority of agencies, which had already left some of the Biden administration’s landmark climate initiatives legally vulnerable.
The emphasis on unfettered production comes as the United States is producing more oil and gas than any country ever has. But oil industry executives want to export even more fuel and are seeking federal approval for projects that could expand production for years to come.
In addition to gutting environmental rules, Burgum will be tasked with overhauling the billions of dollars in tax incentives and rebates that were created by Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump has said that he wants to eliminate all of that funding, which he calls the “green new scam.”
But the subsidies are driving major investment in red states, where Republican governors are using the tax breaks to lure factories that make electric vehicles and other clean-energy components, as well as oil company investment in nascent technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide.
The biggest challenge for Burgum, though, may be delivering on a promise the president-elect made frequently during the campaign: to lower gas prices below $2 per gallon. Energy experts say such prices are highly unlikely, no matter how many environmental rules are lifted. Prices at the pump are driven by market factors outside the control of the White House, including the amount of oil pumped by countries in the OPEC consortium, global demand, and the balance sheets of oil companies.
If approved by the Senate for the interior post, Burgum would steward hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned lands and waters, a role that would prove central to Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. Concentrated mostly in the West and Alaska, the department’s sprawling system of public lands includes not only national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, but also property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management for cattle grazing, mining, and oil and gas drilling.
Burgum will oversee sweeping plans to repeal climate rules, scrap clean-energy subsidies and boost oil and gas production.
By Evan Halper, and Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post
President-elect Donald Trump has picked North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) to serve as both interior secretary and “energy czar,” a newly created role that will orchestrate the administration’s sweeping plans to repeal climate rules, scrap clean-energy subsidies, and boost oil and gas production on millions of acres of federal lands nationwide. In Burgum, Trump has chosen a close ally with deep connections to the oil industry CEOs who helped fund his campaign. The czar role does not require Senate confirmation.
Trump has been transparent about what he expects from Burgum: an evisceration of the rules and policies that speed the nation’s shift away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner energy sources. The president-elect’s plans include revoking limits on planet-warming pollution from cars and power plants, ending a “pause” on new exports of liquefied natural gas, and abdicating America’s leadership role in global climate negotiations.
Trump’s priorities on energy are so expansive that his appointees are unlikely to address all of them in the next four years, said Andrew Wheeler, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency for 2½ years during the first Trump administration. “There is a long laundry list,” Wheeler said Thursday at a Washington event held by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. “There is going to have to be a triage.”
Among Trump’s biggest targets are restrictions on power plant emissions and auto industry mandates that push companies to manufacture more electric vehicles. The incoming administration is also expected to heed the oil and gas industry’s calls to repeal a new fee on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks into the atmosphere from drilling operations and pipelines.
Another top priority: clawing back billions of dollars in subsidies for clean-energy technologies used by a wide range of Americans, from consumers purchasing rooftop solar panels and electric cars to oil companies pursuing production that is more climate-friendly.
Trump has dismissed the scientific consensus that a rapid shift from fossil fuels is crucial to avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. He has vowed to reorient the federal government from carbon-free sources of energy, such as wind and solar power, and to pull the United States out of the Paris agreement, a global effort to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
Oil industry groups are already writing draft executive orders the White House can use as a template for reorienting federal energy policy. They are emboldened by a recent Supreme Court decision limiting the regulatory authority of agencies, which had already left some of the Biden administration’s landmark climate initiatives legally vulnerable.
The emphasis on unfettered production comes as the United States is producing more oil and gas than any country ever has. But oil industry executives want to export even more fuel and are seeking federal approval for projects that could expand production for years to come.
In addition to gutting environmental rules, Burgum will be tasked with overhauling the billions of dollars in tax incentives and rebates that were created by Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump has said that he wants to eliminate all of that funding, which he calls the “green new scam.”
But the subsidies are driving major investment in red states, where Republican governors are using the tax breaks to lure factories that make electric vehicles and other clean-energy components, as well as oil company investment in nascent technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide.
The biggest challenge for Burgum, though, may be delivering on a promise the president-elect made frequently during the campaign: to lower gas prices below $2 per gallon. Energy experts say such prices are highly unlikely, no matter how many environmental rules are lifted. Prices at the pump are driven by market factors outside the control of the White House, including the amount of oil pumped by countries in the OPEC consortium, global demand, and the balance sheets of oil companies.
If approved by the Senate for the interior post, Burgum would steward hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned lands and waters, a role that would prove central to Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. Concentrated mostly in the West and Alaska, the department’s sprawling system of public lands includes not only national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, but also property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management for cattle grazing, mining, and oil and gas drilling.
TRUMP PICKS FRACKING FIRM CEO CHRIS WRIGHT TO BE ENERGY SECRETARY
The executive has taken a defiant approach to fighting climate change by attacking policies that call for a shift from fossil fuels.
By Evan Halper, Maxine Joselow,, Maegan Vazquez, and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he has selected Chris Wright, the head of fracking company Liberty Energy and a skeptic of mainstream climate science, to lead the Department of Energy and to serve on a new National Energy Council.
In his announcement, Trump credited Wright as “one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution,” adding that “as Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape.” In Wright, Trump has chosen a skeptic of the scientific consensus on global warming who argues the “climate crisis” is a myth. The fracking executive runs a foundation focused on dispelling the conventional wisdom on climate change and promoting expanded fossil fuel production as a solution to many of the world’s problems, an approach others say would drive dangerous levels of warming.
Wright developed new techniques for fracking — extracting natural gas by creating cracks in the Earth’s bedrock — that helped advance the shale gas revolution. “There is no ‘climate crisis,’” Wright said in a video he posted on LinkedIn last year, adding that “the only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”
Those assertions conflict sharply with the conclusions of the world’s leading climate scientists affiliated with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its latest report concluded the world is quickly running out of time to avoid catastrophic warming, and nothing short of a “quantum leap” in the energy transition would contain climate change to levels manageable by society.
Wright’s arguments that temperatures and sea levels are not rising quickly also clash with the IPCC’s findings. While other oil and gas companies acknowledge such findings and say they are working to reduce emissions, Wright is among the industry executives who take a defiant approach, attacking policies that call for shifting away from fossil fuels.
Wright ranked as a major donor to the Trump campaign. After Trump asked oil industry executives to help steer $1 billion toward his campaign during an April dinner at his Mar-a-Lago Club, Wright donated more than $273,000 to pro-Trump super PACs and the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Wright and his wife also co-hosted an August fundraiser for Trump at a golf and ski resort in Big Sky, Montana.
“It is not surprising, but still appalling, that Trump's pick for Secretary of Energy is a climate-denying Big Oil executive,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, who leads government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement. “With the nomination of Chris Wright, Trump is following through on the $1 billion offer he made to Big Oil at a dinner this spring.”
Wright’s appointment puts a strident opponent of clean-energy subsidies in a key Cabinet post as the Trump White House will be weighing whether to rescind billions of dollars in such incentives. Trump has repeatedly called for canceling the subsidies, which are helping to fund a range of climate-friendly endeavors, from consumers purchasing electric vehicles to oil companies investing in green hydrogen.
As energy secretary, Wright would be deeply involved in the allocation of such subsidies, as well as federal loan guarantees to energy projects. He would be in charge of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and he would oversee the domestic nuclear energy industry when the sector is seeking to extend the lives of existing reactors and bring new reactor technologies to market.
Other oil industry executives cheered his appointment.
The executive has taken a defiant approach to fighting climate change by attacking policies that call for a shift from fossil fuels.
By Evan Halper, Maxine Joselow,, Maegan Vazquez, and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he has selected Chris Wright, the head of fracking company Liberty Energy and a skeptic of mainstream climate science, to lead the Department of Energy and to serve on a new National Energy Council.
In his announcement, Trump credited Wright as “one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution,” adding that “as Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape.” In Wright, Trump has chosen a skeptic of the scientific consensus on global warming who argues the “climate crisis” is a myth. The fracking executive runs a foundation focused on dispelling the conventional wisdom on climate change and promoting expanded fossil fuel production as a solution to many of the world’s problems, an approach others say would drive dangerous levels of warming.
Wright developed new techniques for fracking — extracting natural gas by creating cracks in the Earth’s bedrock — that helped advance the shale gas revolution. “There is no ‘climate crisis,’” Wright said in a video he posted on LinkedIn last year, adding that “the only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”
Those assertions conflict sharply with the conclusions of the world’s leading climate scientists affiliated with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its latest report concluded the world is quickly running out of time to avoid catastrophic warming, and nothing short of a “quantum leap” in the energy transition would contain climate change to levels manageable by society.
Wright’s arguments that temperatures and sea levels are not rising quickly also clash with the IPCC’s findings. While other oil and gas companies acknowledge such findings and say they are working to reduce emissions, Wright is among the industry executives who take a defiant approach, attacking policies that call for shifting away from fossil fuels.
Wright ranked as a major donor to the Trump campaign. After Trump asked oil industry executives to help steer $1 billion toward his campaign during an April dinner at his Mar-a-Lago Club, Wright donated more than $273,000 to pro-Trump super PACs and the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Wright and his wife also co-hosted an August fundraiser for Trump at a golf and ski resort in Big Sky, Montana.
“It is not surprising, but still appalling, that Trump's pick for Secretary of Energy is a climate-denying Big Oil executive,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, who leads government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement. “With the nomination of Chris Wright, Trump is following through on the $1 billion offer he made to Big Oil at a dinner this spring.”
Wright’s appointment puts a strident opponent of clean-energy subsidies in a key Cabinet post as the Trump White House will be weighing whether to rescind billions of dollars in such incentives. Trump has repeatedly called for canceling the subsidies, which are helping to fund a range of climate-friendly endeavors, from consumers purchasing electric vehicles to oil companies investing in green hydrogen.
As energy secretary, Wright would be deeply involved in the allocation of such subsidies, as well as federal loan guarantees to energy projects. He would be in charge of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and he would oversee the domestic nuclear energy industry when the sector is seeking to extend the lives of existing reactors and bring new reactor technologies to market.
Other oil industry executives cheered his appointment.
THE MOGUL
By Jonathan Mahler, The New York Times
Over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk went from dark-money donor to high-profile surrogate to unofficial chief of staff. He camped out at Mar-a-Lago after the election with the Trump family and hopped on Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president. He’s even played diplomat, meeting secretly in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Last week, the president-elect named Musk to co-lead a department focused on government efficiency, a role that will put him in a position to recommend the hiring and firing of federal workers and the restructuring of entire agencies. But it’s clear that Musk’s influence could reach far beyond even this.
He and Trump are in sync on a lot of issues (immigration, trans rights). And although they diverge on some others (climate change and policies that push people toward electric vehicles), the world’s richest person has now allied himself with the leader of the free world whom he helped install in office, creating a political partnership unlike anything America has ever seen.
Big government deals
Musk previewed plans for his new job on the campaign trail. He said that the federal government’s $6.8 trillion budget should be slashed by at least $2 trillion and acknowledged that such draconian cuts would “necessarily involve some temporary hardship.” Slashing and burning is certainly one of his hallmarks: He laid off 80 percent of X’s staff after buying the company — then called Twitter — in late 2022.
Musk has a lot to gain from a second Trump administration. His businesses are already entangled with the federal government, which awarded them $3 billion in contracts across numerous agencies last year. His rocket company, SpaceX, launches military satellites and shuttles astronauts to the International Space Station. Even before the election, Musk asked Trump to hire SpaceX employees at the Defense Department, presumably to further strengthen their ties.
Musk is also at war with federal regulators. He faces at least 20 investigations or reviews, including one into the software of Tesla’s self-driving cars and another into polluted water allegedly discharged from SpaceX’s launchpad in Texas. It’s safe to assume that Musk will try to quash these inquiries and also seek greater freedom from oversight in the future. Musk views government regulation as just a drain on profits.
Musk’s ideas
Musk is not just an entrepreneur. He is a new kind of media mogul, with ready access to the president and few rules governing how he uses his platform. And he wants a hands-off approach. He considers himself a free-speech absolutist. After buying Twitter and renaming it X, Musk reinstated the accounts of hundreds of users barred for spreading misinformation or inciting violence. Trump’s was among them — he was kicked off the platform after the Jan. 6 attack out of concern that he might encourage more violence— and during the campaign Musk used his own account to promote Trump’s candidacy to his more than 200 million followers.
That could make X a new home for the MAGA movement as Trump seeks out friendly outlets to champion his policies. The platform is already a gathering place for Trump’s supporters. Once Trump is back in the White House, it’s easy to imagine it as the primary means through which he and his officials communicate with the public, bypassing an independent media that Trump considers hostile and Musk considers unnecessary and corrupt.
It would cement an unusual bond between two extraordinarily powerful, if famously impulsive, men. Provided that they don’t fall out, they stand to gain a great deal from each other.
By Jonathan Mahler, The New York Times
Over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk went from dark-money donor to high-profile surrogate to unofficial chief of staff. He camped out at Mar-a-Lago after the election with the Trump family and hopped on Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president. He’s even played diplomat, meeting secretly in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Last week, the president-elect named Musk to co-lead a department focused on government efficiency, a role that will put him in a position to recommend the hiring and firing of federal workers and the restructuring of entire agencies. But it’s clear that Musk’s influence could reach far beyond even this.
He and Trump are in sync on a lot of issues (immigration, trans rights). And although they diverge on some others (climate change and policies that push people toward electric vehicles), the world’s richest person has now allied himself with the leader of the free world whom he helped install in office, creating a political partnership unlike anything America has ever seen.
Big government deals
Musk previewed plans for his new job on the campaign trail. He said that the federal government’s $6.8 trillion budget should be slashed by at least $2 trillion and acknowledged that such draconian cuts would “necessarily involve some temporary hardship.” Slashing and burning is certainly one of his hallmarks: He laid off 80 percent of X’s staff after buying the company — then called Twitter — in late 2022.
Musk has a lot to gain from a second Trump administration. His businesses are already entangled with the federal government, which awarded them $3 billion in contracts across numerous agencies last year. His rocket company, SpaceX, launches military satellites and shuttles astronauts to the International Space Station. Even before the election, Musk asked Trump to hire SpaceX employees at the Defense Department, presumably to further strengthen their ties.
Musk is also at war with federal regulators. He faces at least 20 investigations or reviews, including one into the software of Tesla’s self-driving cars and another into polluted water allegedly discharged from SpaceX’s launchpad in Texas. It’s safe to assume that Musk will try to quash these inquiries and also seek greater freedom from oversight in the future. Musk views government regulation as just a drain on profits.
Musk’s ideas
Musk is not just an entrepreneur. He is a new kind of media mogul, with ready access to the president and few rules governing how he uses his platform. And he wants a hands-off approach. He considers himself a free-speech absolutist. After buying Twitter and renaming it X, Musk reinstated the accounts of hundreds of users barred for spreading misinformation or inciting violence. Trump’s was among them — he was kicked off the platform after the Jan. 6 attack out of concern that he might encourage more violence— and during the campaign Musk used his own account to promote Trump’s candidacy to his more than 200 million followers.
That could make X a new home for the MAGA movement as Trump seeks out friendly outlets to champion his policies. The platform is already a gathering place for Trump’s supporters. Once Trump is back in the White House, it’s easy to imagine it as the primary means through which he and his officials communicate with the public, bypassing an independent media that Trump considers hostile and Musk considers unnecessary and corrupt.
It would cement an unusual bond between two extraordinarily powerful, if famously impulsive, men. Provided that they don’t fall out, they stand to gain a great deal from each other.
GABBARD’S LACK OF JUDGMENT AND FLIGHTS FROM REALITY ARE DISQUALIFYING
You can’t believe foreign propaganda more than your intelligence agencies — and hope to run them.
By Josh Rogin, The Washington Post
As Tulsi Gabbard evolved from Democratic congresswoman to MAGA celebrity and now Republican nominee for Donald Trump’s Cabinet, she has been called a lot of names. She has been accused of being a “Russian asset,” a “useful idiot” and even “Russia’s girlfriend.” Hillary Clinton once suggested Moscow was “grooming” Gabbard to run for president. In 2022, Republican Adam Kinzinger, at the time a representative of Illinois, called her “traitorous.”
is little concrete evidence) obscure real concerns about her nomination. The head of the U.S. intelligence community must be willing and able to distinguish between democracies and autocracies, and separate propaganda from reality. Gabbard’s record shows she consistently fails to do both.
Indeed, Gabbard is dangerous precisely because she doesn’t need any outside influence to come to her conspiratorial, dictator-friendly worldview. The problem is not that Gabbard’s views are unconventional. It’s that her long-standing pattern of embracing and amplifying Russian propaganda speaks to her poor judgment and tenuous allegiance to the truth.
Yes, Gabbard admirably served in the military. But military service alone doesn’t ensure one is qualified to lead the intelligence community. Take the case of Michael Flynn, a three-star general and leader of the Defense Intelligence Agency who, after being fired 24 days into his service as Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, descended into a spiral of conspiratorial thinking, endorsing QAnon and promoting the idea that the United Nations is working to ban Christianity. Like Flynn, Gabbard has a troubling record of promoting disinformation that is damaging to U.S. interests and the intelligence community she is being asked to lead.
Consider Gabbard’s history with Syria. In 2017, she traveled to Damascus and met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at a time his army was perpetrating well-documented atrocities. Subsequently, whenever pressed, she refused to acknowledge that Assad was responsible for war crimes. She expressed skepticism about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Gabbard went so far as to accuse the United States of funding the Islamic State in Syria — a baseless assertion that again aligned with Russian disinformation efforts. She even wrongfully accused the U.S. military of itself committing war crimes in Syria, citing an attack clearly perpetrated by the Syrian government as evidence.
Gabbard’s thinking follows a pattern. Instead of condemning Russia’s brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, she claimed that the United States and its allies were responsible for provoking Russia. Worse, she described Ukraine as a corrupt autocracy — on par with Russia — as if there were no meaningful difference between a flawed democracy struggling to remain independent and an expansionist dictatorship. And in 2022, she amplified debunked Russian propaganda about the existence of U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine, propaganda that was used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify his aggression.
But it’s not that she’s somehow in Russia’s pocket. Her antipathy toward America’s democratic allies is simply reflexive. At a time when a rising China is destabilizing Asia, Gabbard criticized Japan’s remilitarization, suggesting the United States might find itself once again fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.
To have someone who appears more inclined to believe adversaries’ talking points than the assessments of U.S. intelligence professionals is deeply troubling. This isn’t just a theoretical problem. Trump, a leader who has shown receptiveness to conspiracy theories and disinformation, could end up getting his daily intelligence brief from someone with similar inclinations. The duly-elected president is entitled to his views. But the country is dangerously ill-served if he is not confronted with as accurate a picture of the world as our various intelligence agencies are able to deliver.
And although the intelligence community isn’t perfect — it has made significant mistakes in the past — it is overwhelmingly staffed by patriotic Americans who work tirelessly to provide good-faith assessments. They deserve a leader who will respect their work and their mission, not someone who might view them as part of a “deep state” to be purged.
In the Senate, defeating her nomination would require opposition of at least four Republican senators (assuming she receives little to no support from Democrats). Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), as the incoming chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will likely have a pivotal role. Cotton, who knows the stakes quite well, should prioritize the security of this country and oppose her confirmation, even if it means clashing with a president from his own party.
Gabbard’s nomination should be rejected not because her views are different from the D.C. establishment, but because they’re incompatible with the requirements of the job. In the intelligence world, sound judgment and a firm grasp of reality are essential. Tulsi Gabbard has shown us, repeatedly, that she lacks both.
You can’t believe foreign propaganda more than your intelligence agencies — and hope to run them.
By Josh Rogin, The Washington Post
As Tulsi Gabbard evolved from Democratic congresswoman to MAGA celebrity and now Republican nominee for Donald Trump’s Cabinet, she has been called a lot of names. She has been accused of being a “Russian asset,” a “useful idiot” and even “Russia’s girlfriend.” Hillary Clinton once suggested Moscow was “grooming” Gabbard to run for president. In 2022, Republican Adam Kinzinger, at the time a representative of Illinois, called her “traitorous.”
is little concrete evidence) obscure real concerns about her nomination. The head of the U.S. intelligence community must be willing and able to distinguish between democracies and autocracies, and separate propaganda from reality. Gabbard’s record shows she consistently fails to do both.
Indeed, Gabbard is dangerous precisely because she doesn’t need any outside influence to come to her conspiratorial, dictator-friendly worldview. The problem is not that Gabbard’s views are unconventional. It’s that her long-standing pattern of embracing and amplifying Russian propaganda speaks to her poor judgment and tenuous allegiance to the truth.
Yes, Gabbard admirably served in the military. But military service alone doesn’t ensure one is qualified to lead the intelligence community. Take the case of Michael Flynn, a three-star general and leader of the Defense Intelligence Agency who, after being fired 24 days into his service as Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, descended into a spiral of conspiratorial thinking, endorsing QAnon and promoting the idea that the United Nations is working to ban Christianity. Like Flynn, Gabbard has a troubling record of promoting disinformation that is damaging to U.S. interests and the intelligence community she is being asked to lead.
Consider Gabbard’s history with Syria. In 2017, she traveled to Damascus and met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at a time his army was perpetrating well-documented atrocities. Subsequently, whenever pressed, she refused to acknowledge that Assad was responsible for war crimes. She expressed skepticism about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Gabbard went so far as to accuse the United States of funding the Islamic State in Syria — a baseless assertion that again aligned with Russian disinformation efforts. She even wrongfully accused the U.S. military of itself committing war crimes in Syria, citing an attack clearly perpetrated by the Syrian government as evidence.
Gabbard’s thinking follows a pattern. Instead of condemning Russia’s brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, she claimed that the United States and its allies were responsible for provoking Russia. Worse, she described Ukraine as a corrupt autocracy — on par with Russia — as if there were no meaningful difference between a flawed democracy struggling to remain independent and an expansionist dictatorship. And in 2022, she amplified debunked Russian propaganda about the existence of U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine, propaganda that was used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify his aggression.
But it’s not that she’s somehow in Russia’s pocket. Her antipathy toward America’s democratic allies is simply reflexive. At a time when a rising China is destabilizing Asia, Gabbard criticized Japan’s remilitarization, suggesting the United States might find itself once again fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.
To have someone who appears more inclined to believe adversaries’ talking points than the assessments of U.S. intelligence professionals is deeply troubling. This isn’t just a theoretical problem. Trump, a leader who has shown receptiveness to conspiracy theories and disinformation, could end up getting his daily intelligence brief from someone with similar inclinations. The duly-elected president is entitled to his views. But the country is dangerously ill-served if he is not confronted with as accurate a picture of the world as our various intelligence agencies are able to deliver.
And although the intelligence community isn’t perfect — it has made significant mistakes in the past — it is overwhelmingly staffed by patriotic Americans who work tirelessly to provide good-faith assessments. They deserve a leader who will respect their work and their mission, not someone who might view them as part of a “deep state” to be purged.
In the Senate, defeating her nomination would require opposition of at least four Republican senators (assuming she receives little to no support from Democrats). Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), as the incoming chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will likely have a pivotal role. Cotton, who knows the stakes quite well, should prioritize the security of this country and oppose her confirmation, even if it means clashing with a president from his own party.
Gabbard’s nomination should be rejected not because her views are different from the D.C. establishment, but because they’re incompatible with the requirements of the job. In the intelligence world, sound judgment and a firm grasp of reality are essential. Tulsi Gabbard has shown us, repeatedly, that she lacks both.
THE MAIN REASON RFK JR. IS UNQUALIFIED TO SERVE AS HHS SECRETARY
RFK Jr is an activist, not a scientist. That should be disqualifying to head HHS.
By Leana S. Wen, The Washington Post
There are many reasons to strenuously oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. But this one matters most: his willful disregard for the scientific process. HHS is a huge bureaucracy with more than 80,000 employees and 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institutes of Health.
The reason Kennedy is uniquely unfit compared with past nominees is that his approach to scientific inquiry is as an activist, not a scientist.
The clearest example of this is his repeated assertions that childhood immunizations are harmful. Kennedy is one of the most prominent promoters of disinformation that vaccines cause autism, despite dozens of rigorously conducted medical studies that have debunked the claim. In July, he stated on a podcast that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective” and suggested that vaccines might kill more people than they save. In fact, a Lancet study this year estimates that vaccines against 14 common pathogens have saved 154 million lives globally over the past five decades and cut infant mortality by 40 percent.
Kennedy maintains he is not an anti-vaxxer, but he urges people to “resist” childhood immunization guidelines. “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated,’” he said in 2021.
These statements are outrageous enough. The deeper problem is that, in the face of overwhelming evidence, he is unwilling to change his views. Instead, he doubles down on his advocacy and asserts opinions as facts.
He is either unable to understand the scientific process that forms the basis of modern medicine or he purposefully ignores the research when conclusions don’t support his preconceived notions. Either explanation is disqualifying for someone overseeing the nation’s health and science.
The downstream effects of a Secretary Kennedy would be unimaginably far-reaching. Who would want to lead agencies such as the CDC and FDA knowing they would report to someone who might ask them to suppress data that doesn’t comport with his worldview? Who would want to work at the NIH, where Kennedy has said he would fire as many as 600 employees on Day 1? How can the public trust that the food and medicines they are consuming are safe, if the basis for these decisions is not the scientific method?
And what happens if the United States faces another novel pathogen? Kennedy has said he would stop all infectious-disease research for eight years. This is absurd and dangerous. Many of the most impactful medical advancements have come from combating infectious diseases. In 1900, more than 30 percent of all deaths occurred in children younger than 5. The three leading causes of death in America were pneumonia, tuberculosis and gastrointestinal infections. It’s thanks to antibiotics, sanitation and, yes, vaccines that far fewer Americans are succumbing to infectious diseases.
It won’t stay that way without continued investment. Take the growing threat of the H5N1 avian flu virus. Cases are increasing among farmworkers. There is new evidence that infections might be far more widespread. Just this week, a Canadian teen who contracted bird flu was reported to be in critical condition.
Now is the time to ramp up testing and research into vaccines and treatments, not to shut it down. If Kennedy were in charge of the avian flu response, would he allow his agencies to approve and distribute the vaccines that are already developed? Would he withhold antiviral treatments in favor of unproven “alternative” therapies, just like those he promoted during the covid-19 pandemic? Would he continue his advocacy for raw milk, even though it threatens to serve as avector for H5N1 spread?
Who knows? And that’s exactly the danger. There are many other people capable of carrying out Trump’s MAHA agenda who do not pose such a threat to the health and survival of Americans.
RFK Jr is an activist, not a scientist. That should be disqualifying to head HHS.
By Leana S. Wen, The Washington Post
There are many reasons to strenuously oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. But this one matters most: his willful disregard for the scientific process. HHS is a huge bureaucracy with more than 80,000 employees and 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institutes of Health.
The reason Kennedy is uniquely unfit compared with past nominees is that his approach to scientific inquiry is as an activist, not a scientist.
The clearest example of this is his repeated assertions that childhood immunizations are harmful. Kennedy is one of the most prominent promoters of disinformation that vaccines cause autism, despite dozens of rigorously conducted medical studies that have debunked the claim. In July, he stated on a podcast that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective” and suggested that vaccines might kill more people than they save. In fact, a Lancet study this year estimates that vaccines against 14 common pathogens have saved 154 million lives globally over the past five decades and cut infant mortality by 40 percent.
Kennedy maintains he is not an anti-vaxxer, but he urges people to “resist” childhood immunization guidelines. “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby, and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated,’” he said in 2021.
These statements are outrageous enough. The deeper problem is that, in the face of overwhelming evidence, he is unwilling to change his views. Instead, he doubles down on his advocacy and asserts opinions as facts.
He is either unable to understand the scientific process that forms the basis of modern medicine or he purposefully ignores the research when conclusions don’t support his preconceived notions. Either explanation is disqualifying for someone overseeing the nation’s health and science.
The downstream effects of a Secretary Kennedy would be unimaginably far-reaching. Who would want to lead agencies such as the CDC and FDA knowing they would report to someone who might ask them to suppress data that doesn’t comport with his worldview? Who would want to work at the NIH, where Kennedy has said he would fire as many as 600 employees on Day 1? How can the public trust that the food and medicines they are consuming are safe, if the basis for these decisions is not the scientific method?
And what happens if the United States faces another novel pathogen? Kennedy has said he would stop all infectious-disease research for eight years. This is absurd and dangerous. Many of the most impactful medical advancements have come from combating infectious diseases. In 1900, more than 30 percent of all deaths occurred in children younger than 5. The three leading causes of death in America were pneumonia, tuberculosis and gastrointestinal infections. It’s thanks to antibiotics, sanitation and, yes, vaccines that far fewer Americans are succumbing to infectious diseases.
It won’t stay that way without continued investment. Take the growing threat of the H5N1 avian flu virus. Cases are increasing among farmworkers. There is new evidence that infections might be far more widespread. Just this week, a Canadian teen who contracted bird flu was reported to be in critical condition.
Now is the time to ramp up testing and research into vaccines and treatments, not to shut it down. If Kennedy were in charge of the avian flu response, would he allow his agencies to approve and distribute the vaccines that are already developed? Would he withhold antiviral treatments in favor of unproven “alternative” therapies, just like those he promoted during the covid-19 pandemic? Would he continue his advocacy for raw milk, even though it threatens to serve as a
Who knows? And that’s exactly the danger. There are many other people capable of carrying out Trump’s MAHA agenda who do not pose such a threat to the health and survival of Americans.
RFK JR. CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND FALSE CLAIMS, IN HIS OWN WORDS
Kennedy’s ascension to the nation’s top health job alarms medical experts.
By Lauren Weber, Lena H. Sun, and David Ovalle, The Washington Post
The ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to the nation’s top health post has alarmed medical experts, who point to his history of trafficking in conspiracy theories as disqualifying to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, whom President-elect Donald Trump selected as health secretary on Thursday, will be charged with a massive portfolio overseeing Americans’ insurance, drugs, medical supplies and food if the Senate confirms him.
“He is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the United States and globally, and he has been at this for 20 years,” said Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine beliefs and advocacy work prompted Hotez to write a book about his autistic daughter titled “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism,” said Hotez, adding that he has spoken to Kennedy several times in the past about his views on vaccines. Here are 10 false health claims Kennedy has publicly made over the years:
Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism
Kennedy, who founded a prominent anti-vaccine group, has repeatedly linked the childhood vaccine schedule to autism — a claim that has been debunked by scientists. Kennedy has falsely blamed autism on thimerosal, a compound safely used as a preservative in vaccines, and decried the number of shots on the childhood vaccination schedule.
“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said last summer in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In 2015, Kennedy equated vaccination to the Holocaust at a California screening for an anti-vaccination film: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” he said. “This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
Because signs of autism may appear around the same time children receive the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, some parents mistakenly link the two events. Vaccine safety experts, including those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that the MMR vaccine is not responsible for recent increases in the number of children with autism.
A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination. Dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals have also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
Hotez and many other public health experts say they worry that Kennedy, as health secretary, will do irreparable harm to already declining confidence in vaccines.
Hotez pointed to the fivefold rise in pertussis, or whooping cough, in the past year; the 16 measles outbreaks reported by the CDC so far this year, compared with four in 2023; and the detection of polio in New York in 2022.
“So our baseline is a fragile vaccine ecosystem that could be on the brink of collapse,” Hotez said. “I worry that now with this appointment, that could actually happen.” (Rainmaker/MediaPunch/IPx/AP)
Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’
At a 2021 state House hearing on a Louisiana Department of Health proposal to require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, Kennedy proclaimed the vaccine to be the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Health officials say the coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective, saving millions of lives.
At the time, Louisiana State Health Officer Joseph Kanter condemned Kennedy’s remarks as “the intentional spread of health disinformation.” Kanter is now chief executive of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents public health agencies across the country.
Asked by The Post last year about his previous comments, Kennedy’s spokeswoman stood by his remarks in an email that repeated misleading statements about childhood vaccines.
Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments
FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything…— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 25, 2024
There is a reason milk is pasteurized. Raw milk is unsafe to consume, and the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC have strongly advised against consuming it because it can contain dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria. It can also contain viruses, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that is causing an outbreak in dairy cattle and has sickened at least 46 people in the United States. Unpasteurized milk from infected cows can contain high levels of infectious H5N1 virus.
Stem cells, which have shown great promise for potential medical treatments, have also spawned a cottage industry of clinics marketing unproven treatments — some of which have blinded patients.
Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at the University of California at Davis who tracks questionable stem cell treatments, told The Post he is concerned Kennedy could become an ally of unproven stem cell clinics that have popped up across the United States, potentially exerting pressure on the FDA to back off enforcement actions and allow therapies that are not ready for clinical trial.
Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public
“The agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, and they all have an interest in subsidies and mass poisoning the American public,” Kennedy told Fox News in August.
Kennedy has repeatedly spoken about wanting to eliminate industry interests from the government, but public health experts say it is slander to imply that government employees are purposefully harming Americans.
“That’s just an inflammatory statement that has no basis in reality,” Hotez said. “I’ve worked with the scientists at the [health] agencies, at CDC and FDA, at the National Institutes of Health, and they are the most dedicated civil servants the nation has ever seen.”
Kennedy has falsely linked antidepressants to mass shootings
Kennedy has suggested mass shootings committed by young people are spurred by antidepressants and video games. Federal scientists need to be studying shootings to “see if there is connections to some of the SSRI [antidepressant] and psychiatric drugs people are taking, whether there is connections to video games,” he told Turkish state-owned TRT World in January.
The suggestion that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings has been amplified by right-wing figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. But experts caution there is no credible research linking antidepressants to mass shootings. Studies show only a small percentage of mass shooters were taking medications or suffering from serious mental illness when they committed the crimes.
Kennedy incorrectly suggests AIDS may not be caused by HIV
Kennedy has repeatedly — and falsely — suggested that the human immunodeficiency virus is not the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The discovery of the connection between HIV and AIDS garnered a Nobel Prize in 2008 and is established science.
“They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS,” Kennedy said in an interview last summer with New York Magazine.
In his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” Kennedy wrote that he takes “no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS — then dedicated many pages to casting doubt on the science.
Kennedy falsely argues children’s gender identity can be impacted by water
Kennedy has repeatedly argued that chemicals in the water are changing children’s sexuality and gender identity. “I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disrupters because our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion,” he said on his podcast in 2022, according to CNN.
Experts say there is no scientific evidence to back up Kennedy’s claims, which have also been spread by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. “That’s just leaning into the fear that hormones are going to make our kids gay or transgender. It’s a very old conspiracy theory,” said David Gorski, a Wayne State University professor of surgery and oncology and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks misinformation in medicine. “That has no basis in evidence.”
Kennedy falsely claimed in a July interview last year with Fox News that fewer people would have died of covid-19 if the United States had deployed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Multiple studies have concluded that the antiparasitic and antimalarial drugs are ineffective against covid-19, despite the promotion of the drug by right-wing media. “We racked up the highest death count in the world. We only have 4.2 percent of the globe’s population, but we had 16 percent of the covid deaths in this country, and that is … that was from bad policy. There’s … countries that did the opposite of what we did — that provided ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, other early treatments to their populations — and had 1/200th of our death rate,” he told Watters, the Fox host.
The FDA has approved ivermectin for treating some parasitic infections, head lice and skin conditions such as rosacea — but not for the coronavirus.
In spring 2020, the FDA authorized the emergency use of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, to treat the coronavirus. But less than three months later, the agency withdrew the drug’s authorization because the medications “were unlikely to be effective.”
Kennedy argued that covid-19 was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people
“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said in a video recorded by the New York Post last July. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
There is no scientific basis to these claims. Scientists and politicians have widely decried Kennedy’s remarks as racist and antisemitic.
Kennedy claims 5G high-speed wireless network is used to ‘control our behavior’
Return to menu
Kennedy has claimed that 5G high-speed wireless network service is being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior.” His claims echo long-running conspiracy theories that 5G technology causes harmful effects on health.
During the pandemic, governments in the United Kingdom and the United States issued assurances that the technology was not fueling the coronavirus. Experts have dismissed fears of detrimental health effects, pointing out the technology is no different than existing networks.
Kennedy’s ascension to the nation’s top health job alarms medical experts.
By Lauren Weber, Lena H. Sun, and David Ovalle, The Washington Post
The ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to the nation’s top health post has alarmed medical experts, who point to his history of trafficking in conspiracy theories as disqualifying to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, whom President-elect Donald Trump selected as health secretary on Thursday, will be charged with a massive portfolio overseeing Americans’ insurance, drugs, medical supplies and food if the Senate confirms him.
“He is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the United States and globally, and he has been at this for 20 years,” said Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine beliefs and advocacy work prompted Hotez to write a book about his autistic daughter titled “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism,” said Hotez, adding that he has spoken to Kennedy several times in the past about his views on vaccines. Here are 10 false health claims Kennedy has publicly made over the years:
Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism
Kennedy, who founded a prominent anti-vaccine group, has repeatedly linked the childhood vaccine schedule to autism — a claim that has been debunked by scientists. Kennedy has falsely blamed autism on thimerosal, a compound safely used as a preservative in vaccines, and decried the number of shots on the childhood vaccination schedule.
“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said last summer in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In 2015, Kennedy equated vaccination to the Holocaust at a California screening for an anti-vaccination film: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” he said. “This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
Because signs of autism may appear around the same time children receive the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, some parents mistakenly link the two events. Vaccine safety experts, including those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that the MMR vaccine is not responsible for recent increases in the number of children with autism.
A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination. Dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals have also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
Hotez and many other public health experts say they worry that Kennedy, as health secretary, will do irreparable harm to already declining confidence in vaccines.
Hotez pointed to the fivefold rise in pertussis, or whooping cough, in the past year; the 16 measles outbreaks reported by the CDC so far this year, compared with four in 2023; and the detection of polio in New York in 2022.
“So our baseline is a fragile vaccine ecosystem that could be on the brink of collapse,” Hotez said. “I worry that now with this appointment, that could actually happen.” (Rainmaker/MediaPunch/IPx/AP)
Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’
At a 2021 state House hearing on a Louisiana Department of Health proposal to require schoolchildren to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, Kennedy proclaimed the vaccine to be the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Health officials say the coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective, saving millions of lives.
At the time, Louisiana State Health Officer Joseph Kanter condemned Kennedy’s remarks as “the intentional spread of health disinformation.” Kanter is now chief executive of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents public health agencies across the country.
Asked by The Post last year about his previous comments, Kennedy’s spokeswoman stood by his remarks in an email that repeated misleading statements about childhood vaccines.
Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments
FDA’s war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything…— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 25, 2024
There is a reason milk is pasteurized. Raw milk is unsafe to consume, and the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC have strongly advised against consuming it because it can contain dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria. It can also contain viruses, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that is causing an outbreak in dairy cattle and has sickened at least 46 people in the United States. Unpasteurized milk from infected cows can contain high levels of infectious H5N1 virus.
Stem cells, which have shown great promise for potential medical treatments, have also spawned a cottage industry of clinics marketing unproven treatments — some of which have blinded patients.
Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at the University of California at Davis who tracks questionable stem cell treatments, told The Post he is concerned Kennedy could become an ally of unproven stem cell clinics that have popped up across the United States, potentially exerting pressure on the FDA to back off enforcement actions and allow therapies that are not ready for clinical trial.
Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public
“The agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, and they all have an interest in subsidies and mass poisoning the American public,” Kennedy told Fox News in August.
Kennedy has repeatedly spoken about wanting to eliminate industry interests from the government, but public health experts say it is slander to imply that government employees are purposefully harming Americans.
“That’s just an inflammatory statement that has no basis in reality,” Hotez said. “I’ve worked with the scientists at the [health] agencies, at CDC and FDA, at the National Institutes of Health, and they are the most dedicated civil servants the nation has ever seen.”
Kennedy has falsely linked antidepressants to mass shootings
Kennedy has suggested mass shootings committed by young people are spurred by antidepressants and video games. Federal scientists need to be studying shootings to “see if there is connections to some of the SSRI [antidepressant] and psychiatric drugs people are taking, whether there is connections to video games,” he told Turkish state-owned TRT World in January.
The suggestion that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings has been amplified by right-wing figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. But experts caution there is no credible research linking antidepressants to mass shootings. Studies show only a small percentage of mass shooters were taking medications or suffering from serious mental illness when they committed the crimes.
Kennedy incorrectly suggests AIDS may not be caused by HIV
Kennedy has repeatedly — and falsely — suggested that the human immunodeficiency virus is not the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. The discovery of the connection between HIV and AIDS garnered a Nobel Prize in 2008 and is established science.
“They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS,” Kennedy said in an interview last summer with New York Magazine.
In his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” Kennedy wrote that he takes “no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS — then dedicated many pages to casting doubt on the science.
Kennedy falsely argues children’s gender identity can be impacted by water
Kennedy has repeatedly argued that chemicals in the water are changing children’s sexuality and gender identity. “I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disrupters because our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion,” he said on his podcast in 2022, according to CNN.
Experts say there is no scientific evidence to back up Kennedy’s claims, which have also been spread by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. “That’s just leaning into the fear that hormones are going to make our kids gay or transgender. It’s a very old conspiracy theory,” said David Gorski, a Wayne State University professor of surgery and oncology and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks misinformation in medicine. “That has no basis in evidence.”
Kennedy falsely claimed in a July interview last year with Fox News that fewer people would have died of covid-19 if the United States had deployed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Multiple studies have concluded that the antiparasitic and antimalarial drugs are ineffective against covid-19, despite the promotion of the drug by right-wing media. “We racked up the highest death count in the world. We only have 4.2 percent of the globe’s population, but we had 16 percent of the covid deaths in this country, and that is … that was from bad policy. There’s … countries that did the opposite of what we did — that provided ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, other early treatments to their populations — and had 1/200th of our death rate,” he told Watters, the Fox host.
The FDA has approved ivermectin for treating some parasitic infections, head lice and skin conditions such as rosacea — but not for the coronavirus.
In spring 2020, the FDA authorized the emergency use of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, to treat the coronavirus. But less than three months later, the agency withdrew the drug’s authorization because the medications “were unlikely to be effective.”
Kennedy argued that covid-19 was ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people
“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said in a video recorded by the New York Post last July. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
There is no scientific basis to these claims. Scientists and politicians have widely decried Kennedy’s remarks as racist and antisemitic.
Kennedy claims 5G high-speed wireless network is used to ‘control our behavior’
Return to menu
Kennedy has claimed that 5G high-speed wireless network service is being used to “harvest our data and control our behavior.” His claims echo long-running conspiracy theories that 5G technology causes harmful effects on health.
During the pandemic, governments in the United Kingdom and the United States issued assurances that the technology was not fueling the coronavirus. Experts have dismissed fears of detrimental health effects, pointing out the technology is no different than existing networks.
WELCOME TO THE DONALD TRUMP AMATEUR HOUR. CAN DEMOCRACY SURVIVE IT?
Trump is stocking his Cabinet with amateurs and pranksters. Can democracy survive it?
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
It took Donald Trump scarcely a week to demonstrate his utter contempt for the government he is about to lead, culminating in his choice of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. The Senate cannot allow this dangerous man to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
Trump’s appointments briefly looked fine, normal even, with Marco Rubio to be secretary of state and Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the United Nations.
They went downhill from there, with candidates manifestly underqualified for the positions for which they were selected — former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, who has no real experience on environmental issues, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency; South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem to head the sprawling Department of Homeland Security; and Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as defense secretary, despite his absence of serious management or defense policy experience.
Then things went from insulting to untenable. Trump tapped former representative Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence. It’s bad enough that Gabbard lacks any experience on intelligence matters, but even more scary that she has cozied up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic, “A person with Gabbard’s views should not be allowed anywhere near the crown jewels of American intelligence.”
Thursday’s news — Trump’s choice of anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of health and human services — was more of the shocking same.
But nothing in the history of presidential Cabinet choices compares with Trump’s selection of Gaetz. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton called it “the worst nomination for a Cabinet secretary in American history,” and that doesn’t seem like an overstatement.
The choice of Gaetz reflects Trump unleashed. I’m told Gaetz was not even among the candidates vetted for the attorney general post — those names included Clarence Thomas ally Mark Paoletta and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. They would have been bad enough.
But the toddler wants what the toddler wants, and in Trump’s case that is someone willing to indulge his desires to exact retribution, someone unconcerned about barreling through department rules and norms against politicizing prosecutions, someone who would not resist a Trump edict no matter how out of line.
Here, the very antics that so repelled even his Republican colleagues — Gaetz’s performative histrionics in the service of Trump, his embrace of conspiracy theories no matter how outlandish (antifa was responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection) — were a plus-up for the president-elect.
Before the election, Trump’s choice for vice president, JD Vance, termed the attorney general post “the most important job after president of the United States,” adding, “We really want the American people to believe that we have a fair and equitable administration of justice. If not, the entire sort of system falls apart. You need people to believe that if the attorney general prosecutes somebody, it’s motivated by justice and law and not by politics.”
And this is who they came up with?
The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the post of attorney general, calling for “a meet person, learned in the law.” No sane person would argue Gaetz fits that description. Most candidates for attorney general don’t feel compelled to seek preemptive pardons from a departing president.
Leaving aside his repellent behavior in Congress, Gaetz was the subject of a Justice Department — yes, that Justice Department — probe into sex trafficking of minors. (The department ultimately didn’t bring charges and Gaetz denied wrongdoing.) Gaetz resigned just two days before the House Ethics Committee, which has been investigating allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct, used drugs and accepted improper gifts, was planning to issue a damning report. Put it this way: No mother says to her son, “Why can’t you be more like Matt Gaetz.”
Some see method to Trump’s madness, a you-scratch-my-back play that goes like this: Gaetz knew he wouldn’t get confirmed as attorney general but seized on the opportunity to get out of Congress before the ethics report was released. Trump doesn’t mind having a nominee go up in flames, because Gaetz’s demise will clear the way for other controversial nominees who might otherwise have failed. Senate rebellion, such as it is, only goes so far.
Maybe. But. Trump is a man who hates losing. When has he ever engaged in a tactical loss that would be seen as a personal humiliation to reap a benefit down the road?
My fear is twofold. One possibility is that not enough Senate Republicans, despite their revulsion for Gaetz, will have the guts to stand up to Trump. History does not augur well for backbone on the part of elected officials defying Trump.
A second, even scarier, is that Trump, if senators defy him, will employ a never before used option, outlined in the Constitution, that grants the president power to unilaterally adjourn congress if the two houses are unable to agree on a time for adjournment. If Trump were to do so, he could then use his constitutional authority to grant recess appointments during that period.
And a man with the power of an attorney general and the character of a Gaetz would be enormously dangerous. Imagine: A Trump-Gaetz Justice Department concocting charges against, say, Liz Cheney. It is close to impossible to imagine such a prosecution succeeding, but it is also true that a federal judge assigned to oversee such a case would find it difficult to throw out such a case before it came before a jury. From the Trump-Gaetz point of view, forcing Cheney to endure the expense and indignity of a trial might be punishment enough.
Taking office in 1975 in the aftermath of Watergate, a scandal that claimed Richard M. Nixon and his attorney general and tarnished the department, Gerald Ford’s straight-arrow attorney general, Edward H. Levi, emphasized the importance of the rule of law.
“We have lived in a time of change and corrosive skepticism and cynicism concerning the administration of justice,” Levi said at his swearing in. “Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of those goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by word and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose, and it is not an instrument to be used in ways which are careless of the higher values which are within all of us.”
What would Levi say now? There is something worse than a clown in Congress. That is a clown invested with subpoena power and the authority to convene a federal grand jury.
Trump is stocking his Cabinet with amateurs and pranksters. Can democracy survive it?
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
It took Donald Trump scarcely a week to demonstrate his utter contempt for the government he is about to lead, culminating in his choice of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. The Senate cannot allow this dangerous man to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
Trump’s appointments briefly looked fine, normal even, with Marco Rubio to be secretary of state and Elise Stefanik to be ambassador to the United Nations.
They went downhill from there, with candidates manifestly underqualified for the positions for which they were selected — former New York congressman Lee Zeldin, who has no real experience on environmental issues, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency; South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem to head the sprawling Department of Homeland Security; and Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as defense secretary, despite his absence of serious management or defense policy experience.
Then things went from insulting to untenable. Trump tapped former representative Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence. It’s bad enough that Gabbard lacks any experience on intelligence matters, but even more scary that she has cozied up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic, “A person with Gabbard’s views should not be allowed anywhere near the crown jewels of American intelligence.”
Thursday’s news — Trump’s choice of anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of health and human services — was more of the shocking same.
But nothing in the history of presidential Cabinet choices compares with Trump’s selection of Gaetz. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton called it “the worst nomination for a Cabinet secretary in American history,” and that doesn’t seem like an overstatement.
The choice of Gaetz reflects Trump unleashed. I’m told Gaetz was not even among the candidates vetted for the attorney general post — those names included Clarence Thomas ally Mark Paoletta and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. They would have been bad enough.
But the toddler wants what the toddler wants, and in Trump’s case that is someone willing to indulge his desires to exact retribution, someone unconcerned about barreling through department rules and norms against politicizing prosecutions, someone who would not resist a Trump edict no matter how out of line.
Here, the very antics that so repelled even his Republican colleagues — Gaetz’s performative histrionics in the service of Trump, his embrace of conspiracy theories no matter how outlandish (antifa was responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection) — were a plus-up for the president-elect.
Before the election, Trump’s choice for vice president, JD Vance, termed the attorney general post “the most important job after president of the United States,” adding, “We really want the American people to believe that we have a fair and equitable administration of justice. If not, the entire sort of system falls apart. You need people to believe that if the attorney general prosecutes somebody, it’s motivated by justice and law and not by politics.”
And this is who they came up with?
The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the post of attorney general, calling for “a meet person, learned in the law.” No sane person would argue Gaetz fits that description. Most candidates for attorney general don’t feel compelled to seek preemptive pardons from a departing president.
Leaving aside his repellent behavior in Congress, Gaetz was the subject of a Justice Department — yes, that Justice Department — probe into sex trafficking of minors. (The department ultimately didn’t bring charges and Gaetz denied wrongdoing.) Gaetz resigned just two days before the House Ethics Committee, which has been investigating allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct, used drugs and accepted improper gifts, was planning to issue a damning report. Put it this way: No mother says to her son, “Why can’t you be more like Matt Gaetz.”
Some see method to Trump’s madness, a you-scratch-my-back play that goes like this: Gaetz knew he wouldn’t get confirmed as attorney general but seized on the opportunity to get out of Congress before the ethics report was released. Trump doesn’t mind having a nominee go up in flames, because Gaetz’s demise will clear the way for other controversial nominees who might otherwise have failed. Senate rebellion, such as it is, only goes so far.
Maybe. But. Trump is a man who hates losing. When has he ever engaged in a tactical loss that would be seen as a personal humiliation to reap a benefit down the road?
My fear is twofold. One possibility is that not enough Senate Republicans, despite their revulsion for Gaetz, will have the guts to stand up to Trump. History does not augur well for backbone on the part of elected officials defying Trump.
A second, even scarier, is that Trump, if senators defy him, will employ a never before used option, outlined in the Constitution, that grants the president power to unilaterally adjourn congress if the two houses are unable to agree on a time for adjournment. If Trump were to do so, he could then use his constitutional authority to grant recess appointments during that period.
And a man with the power of an attorney general and the character of a Gaetz would be enormously dangerous. Imagine: A Trump-Gaetz Justice Department concocting charges against, say, Liz Cheney. It is close to impossible to imagine such a prosecution succeeding, but it is also true that a federal judge assigned to oversee such a case would find it difficult to throw out such a case before it came before a jury. From the Trump-Gaetz point of view, forcing Cheney to endure the expense and indignity of a trial might be punishment enough.
Taking office in 1975 in the aftermath of Watergate, a scandal that claimed Richard M. Nixon and his attorney general and tarnished the department, Gerald Ford’s straight-arrow attorney general, Edward H. Levi, emphasized the importance of the rule of law.
“We have lived in a time of change and corrosive skepticism and cynicism concerning the administration of justice,” Levi said at his swearing in. “Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of those goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by word and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose, and it is not an instrument to be used in ways which are careless of the higher values which are within all of us.”
What would Levi say now? There is something worse than a clown in Congress. That is a clown invested with subpoena power and the authority to convene a federal grand jury.
TRUMP’S RECKLESS CHOICES FOR NATIONAL LEADERSHIP
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.
For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.
The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. Yes, that Matt Gaetz.
The one who called for the abolishment of the F.B.I. and the entire Justice Department if they didn’t stop investigating Mr. Trump. The one who was among the loudest congressional voices in denying the results of the 2020 election, who said he was “proud of the work” that he and other deniers did on Jan. 6, 2021, and who praised the Capitol rioters as “patriotic Americans” who had no intention of committing violence. The one whose move to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 paralyzed his own party’s leadership of the House for nearly a month.
Mr. Gaetz, who submitted his letter of resignation from Congress on Wednesday after his nomination was announced, was the target of a yearslong federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11-year prison term for one of his associates, though he denied any involvement. The Justice Department closed that investigation, but the House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, blamed Mr. Gaetz for his ouster, on the grounds that Mr. Gaetz “wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”
This is the man Mr. Trump has selected to lead the 115,000-person agency that he has called the most important in the federal government, a position whose enforcement role could cause the most trouble for any president with corrupt intent. Even for Mr. Trump, it was a stunning demonstration of his disregard for basic competence and government experience, and of his duty to lead the executive branch in a sober and patriotic way. It will now be up to the Senate to say he has gone too far and reject this nomination.
Mr. Trump’s list of appointments is just getting started but already includes two other unqualified nominations that he announced this week: former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.
Ms. Gabbard, who previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox News, is not only devoid of intelligence experience but has repeatedly taken positions in direct opposition to American foreign policy and national security interests. She has appeared on several occasions to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Mr. Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is perhaps even more unqualified, given the gravity — not to mention the budget — of the post he would assume. He enjoys some support from enlisted service members and veterans, but outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as time in Guantánamo Bay, Mr. Hegseth has no experience in government or national defense.
“He’s never run a big institution, much less one of the largest and most hidebound on the planet,” the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday. “He has no experience in government outside the military, and no small risk is that the bureaucracy will eat him alive.” The board went on to call Mr. Hegseth a “culture warrior” at a time when there are much bigger security issues for the Pentagon to be focused on.
It’s far from certain Mr. Hegseth could even obtain the security clearances required for the job. He has said he was one of a dozen National Guard members removed from service at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 because of concerns that he was an extremist — possibly because of a tattoo he wears that is popular among white supremacists.
These are some of the most consequential roles in government, protecting the country from military and terrorist threats, investigating domestic criminal conspiracies, and prosecuting thousands of federal crimes every year. Yet to fill them Mr. Trump has resorted to people whose only eligibility for office is an apparent willingness to say yes to his every demand.
Mr. Gaetz in particular has joined Mr. Trump in expressing a commitment to exacting vengeance against anyone they believe has done them wrong. Mr. Trump began his campaign by saying “I am your retribution,” and Mr. Gaetz broadcasts nothing so much as that. He has no business leading an agency with the role of combating crime, fraud, violations of civil rights and threats to national security, among many other things.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, the department was protected by career prosecutors and other civil servants who understood that their primary obligation was to the dictates of the Constitution, not to the whims of the president. But Mr. Trump has promised to purge people like that from his second administration.
The possibility of extreme appointments like these was the reason the Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president’s wishes. Last week, Republicans won control of the chamber. Now they will be confronted with an immediate test: Will they stand up for the legislative branch and for the American system of checks and balances? Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have already expressed strong skepticism of Mr. Gaetz’s nomination, and others have declined to express their support.
Mr. Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities. He wants to turn the leaders of major important agencies into his deputies, remaking the federal government into a Trump Inc. organization chart entirely subordinate to him. He recently demanded that the Senate give him the ability to make recess appointments, a way of bypassing the Senate’s consent process when the chamber is adjourned for 10 days or more.
Even Republican senators refused to consent to that demand during his first term, to preserve their constitutional role, and on Wednesday Senate Republicans voted to reject as their leader Rick Scott of Florida, who said he would have no problem allowing recess appointments. Instead they chose John Thune of South Dakota, who is far more likely to uphold his chamber’s right to refuse consent of president nominations.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, senators will immediately be confronted with an extreme set of appointments even worse than those of the first term. That makes all the more important that they preserve the ability to say no.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.
For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.
The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. Yes, that Matt Gaetz.
The one who called for the abolishment of the F.B.I. and the entire Justice Department if they didn’t stop investigating Mr. Trump. The one who was among the loudest congressional voices in denying the results of the 2020 election, who said he was “proud of the work” that he and other deniers did on Jan. 6, 2021, and who praised the Capitol rioters as “patriotic Americans” who had no intention of committing violence. The one whose move to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 paralyzed his own party’s leadership of the House for nearly a month.
Mr. Gaetz, who submitted his letter of resignation from Congress on Wednesday after his nomination was announced, was the target of a yearslong federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11-year prison term for one of his associates, though he denied any involvement. The Justice Department closed that investigation, but the House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, blamed Mr. Gaetz for his ouster, on the grounds that Mr. Gaetz “wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”
This is the man Mr. Trump has selected to lead the 115,000-person agency that he has called the most important in the federal government, a position whose enforcement role could cause the most trouble for any president with corrupt intent. Even for Mr. Trump, it was a stunning demonstration of his disregard for basic competence and government experience, and of his duty to lead the executive branch in a sober and patriotic way. It will now be up to the Senate to say he has gone too far and reject this nomination.
Mr. Trump’s list of appointments is just getting started but already includes two other unqualified nominations that he announced this week: former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.
Ms. Gabbard, who previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox News, is not only devoid of intelligence experience but has repeatedly taken positions in direct opposition to American foreign policy and national security interests. She has appeared on several occasions to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Mr. Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is perhaps even more unqualified, given the gravity — not to mention the budget — of the post he would assume. He enjoys some support from enlisted service members and veterans, but outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as time in Guantánamo Bay, Mr. Hegseth has no experience in government or national defense.
“He’s never run a big institution, much less one of the largest and most hidebound on the planet,” the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday. “He has no experience in government outside the military, and no small risk is that the bureaucracy will eat him alive.” The board went on to call Mr. Hegseth a “culture warrior” at a time when there are much bigger security issues for the Pentagon to be focused on.
It’s far from certain Mr. Hegseth could even obtain the security clearances required for the job. He has said he was one of a dozen National Guard members removed from service at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 because of concerns that he was an extremist — possibly because of a tattoo he wears that is popular among white supremacists.
These are some of the most consequential roles in government, protecting the country from military and terrorist threats, investigating domestic criminal conspiracies, and prosecuting thousands of federal crimes every year. Yet to fill them Mr. Trump has resorted to people whose only eligibility for office is an apparent willingness to say yes to his every demand.
Mr. Gaetz in particular has joined Mr. Trump in expressing a commitment to exacting vengeance against anyone they believe has done them wrong. Mr. Trump began his campaign by saying “I am your retribution,” and Mr. Gaetz broadcasts nothing so much as that. He has no business leading an agency with the role of combating crime, fraud, violations of civil rights and threats to national security, among many other things.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, the department was protected by career prosecutors and other civil servants who understood that their primary obligation was to the dictates of the Constitution, not to the whims of the president. But Mr. Trump has promised to purge people like that from his second administration.
The possibility of extreme appointments like these was the reason the Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president’s wishes. Last week, Republicans won control of the chamber. Now they will be confronted with an immediate test: Will they stand up for the legislative branch and for the American system of checks and balances? Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have already expressed strong skepticism of Mr. Gaetz’s nomination, and others have declined to express their support.
Mr. Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities. He wants to turn the leaders of major important agencies into his deputies, remaking the federal government into a Trump Inc. organization chart entirely subordinate to him. He recently demanded that the Senate give him the ability to make recess appointments, a way of bypassing the Senate’s consent process when the chamber is adjourned for 10 days or more.
Even Republican senators refused to consent to that demand during his first term, to preserve their constitutional role, and on Wednesday Senate Republicans voted to reject as their leader Rick Scott of Florida, who said he would have no problem allowing recess appointments. Instead they chose John Thune of South Dakota, who is far more likely to uphold his chamber’s right to refuse consent of president nominations.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, senators will immediately be confronted with an extreme set of appointments even worse than those of the first term. That makes all the more important that they preserve the ability to say no.
FOR TRUMP, DUBIOUS NOMINEES COME IN THREES
Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth will test Senate Republicans’ commitment to the country.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Like his predecessors, President-elect Donald Trump is entitled to some deference from the Senate and the public at large in making nominations to top positions. In return for this, however, there is an implied requirement that he name plausibly qualified candidates. Yet, on Tuesday and Wednesday, he announced three nominees for major national security roles, each of whom is ideologically extreme and lacks necessary experience: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) as attorney general; Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth as defense secretary; and former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Each pick presents the incoming Republican-majority Senate with a major test of its ability to put the public interest ahead of party loyalty.
Mr. Hegseth, 44, served honorably in combat areas overseas. But as a conservative activist during Mr. Trump’s first term, he campaigned — successfully, alas — on behalf of executive clemency for military members accused or convicted of war crimes. He has never run a large organization of any kind, much less an entity with an $842 billion budget such as the Pentagon. Ms. Gabbard, a reflexive critic of U.S. engagement abroad, has no significant intelligence background and has described Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whom she met in 2017 after he used chemical weapons to slaughter children, as “not an enemy of the United States.”
Mr. Gaetz, meanwhile, has exhibited routine poor judgment and a willingness to throw the country into chaos. He dethroned Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House last year, plunging the GOP conference into prolonged anarchy. His baggage could fill Justice Department headquarters: He remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegations of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use and accepting improper gifts. Federal prosecutors investigated him for sex trafficking, in a case that revolved around allegations that he paid for sex and had a sexual relationship with a minor; they declined to file charges because they had concerns that two witnesses’ credibility issues would make it hard to prove their case to a jury. Mr. Gaetz categorically denied wrongdoing.
Mr. Gaetz, 42, worked briefly in private practice after William & Mary Law School before winning a state House seat in 2010 and coming to Congress in 2017, where he quickly earned a reputation as an over-the-top Trump apologist. This is likely why he appeals to Mr. Trump — and why he is such a bad fit to run a department that has sought to maintain a modicum of independence since Watergate.
Compare Mr. Gaetz with the attorney general Mr. Trump nominated him to replace. Merrick Garland, 72, served as a federal prosecutor, overseeing the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, and became chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second-most-important court in the country. After Senate Republicans blocked a hearing for his nomination to the Supreme Court, Mr. Garland vigorously defended the rule of law during his term as attorney general. Keeping the White House at arm’s length, Mr. Garland appointed special counsels to investigate President Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents and the president’s son, Hunter Biden, for gun and tax crimes.
Wednesday’s announcement is the most worrisome indicator since the election that Mr. Trump could pursue retribution against perceived enemies. And it came on the same day that Mr. Biden warmly welcomed the incoming president into the Oval Office — a courtesy that Mr. Trump did not extend Mr. Biden four years ago. In addition to all federal prosecutors, Mr. Gaetz would oversee the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives if he were confirmed. About 115,000 employees would report to him.
Mr. Trump said in a statement that “Matt will root out the systemic corruption at DOJ” and “restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.” There is no systemic corruption inside the Justice Department. In search of Trump enemies, Mr. Gaetz would wreak havoc on morale among the public-spirited federal law enforcement officials the nation needs to fight crime and keep Americans safe. Mr. Gaetz’s record also suggests he would be inclined to “weaponize” the justice system, as Republicans have hyperbolically accused the Biden administration of doing.
Mr. Trump named Mr. Gaetz, Mr. Hegseth and Ms. Gabbard just as Senate Republicans were choosing John Thune (South Dakota), a relatively conventional conservative politician, to be majority leader. It falls to Mr. Thune to show that, under his leadership, advice and consent has real meaning and that the Senate will not rubber-stamp manifestly unfit choices to crucial positions.
Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth will test Senate Republicans’ commitment to the country.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Like his predecessors, President-elect Donald Trump is entitled to some deference from the Senate and the public at large in making nominations to top positions. In return for this, however, there is an implied requirement that he name plausibly qualified candidates. Yet, on Tuesday and Wednesday, he announced three nominees for major national security roles, each of whom is ideologically extreme and lacks necessary experience: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) as attorney general; Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth as defense secretary; and former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Each pick presents the incoming Republican-majority Senate with a major test of its ability to put the public interest ahead of party loyalty.
Mr. Hegseth, 44, served honorably in combat areas overseas. But as a conservative activist during Mr. Trump’s first term, he campaigned — successfully, alas — on behalf of executive clemency for military members accused or convicted of war crimes. He has never run a large organization of any kind, much less an entity with an $842 billion budget such as the Pentagon. Ms. Gabbard, a reflexive critic of U.S. engagement abroad, has no significant intelligence background and has described Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whom she met in 2017 after he used chemical weapons to slaughter children, as “not an enemy of the United States.”
Mr. Gaetz, meanwhile, has exhibited routine poor judgment and a willingness to throw the country into chaos. He dethroned Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House last year, plunging the GOP conference into prolonged anarchy. His baggage could fill Justice Department headquarters: He remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegations of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use and accepting improper gifts. Federal prosecutors investigated him for sex trafficking, in a case that revolved around allegations that he paid for sex and had a sexual relationship with a minor; they declined to file charges because they had concerns that two witnesses’ credibility issues would make it hard to prove their case to a jury. Mr. Gaetz categorically denied wrongdoing.
Mr. Gaetz, 42, worked briefly in private practice after William & Mary Law School before winning a state House seat in 2010 and coming to Congress in 2017, where he quickly earned a reputation as an over-the-top Trump apologist. This is likely why he appeals to Mr. Trump — and why he is such a bad fit to run a department that has sought to maintain a modicum of independence since Watergate.
Compare Mr. Gaetz with the attorney general Mr. Trump nominated him to replace. Merrick Garland, 72, served as a federal prosecutor, overseeing the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, and became chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second-most-important court in the country. After Senate Republicans blocked a hearing for his nomination to the Supreme Court, Mr. Garland vigorously defended the rule of law during his term as attorney general. Keeping the White House at arm’s length, Mr. Garland appointed special counsels to investigate President Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents and the president’s son, Hunter Biden, for gun and tax crimes.
Wednesday’s announcement is the most worrisome indicator since the election that Mr. Trump could pursue retribution against perceived enemies. And it came on the same day that Mr. Biden warmly welcomed the incoming president into the Oval Office — a courtesy that Mr. Trump did not extend Mr. Biden four years ago. In addition to all federal prosecutors, Mr. Gaetz would oversee the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives if he were confirmed. About 115,000 employees would report to him.
Mr. Trump said in a statement that “Matt will root out the systemic corruption at DOJ” and “restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.” There is no systemic corruption inside the Justice Department. In search of Trump enemies, Mr. Gaetz would wreak havoc on morale among the public-spirited federal law enforcement officials the nation needs to fight crime and keep Americans safe. Mr. Gaetz’s record also suggests he would be inclined to “weaponize” the justice system, as Republicans have hyperbolically accused the Biden administration of doing.
Mr. Trump named Mr. Gaetz, Mr. Hegseth and Ms. Gabbard just as Senate Republicans were choosing John Thune (South Dakota), a relatively conventional conservative politician, to be majority leader. It falls to Mr. Thune to show that, under his leadership, advice and consent has real meaning and that the Senate will not rubber-stamp manifestly unfit choices to crucial positions.
HOUSE ETHICS PANEL WAS SET TO VOTE TO RELEASE REPORT CRITICAL OF MATT GAETZ
The committee has been investigating allegations that Mr. Gaetz, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for attorney general, engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.
By Robert Draper, Luke Broadwater and Maya C. Miller, The New York Times
The House Ethics Committee, which has been investigating allegations that Representative Matt Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, was prepared to vote to release a highly critical report about Mr. Gaetz on Friday, according to a Republican official familiar with the matter. The release would have come two days after President-elect Donald J. Trump selected Mr. Gaetz to be attorney general.
Mr. Gaetz, a Florida Republican, abruptly resigned from his House seat late Wednesday, effectively ending the ethics investigation that has hung over his head for years.
Mr. Gaetz, the official said, had repeatedly offered combative replies to questions posed by the committee, effectively delaying the fact-finding process for months. The publication of the committee’s findings was additionally delayed, the official said, because of a House rule that forbids releasing a negative report close to an election. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation.
Now, with Mr. Gaetz’s departure from Congress, the committee no longer has jurisdiction to investigate him. It was not immediately clear whether it would still release its findings. Tom Rust, the chief counsel and staff director for the panel, declined to comment.
Republicans in Congress expressed shock at Mr. Gaetz’s selection to be attorney general. Mr. Gaetz, who led the successful effort last fall to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, is one of the most reviled members of his conference.
For two years, the Justice Department looked into allegations that he had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and possibly violated federal sex trafficking laws. The department closed its investigation last year without filing any charges against Mr. Gaetz.
Still, the Ethics Committee opened an inquiry in 2021 into the sexual misconduct allegations along with claims that Mr. Gaetz misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, accepted impermissible gifts under House rules, and shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, among other transgressions.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, announced Mr. Gaetz’s resignation at a news conference on Wednesday night after House Republicans chose their leaders for the next Congress. Mr. Johnson said he had called Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to start the process for scheduling a special election to fill the seat.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Johnson of his decision to tap Mr. Gaetz earlier in the day, shortly before he took the stage to briefly address and congratulate the Republican conference. In those remarks, Mr. Trump joked about poaching more House G.O.P. members for his administration.
Earlier in the day, some of Mr. Gaetz’s colleagues made no secret of their joy to see him depart. “Most people in there are giddy about it. Get him out of here,” said Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, speaking about his G.O.P. colleagues who were gathered to vote in leadership elections. He said Mr. Trump had plenty of other good options for nominees, but probably went with Mr. Gaetz to reward his loyalty.
Before Mr. Gaetz’s resignation was publicly announced, Mr. Miller suggested that if the Senate hearings unearthed new and convincing evidence that the misconduct allegations against Mr. Gaetz were true, his colleagues could expel him, as they did Representative George Santos late last year.
The committee has been investigating allegations that Mr. Gaetz, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for attorney general, engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.
By Robert Draper, Luke Broadwater and Maya C. Miller, The New York Times
The House Ethics Committee, which has been investigating allegations that Representative Matt Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, was prepared to vote to release a highly critical report about Mr. Gaetz on Friday, according to a Republican official familiar with the matter. The release would have come two days after President-elect Donald J. Trump selected Mr. Gaetz to be attorney general.
Mr. Gaetz, a Florida Republican, abruptly resigned from his House seat late Wednesday, effectively ending the ethics investigation that has hung over his head for years.
Mr. Gaetz, the official said, had repeatedly offered combative replies to questions posed by the committee, effectively delaying the fact-finding process for months. The publication of the committee’s findings was additionally delayed, the official said, because of a House rule that forbids releasing a negative report close to an election. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation.
Now, with Mr. Gaetz’s departure from Congress, the committee no longer has jurisdiction to investigate him. It was not immediately clear whether it would still release its findings. Tom Rust, the chief counsel and staff director for the panel, declined to comment.
Republicans in Congress expressed shock at Mr. Gaetz’s selection to be attorney general. Mr. Gaetz, who led the successful effort last fall to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, is one of the most reviled members of his conference.
For two years, the Justice Department looked into allegations that he had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and possibly violated federal sex trafficking laws. The department closed its investigation last year without filing any charges against Mr. Gaetz.
Still, the Ethics Committee opened an inquiry in 2021 into the sexual misconduct allegations along with claims that Mr. Gaetz misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, accepted impermissible gifts under House rules, and shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, among other transgressions.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, announced Mr. Gaetz’s resignation at a news conference on Wednesday night after House Republicans chose their leaders for the next Congress. Mr. Johnson said he had called Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to start the process for scheduling a special election to fill the seat.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Johnson of his decision to tap Mr. Gaetz earlier in the day, shortly before he took the stage to briefly address and congratulate the Republican conference. In those remarks, Mr. Trump joked about poaching more House G.O.P. members for his administration.
Earlier in the day, some of Mr. Gaetz’s colleagues made no secret of their joy to see him depart. “Most people in there are giddy about it. Get him out of here,” said Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, speaking about his G.O.P. colleagues who were gathered to vote in leadership elections. He said Mr. Trump had plenty of other good options for nominees, but probably went with Mr. Gaetz to reward his loyalty.
Before Mr. Gaetz’s resignation was publicly announced, Mr. Miller suggested that if the Senate hearings unearthed new and convincing evidence that the misconduct allegations against Mr. Gaetz were true, his colleagues could expel him, as they did Representative George Santos late last year.
SENATE REPUBLICANS SHOULD NOT SURRENDER TO TRUMP ON APPOINTMENTS
Confirming a president’s nominees is one of the Senate’s most essential responsibilities.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
As Senate Republicans prepared to select a new leader on Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump demanded that candidates make a promise that would effectively weaken their chamber’s constitutional power to confirm — or reject — major presidential appointees. The three hopefuls — Sens. John Cornyn (Texas), Rick Scott (Florida) and John Thune (South Dakota) — fell in line. The rest of the chamber following suit would be a mistake.
Mr. Trump wants the next Senate GOP leader to allow him to make “recess appointments”: temporary postings when the Senate is not in session, and therefore unable to provide “advice and consent.” Since the George W. Bush years, senators have prevented recess appointments by staying in session permanently, albeit via the technicality of brief pro forma sessions when most senators are out of Washington. Mr. Trump wants the next Senate leader to end that blocking tactic.
Mr. Trump wants opportunities to circumvent the Senate confirmation process even though Republicans will have a clear majority of seats — at least 52, according to the latest count — signaling his intention to elevate appointees whom even some Republicans cannot tolerate. Senators should refuse to squander their constitutional prerogatives in this way.
Until less than a century ago, Congress was effectively a part-time legislature that would recess for months at a time. In the age before telecommunications and planes, trains and automobiles, the Founders recognized a limited need for the president to fill a vacancy that opened while the legislative branch was out of town, to ensure continuity of government. Modern conveniences eliminated the need for recess appointments, yet presidents came to use the recess clause more and more as an expedient to overcome Senate resistance to a presidential nominee. In short, the recess appointment process now exists mainly to be abused.
In 2007, Democrats began holding pro forma sessions to prevent Mr. Bush from making recess appointments. No doubt this practice is a bit of a legal fiction. However, the Supreme Court has blessed it. In 2014, the justices ruled — unanimously — that then-President Barack Obama had exceeded his constitutional authority by making recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate was holding pro forma sessions. “The Senate is in session when it says it is,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote.
There were nuances within that overall unity on the court, to be sure. Five justices upheld a president’s ability to make recess appointments if the Senate recessed for more than 10 days. Four of the conservative justices, however, wanted to narrow the president’s recess power so that he could make appointments only between sessions of Congress and only to fill vacancies that opened during the recess.
Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed the recess power as an “anachronism” that undermined the Senate’s authority to advise and consent. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the President to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process,” Justice Scalia wrote. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed with Justice Scalia on that point.
And Justice Scalia’s words ring equally true today. There does not appear to be any example in U.S. history of the Senate recessing so that a president may make a recess appointment. Senators of both parties have long seen confirmation votes as an important check on executive power, and they are. In general, presidents should be able to assemble the executive branch teams they want. The bar for opposing a Cabinet nominee should be high. But it should not be insurmountable. Certain misconduct, corruption, a record of incompetence or extreme views could be reasonable grounds to oppose a nomination. Requiring Senate confirmation for major offices discourages presidents from tapping unsuitable candidates for powerful positions.
Mr. Trump tried to skirt the Senate confirmation process during his first term, when his party held a narrower majority. He routinely abused the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to install acting secretaries with dubious legal authority. During the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Mr. Trump threatened at one point to adjourn Congress so he could make recess appointments.
Senators should fight his efforts to evade their scrutiny in his second term. Article I of the Constitution says that neither chamber may take a break of more than three days without the consent of the other. Regardless of what the next Senate GOP leader has promised Mr. Trump, there will be ample opportunities for objections. Republicans as well as Democrats should take them.
Confirming a president’s nominees is one of the Senate’s most essential responsibilities.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
As Senate Republicans prepared to select a new leader on Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump demanded that candidates make a promise that would effectively weaken their chamber’s constitutional power to confirm — or reject — major presidential appointees. The three hopefuls — Sens. John Cornyn (Texas), Rick Scott (Florida) and John Thune (South Dakota) — fell in line. The rest of the chamber following suit would be a mistake.
Mr. Trump wants the next Senate GOP leader to allow him to make “recess appointments”: temporary postings when the Senate is not in session, and therefore unable to provide “advice and consent.” Since the George W. Bush years, senators have prevented recess appointments by staying in session permanently, albeit via the technicality of brief pro forma sessions when most senators are out of Washington. Mr. Trump wants the next Senate leader to end that blocking tactic.
Mr. Trump wants opportunities to circumvent the Senate confirmation process even though Republicans will have a clear majority of seats — at least 52, according to the latest count — signaling his intention to elevate appointees whom even some Republicans cannot tolerate. Senators should refuse to squander their constitutional prerogatives in this way.
Until less than a century ago, Congress was effectively a part-time legislature that would recess for months at a time. In the age before telecommunications and planes, trains and automobiles, the Founders recognized a limited need for the president to fill a vacancy that opened while the legislative branch was out of town, to ensure continuity of government. Modern conveniences eliminated the need for recess appointments, yet presidents came to use the recess clause more and more as an expedient to overcome Senate resistance to a presidential nominee. In short, the recess appointment process now exists mainly to be abused.
In 2007, Democrats began holding pro forma sessions to prevent Mr. Bush from making recess appointments. No doubt this practice is a bit of a legal fiction. However, the Supreme Court has blessed it. In 2014, the justices ruled — unanimously — that then-President Barack Obama had exceeded his constitutional authority by making recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate was holding pro forma sessions. “The Senate is in session when it says it is,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote.
There were nuances within that overall unity on the court, to be sure. Five justices upheld a president’s ability to make recess appointments if the Senate recessed for more than 10 days. Four of the conservative justices, however, wanted to narrow the president’s recess power so that he could make appointments only between sessions of Congress and only to fill vacancies that opened during the recess.
Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed the recess power as an “anachronism” that undermined the Senate’s authority to advise and consent. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the President to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process,” Justice Scalia wrote. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. agreed with Justice Scalia on that point.
And Justice Scalia’s words ring equally true today. There does not appear to be any example in U.S. history of the Senate recessing so that a president may make a recess appointment. Senators of both parties have long seen confirmation votes as an important check on executive power, and they are. In general, presidents should be able to assemble the executive branch teams they want. The bar for opposing a Cabinet nominee should be high. But it should not be insurmountable. Certain misconduct, corruption, a record of incompetence or extreme views could be reasonable grounds to oppose a nomination. Requiring Senate confirmation for major offices discourages presidents from tapping unsuitable candidates for powerful positions.
Mr. Trump tried to skirt the Senate confirmation process during his first term, when his party held a narrower majority. He routinely abused the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to install acting secretaries with dubious legal authority. During the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Mr. Trump threatened at one point to adjourn Congress so he could make recess appointments.
Senators should fight his efforts to evade their scrutiny in his second term. Article I of the Constitution says that neither chamber may take a break of more than three days without the consent of the other. Regardless of what the next Senate GOP leader has promised Mr. Trump, there will be ample opportunities for objections. Republicans as well as Democrats should take them.
DEMOCRATS NEED TO RECLAIM REALITY FROM THE RIGHT-WING DISINFORMATION MACHINE
Disinformation has taken hold over democracy.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Whether you believe that Americans embraced President-elect Donald Trump’s misogynistic, racist and bullying persona because they misunderstood what he stood for or because they liked what he stood for; or because they believed (falsely) that the economy was in a recession or because they could not afford to buy their own home; or because of some combination of all of these, we cannot ignore the success of the right-wing media’s disinformation network in shaping how millions of Americans view the country.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer put it succinctly:
The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.
A now much-discussed Reuters-Ipsos poll found that “Americans who primarily get their news from Fox News and Conservative Media and social media/other are more likely to answer questions about inflation and crime incorrectly than Americans writ large.” When tens of millions of Americans believe things that simply are not true, Democrats’ accomplishments matter very little. Their message does not reach the intended audience. And frighteningly, “You can get people to vote away their democracy … as long as you create a false world for them to believe in,” as historian Heather Cox Richardson said.
In the right-wing media’s world, the economy is in a shambles, crime is surging, and kids are being lured into sex-reassignment surgery. In such an atmosphere, Democrats’ positions and proposals become divorced from the public’s perceptions of politics.
Michael Tomasky of the New Republic wrote last week: “Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country.” He explained that “they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.” Moreover, when Missouri voters embrace “a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave,” which are Democratic positions Republicans reject, as Tomasky pointed out, they are obviously confused about which party stands for which agenda.
It behooves Americans who care about the future of democracy, decent governance and the fate of their most vulnerable fellow Americans to understand the fundamentally different media reality that envelops a substantial number of voters. ProPublica, for example, documented an operation peddling vicious right-wing propaganda disguised as religious news. “Using tax documents and business filings, ProPublica traced the papers to a Chicago-based publishing network led by former TV reporter Brian Timpone. His enterprises, including Metric Media, are known among researchers for peddling misinformation and slanted coverage,” and are underwritten by “right-wing super PACs funded by conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein.”
The media preferences of millions of fellow Americans bear little resemblance to the offerings of legacy media. Brookings Institution’s Darrell M. West explained that “there are systematic and organized efforts to shape public opinion in many areas, from public health and climate change to race relations.” He wrote that waves of false, menacing messages get “disseminated broadly on social media platforms, promoted through funny memes, picked up and publicized by mainstream media outlets, circulated by internet mega-influencers, and amplified by leading candidates during rallies, debates, and interviews.”
West continued: On views about inflation and the overall economy, people in 2024 consistently reported very negative opinions compared to actual inflation, unemployment, and GDP figures. Europeans have been especially perplexed by American’s sour views of the economy. On the eve of the general election, the Economist magazine even had a cover story saying the U.S. economy was the envy of the world. Yet voters had a dismal view of the economy and rated Harris negatively for the economic situation.
For coming political battles, people need to be aware of how the current information ecosystem regularly is promoting falsehoods and skewing views about important issues.
The answer to combating the avalanche of disinformation, sadly, does not reside primarily in legacy media, which millions upon millions of Americans never see or read. (It certainly does not reside in outlets that offered false equivalence, failed to oppose a fascist candidate, or ignored voters’ lack of interest in democracy and underlying resentment over the loss of White power.) Rather, the solution lies largely in fostering new forms of media to counteract the gusher of right-wing disinformation that fills the brains and shapes the attitudes of many Americans.
This does not entail putting existing elite cable TV hosts on podcasts. Nor does it mean sending Oprah into the heartland to conduct national therapy. It surely does not require endless seminars among media elites dissecting the Harris campaign. A new crop of relevant opinion makers, local media and investigative journalists is required to get basic information to voters and combat the right’s conspiracy-laden hysteria. Then democracy and good governance stand a fighting chance.
Efforts such as Howard University’s Center for Journalism & Democracy to “reshape the national conversation around responsible power and democracy through critical, investigative journalism” in the tradition of the Black press also hold great promise. And, as Steven Waldman, president of Rebuild Local News, pointed out, the local media desert demands our attention. “We’ve lost one-third of our local newspapers; the number of reporters has dropped 60 percent in two decades,” he wrote. “Studies have shown that the contraction of local news has created a vacuum — which has been filled by partisan news sources and social media (both polarizing and more likely to spread misinformation).” Rebuilding a fact-based media begins in state capitals and local communities.
As West wrote, “In a highly polarized world, where people are divided into competing political tribes, millions of Americans admit they themselves have intentionally spread information they know to be false. If that continues, it will lead to disaster for our country’s politics and governance.”
Democracy requires public virtue and an informed citizenry. In the current media environment, both are under siege. Pro-democracy funders would do well to organize a comprehensive study of the right-wing ecosystem and its impact on the electorate. Then they can support fact-based local media, help recruit new media influencers, sponsor nonprofit investigative journalism and construct well-moderated social media platforms. Getting the truth out to the wider electorate will require a new, culturally relevant media ecosystem firmly rooted in liberal democratic values.
Disinformation has taken hold over democracy.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Whether you believe that Americans embraced President-elect Donald Trump’s misogynistic, racist and bullying persona because they misunderstood what he stood for or because they liked what he stood for; or because they believed (falsely) that the economy was in a recession or because they could not afford to buy their own home; or because of some combination of all of these, we cannot ignore the success of the right-wing media’s disinformation network in shaping how millions of Americans view the country.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer put it succinctly:
The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.
A now much-discussed Reuters-Ipsos poll found that “Americans who primarily get their news from Fox News and Conservative Media and social media/other are more likely to answer questions about inflation and crime incorrectly than Americans writ large.” When tens of millions of Americans believe things that simply are not true, Democrats’ accomplishments matter very little. Their message does not reach the intended audience. And frighteningly, “You can get people to vote away their democracy … as long as you create a false world for them to believe in,” as historian Heather Cox Richardson said.
In the right-wing media’s world, the economy is in a shambles, crime is surging, and kids are being lured into sex-reassignment surgery. In such an atmosphere, Democrats’ positions and proposals become divorced from the public’s perceptions of politics.
Michael Tomasky of the New Republic wrote last week: “Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country.” He explained that “they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.” Moreover, when Missouri voters embrace “a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave,” which are Democratic positions Republicans reject, as Tomasky pointed out, they are obviously confused about which party stands for which agenda.
It behooves Americans who care about the future of democracy, decent governance and the fate of their most vulnerable fellow Americans to understand the fundamentally different media reality that envelops a substantial number of voters. ProPublica, for example, documented an operation peddling vicious right-wing propaganda disguised as religious news. “Using tax documents and business filings, ProPublica traced the papers to a Chicago-based publishing network led by former TV reporter Brian Timpone. His enterprises, including Metric Media, are known among researchers for peddling misinformation and slanted coverage,” and are underwritten by “right-wing super PACs funded by conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein.”
The media preferences of millions of fellow Americans bear little resemblance to the offerings of legacy media. Brookings Institution’s Darrell M. West explained that “there are systematic and organized efforts to shape public opinion in many areas, from public health and climate change to race relations.” He wrote that waves of false, menacing messages get “disseminated broadly on social media platforms, promoted through funny memes, picked up and publicized by mainstream media outlets, circulated by internet mega-influencers, and amplified by leading candidates during rallies, debates, and interviews.”
West continued: On views about inflation and the overall economy, people in 2024 consistently reported very negative opinions compared to actual inflation, unemployment, and GDP figures. Europeans have been especially perplexed by American’s sour views of the economy. On the eve of the general election, the Economist magazine even had a cover story saying the U.S. economy was the envy of the world. Yet voters had a dismal view of the economy and rated Harris negatively for the economic situation.
For coming political battles, people need to be aware of how the current information ecosystem regularly is promoting falsehoods and skewing views about important issues.
The answer to combating the avalanche of disinformation, sadly, does not reside primarily in legacy media, which millions upon millions of Americans never see or read. (It certainly does not reside in outlets that offered false equivalence, failed to oppose a fascist candidate, or ignored voters’ lack of interest in democracy and underlying resentment over the loss of White power.) Rather, the solution lies largely in fostering new forms of media to counteract the gusher of right-wing disinformation that fills the brains and shapes the attitudes of many Americans.
This does not entail putting existing elite cable TV hosts on podcasts. Nor does it mean sending Oprah into the heartland to conduct national therapy. It surely does not require endless seminars among media elites dissecting the Harris campaign. A new crop of relevant opinion makers, local media and investigative journalists is required to get basic information to voters and combat the right’s conspiracy-laden hysteria. Then democracy and good governance stand a fighting chance.
Efforts such as Howard University’s Center for Journalism & Democracy to “reshape the national conversation around responsible power and democracy through critical, investigative journalism” in the tradition of the Black press also hold great promise. And, as Steven Waldman, president of Rebuild Local News, pointed out, the local media desert demands our attention. “We’ve lost one-third of our local newspapers; the number of reporters has dropped 60 percent in two decades,” he wrote. “Studies have shown that the contraction of local news has created a vacuum — which has been filled by partisan news sources and social media (both polarizing and more likely to spread misinformation).” Rebuilding a fact-based media begins in state capitals and local communities.
As West wrote, “In a highly polarized world, where people are divided into competing political tribes, millions of Americans admit they themselves have intentionally spread information they know to be false. If that continues, it will lead to disaster for our country’s politics and governance.”
Democracy requires public virtue and an informed citizenry. In the current media environment, both are under siege. Pro-democracy funders would do well to organize a comprehensive study of the right-wing ecosystem and its impact on the electorate. Then they can support fact-based local media, help recruit new media influencers, sponsor nonprofit investigative journalism and construct well-moderated social media platforms. Getting the truth out to the wider electorate will require a new, culturally relevant media ecosystem firmly rooted in liberal democratic values.
WHAT DO TRUMP VOTERS KNOW ABOUT THE FUTURE HE HAS PLANNED FOR THEM?
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.” What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.” What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
TO PREDICT WHAT TRUMP WILL DO AT HOME, LOOK AT THE STRONGMEN HE MOST ADMIRES OVERSEAS
Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who transformed a democracy into illiberal one-man rule, is the president-elect's best foreign friend.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Of all the overseas leaders avidly watching the U.S. election results, the two happiest were probably Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. As we peer into a murky domestic and foreign policy future under a 47th president who yearns to rule as a strongman, it’s important to understand what this means.
Putin and Orban clearly top Donald Trump’s best foreign friends list, and they know it. The GOP’s election victor leaves no doubts, with his constant praise for and pursuit of the Russian dictator and the anti-democratic Hungarian. It is these two, not the British, French, or German allies, whose modus operandi fascinates our next president. Putin is admired for his macho and brutal toughness, but Orban is the domestic role model. Trump’s choice of best foreign friends offers a stark preview of how he aims to govern for the next four years.
Of course, the president-elect’s long-standing attraction to Putin is endlessly documented. And it continues, despite the Russian dictator’s open disdain for the United States and desire to undermine our country.
But that attraction will be even more dangerous to U.S. national security in a second Trump term. In their side-by-side news conference in Helsinki in 2018, Trump infamously said he trusted the Russian leader more than U.S. intelligence agencies. That means come January, we will have an enormous security threat sitting in the Oval Office — an ill-informed president inclined to believe a murderous Russian dictator and ignore U.S. intel warnings about Putin’s intentions.
In his first term, Trump was surrounded by a foreign policy team of “grown-ups,” including Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who could restrain his pro-Russian leanings. But those grown-ups are gone, and the president-elect looks likely to appoint sycophants and conspiracy theorists to top foreign policy positions. Chances are high that he will purge the FBI and CIA of those he believes are disloyal to him (which no doubt includes those who appreciate the Russian danger).
Even worse, Trump believes that “peace through strength” means he alone can make foreign policy via his friendships with dictators. That approach was a loser with North Korea and Iran, who bulked up their arsenal of nuclear matériel, bombs and long-range missiles after Trump’s failed first-term efforts at personal diplomacy. Trump’s buddy Putin is now helping both countries develop their weapons systems further.
Trump has reportedly had as many as seven private phone calls with the Russian leader since stepping down in 2020. No doubt they were discussing Trump’s pledge to resolve the Ukraine conflict in 24 hours before even being sworn in. Yet, there is no way — I repeat, no way — Trump can do such a deal without surrendering to Putin’s terms, which will mean ending Ukraine’s independence and delivering it to Russian domination. Moreover, Putin is fully aware of Trump’s susceptibility to flattery, which the former KGB colonel will freely exploit.
Trump shows no signs he realizes the weakness that surrendering Ukraine to Putin will signal globally. Rather than build respect for Trump’s strength, this betrayal would convince Beijing that the president is prepared to surrender Taiwan. Meantime, NATO would be wounded, perhaps fatally, by a Trump capitulation to a major adversary, which, in turn, would encourage China, Iran and North Korea to do their worst.
Many observers believe the only explanation for Trump’s affinity for Putin must be that Russian security services have compromising material on him. To the contrary, I believe that affinity has grown out of Trump’s admiration for the Russian dictator’s macho persona — and ability to rule without being pestered by legislators, the press, demonstrations, or any curbs on his power. Never mind if Putin has his opponents poisoned or sent to Siberia (questioned on this, Trump once said, “We’ve got a lot of killers, too”).
Add to the gift bag for Putin the admiration of MAGA conservatives and Trump acolytes, such as Steve Bannon, for the Russian leader’s supposed “traditional values.” Of course, Putin’s version of such values means overt hostility to gays, women’s rights, and dark-skinned Russians. It also means hypocritically promoting Russian Orthodox Christianity while massacring Ukrainian Christians and persecuting minority sects at home.
Yet, nothing exemplifies Trump’s fascination with autocrats more clearly than his bromance with Orbán, who has transformed Hungarian democracy into one-man rule. While Trump spars with democratic French, German, and British leaders, he embraces the pro-Putin Orbán. The Hungarian leader, whose country’s population totals under 10 million, has become Trump’s closest political ally in Europe, invited to the White House in 2019 and to Mar-a-Lago in July.
“I look forward to working closely with Prime Minister Orbán once again when I take the oath of office,” Trump said earlier this year, calling the Hungarian leader a “great man.” This despite Orbán’s unsavory reputation inside the European Union due to his antidemocratic behavior and hostility toward Ukraine.
So why the Trump fondness for Orbán? Imitation hopes? The Hungarian has transformed his country’s democratic system by changing electoral laws to ensure only his party can win elections. Meantime, he has managed, legally, to take political control of the courts. As for the press, he had government-friendly oligarchs (think Elon Musk or Trump-cowed Jeff Bezos) buy up 80% of mass media outlets, turning them into Orbán’s propaganda mills. Most Hungarians now hear only what the leader wants them to hear.
Meantime, due to his supposed defense of family values, Orbán has also become the darling of Bannon and CPAC, the prominent Conservative Political Action Conference, a hard right GOP organization that has held three of its annual meetings in Budapest. Uber-conservative U.S. think tanks work with counterpart think tanks in Hungary.
Orbán’s government has targeted asylum-seekers, “Muslim invaders,” nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), LGBTQ people, the remaining independent press, and the independent Central European University, which was forced to exit Hungary. One of Orbán’s main targets is the Hungarian-born U.S. pro-democracy philanthropist George Soros, whom he has attacked endlessly and falsely, in gross antisemitic fashion, as the financial mastermind behind all of Hungary’s ills. (MAGA loyalists hate Soros human rights work as well).
Orbán (and Bannon) want to cement an alliance with all of Europe’s most far-right, nationalistic political parties. and Trump’s support will greatly advance this effort.
Instead of pushing back against the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that is challenging the United States globally, Trump deludes himself that he is a strongman who can win over their rulers via personal diplomacy or punishing tariffs.
Trump’s pursuit of Putin and Orbán leaves no doubt of the kind of ruler he wants to become. Indeed, he declared days before his election that “in many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies.”
Is this really what a majority of Americans voted for?
Perhaps in two years, we will see buyer’s remorse when some Americans who chose Trump for economic reasons realize that promised tariffs leave them poorer. Perhaps they will also realize that Trump’s slogan of peace through strength is more likely to lead to new wars.
Yet, according to a February study by the Pew Research Center, 32% of Americans believe a military regime or an authoritarian leader would be a better way of governing the country. Perhaps they, and many more U.S. voters, are ready to junk the Constitution and hand it all over to a strongman.
How much Trump sucks up to Putin and imitates Orbán early in his tenure — and whether anyone in government or civil society can stop him — will signal to those who still value democracy how much we have to fear.
Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who transformed a democracy into illiberal one-man rule, is the president-elect's best foreign friend.
by Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Of all the overseas leaders avidly watching the U.S. election results, the two happiest were probably Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. As we peer into a murky domestic and foreign policy future under a 47th president who yearns to rule as a strongman, it’s important to understand what this means.
Putin and Orban clearly top Donald Trump’s best foreign friends list, and they know it. The GOP’s election victor leaves no doubts, with his constant praise for and pursuit of the Russian dictator and the anti-democratic Hungarian. It is these two, not the British, French, or German allies, whose modus operandi fascinates our next president. Putin is admired for his macho and brutal toughness, but Orban is the domestic role model. Trump’s choice of best foreign friends offers a stark preview of how he aims to govern for the next four years.
Of course, the president-elect’s long-standing attraction to Putin is endlessly documented. And it continues, despite the Russian dictator’s open disdain for the United States and desire to undermine our country.
But that attraction will be even more dangerous to U.S. national security in a second Trump term. In their side-by-side news conference in Helsinki in 2018, Trump infamously said he trusted the Russian leader more than U.S. intelligence agencies. That means come January, we will have an enormous security threat sitting in the Oval Office — an ill-informed president inclined to believe a murderous Russian dictator and ignore U.S. intel warnings about Putin’s intentions.
In his first term, Trump was surrounded by a foreign policy team of “grown-ups,” including Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who could restrain his pro-Russian leanings. But those grown-ups are gone, and the president-elect looks likely to appoint sycophants and conspiracy theorists to top foreign policy positions. Chances are high that he will purge the FBI and CIA of those he believes are disloyal to him (which no doubt includes those who appreciate the Russian danger).
Even worse, Trump believes that “peace through strength” means he alone can make foreign policy via his friendships with dictators. That approach was a loser with North Korea and Iran, who bulked up their arsenal of nuclear matériel, bombs and long-range missiles after Trump’s failed first-term efforts at personal diplomacy. Trump’s buddy Putin is now helping both countries develop their weapons systems further.
Trump has reportedly had as many as seven private phone calls with the Russian leader since stepping down in 2020. No doubt they were discussing Trump’s pledge to resolve the Ukraine conflict in 24 hours before even being sworn in. Yet, there is no way — I repeat, no way — Trump can do such a deal without surrendering to Putin’s terms, which will mean ending Ukraine’s independence and delivering it to Russian domination. Moreover, Putin is fully aware of Trump’s susceptibility to flattery, which the former KGB colonel will freely exploit.
Trump shows no signs he realizes the weakness that surrendering Ukraine to Putin will signal globally. Rather than build respect for Trump’s strength, this betrayal would convince Beijing that the president is prepared to surrender Taiwan. Meantime, NATO would be wounded, perhaps fatally, by a Trump capitulation to a major adversary, which, in turn, would encourage China, Iran and North Korea to do their worst.
Many observers believe the only explanation for Trump’s affinity for Putin must be that Russian security services have compromising material on him. To the contrary, I believe that affinity has grown out of Trump’s admiration for the Russian dictator’s macho persona — and ability to rule without being pestered by legislators, the press, demonstrations, or any curbs on his power. Never mind if Putin has his opponents poisoned or sent to Siberia (questioned on this, Trump once said, “We’ve got a lot of killers, too”).
Add to the gift bag for Putin the admiration of MAGA conservatives and Trump acolytes, such as Steve Bannon, for the Russian leader’s supposed “traditional values.” Of course, Putin’s version of such values means overt hostility to gays, women’s rights, and dark-skinned Russians. It also means hypocritically promoting Russian Orthodox Christianity while massacring Ukrainian Christians and persecuting minority sects at home.
Yet, nothing exemplifies Trump’s fascination with autocrats more clearly than his bromance with Orbán, who has transformed Hungarian democracy into one-man rule. While Trump spars with democratic French, German, and British leaders, he embraces the pro-Putin Orbán. The Hungarian leader, whose country’s population totals under 10 million, has become Trump’s closest political ally in Europe, invited to the White House in 2019 and to Mar-a-Lago in July.
“I look forward to working closely with Prime Minister Orbán once again when I take the oath of office,” Trump said earlier this year, calling the Hungarian leader a “great man.” This despite Orbán’s unsavory reputation inside the European Union due to his antidemocratic behavior and hostility toward Ukraine.
So why the Trump fondness for Orbán? Imitation hopes? The Hungarian has transformed his country’s democratic system by changing electoral laws to ensure only his party can win elections. Meantime, he has managed, legally, to take political control of the courts. As for the press, he had government-friendly oligarchs (think Elon Musk or Trump-cowed Jeff Bezos) buy up 80% of mass media outlets, turning them into Orbán’s propaganda mills. Most Hungarians now hear only what the leader wants them to hear.
Meantime, due to his supposed defense of family values, Orbán has also become the darling of Bannon and CPAC, the prominent Conservative Political Action Conference, a hard right GOP organization that has held three of its annual meetings in Budapest. Uber-conservative U.S. think tanks work with counterpart think tanks in Hungary.
Orbán’s government has targeted asylum-seekers, “Muslim invaders,” nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), LGBTQ people, the remaining independent press, and the independent Central European University, which was forced to exit Hungary. One of Orbán’s main targets is the Hungarian-born U.S. pro-democracy philanthropist George Soros, whom he has attacked endlessly and falsely, in gross antisemitic fashion, as the financial mastermind behind all of Hungary’s ills. (MAGA loyalists hate Soros human rights work as well).
Orbán (and Bannon) want to cement an alliance with all of Europe’s most far-right, nationalistic political parties. and Trump’s support will greatly advance this effort.
Instead of pushing back against the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that is challenging the United States globally, Trump deludes himself that he is a strongman who can win over their rulers via personal diplomacy or punishing tariffs.
Trump’s pursuit of Putin and Orbán leaves no doubt of the kind of ruler he wants to become. Indeed, he declared days before his election that “in many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies.”
Is this really what a majority of Americans voted for?
Perhaps in two years, we will see buyer’s remorse when some Americans who chose Trump for economic reasons realize that promised tariffs leave them poorer. Perhaps they will also realize that Trump’s slogan of peace through strength is more likely to lead to new wars.
Yet, according to a February study by the Pew Research Center, 32% of Americans believe a military regime or an authoritarian leader would be a better way of governing the country. Perhaps they, and many more U.S. voters, are ready to junk the Constitution and hand it all over to a strongman.
How much Trump sucks up to Putin and imitates Orbán early in his tenure — and whether anyone in government or civil society can stop him — will signal to those who still value democracy how much we have to fear.
TRUMP WON, BUT GREEN SHOOTS RISE IN THE ROAD AHEAD
There is still room for resistance against Trump’s excesses. Plus: Biden’s legacy. When words fail.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Despondency is a natural reaction to a nation that seems to have gone off the rails and rejected the very values that have imbued it with greatness. However, there are opportunities and green shoots that may provide a source for resistance — if not counterreaction — against the excesses of the incoming administration.
First, most abortion bans have proved to be absolute failures, political nightmares for their backers and undeniable threats to women’s lives. It is no coincidence that the majority of state measures to preserve or reassert the right to abortion access passed even in a Republican wave. There is now a bipartisan coalition against forced-birth extremism. That political force can be enlisted to retain protections for women’s health and lives and to preserve not only abortion access but also access to IVF and contraception.
Second, although President-elect Donald Trump enters office with a groundswell of support, he is an immediate lame duck. His ambitious and ruthless running mate, Vice President-elect JD Vance, will be seeking to carve his own legacy and garner a base of support distinct from his boss. The conflict between a president desperate for approval and a vice president beholden to extreme ideologues will play out over the next four years. If Trump is less willing to engage in controversial steps that might galvanize a backlash, the differences that arise between Trump and Vance may create opportunities for the opposition.
Third, even in the Trump era, facts are stubborn things. He will have to pass a budget, protect our national security, prevent a recession, guard against a trade war, deal with opposition against his proposed abrogation of civil liberties, contend with irate business leaders who object to extremism and instability, and confront health crises and natural disasters. If he cannot do those basic things, he and his administration will be a failure no matter how strong the rhetoric or how insular the right-wing media. Americans must hold him accountable for the results of his policies and actions.
In his first term, those actions and policies resulted in devastation and depression. That ushered in a resurgence for the Democratic Party. There is little to suggest that the outcome of his second term will be any different. Much will depend on the winner of the House majority, which can either provide a check against his excesses or replay the utter dysfunction that comes with MAGA control. Moreover, the Senate filibuster remains a check against some MAGA schemes — for now.
Finally, America is fortunate to have a federal system in which considerable power and responsibility still reside in states and localities. Superb Democratic governors in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — for instance — can be the incubators of not only good policy but also good leadership. In the years ahead, Democrats should look forward to a new cast of Democratic leaders, including Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, JB Pritzker of Illinois, (newly elected) Josh Stein of North Carolina and Maura Healey of Massachusetts. They will be responsible not only for governing their states but also leading the resistance against federal overreach and repression.
A word about mainstream media outlets is in order. They have lost, and will continue to lose, market share as social media, podcasts and other platforms take their place. They will not regain it by cowering in fear or neglecting their obligation to pursue truth and democracy. There is no right-wing audience anxious for fair, fact-based and balanced news. MAGA Republicans have found their outlets in Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outfits. It is a responsible media’s obligation to hold the powerful accountable and to provide exacting coverage of Trump’s aberrant behavior and authoritarian policies.
The media’s mission is not to remain neutral in a battle between authoritarianism and democracy. It is not to play timekeeper when one candidate lies nonstop. It is to focus on the stakes when America gives way to fascism.
A new media model, perhaps one that is not based on the profit motive and not controlled by oligarchs, is required. The years ahead should be ones of experimentation and diversification. The current model is broken; what replaces it will be critical to the survival of our democracy.
There is still room for resistance against Trump’s excesses. Plus: Biden’s legacy. When words fail.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Despondency is a natural reaction to a nation that seems to have gone off the rails and rejected the very values that have imbued it with greatness. However, there are opportunities and green shoots that may provide a source for resistance — if not counterreaction — against the excesses of the incoming administration.
First, most abortion bans have proved to be absolute failures, political nightmares for their backers and undeniable threats to women’s lives. It is no coincidence that the majority of state measures to preserve or reassert the right to abortion access passed even in a Republican wave. There is now a bipartisan coalition against forced-birth extremism. That political force can be enlisted to retain protections for women’s health and lives and to preserve not only abortion access but also access to IVF and contraception.
Second, although President-elect Donald Trump enters office with a groundswell of support, he is an immediate lame duck. His ambitious and ruthless running mate, Vice President-elect JD Vance, will be seeking to carve his own legacy and garner a base of support distinct from his boss. The conflict between a president desperate for approval and a vice president beholden to extreme ideologues will play out over the next four years. If Trump is less willing to engage in controversial steps that might galvanize a backlash, the differences that arise between Trump and Vance may create opportunities for the opposition.
Third, even in the Trump era, facts are stubborn things. He will have to pass a budget, protect our national security, prevent a recession, guard against a trade war, deal with opposition against his proposed abrogation of civil liberties, contend with irate business leaders who object to extremism and instability, and confront health crises and natural disasters. If he cannot do those basic things, he and his administration will be a failure no matter how strong the rhetoric or how insular the right-wing media. Americans must hold him accountable for the results of his policies and actions.
In his first term, those actions and policies resulted in devastation and depression. That ushered in a resurgence for the Democratic Party. There is little to suggest that the outcome of his second term will be any different. Much will depend on the winner of the House majority, which can either provide a check against his excesses or replay the utter dysfunction that comes with MAGA control. Moreover, the Senate filibuster remains a check against some MAGA schemes — for now.
Finally, America is fortunate to have a federal system in which considerable power and responsibility still reside in states and localities. Superb Democratic governors in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — for instance — can be the incubators of not only good policy but also good leadership. In the years ahead, Democrats should look forward to a new cast of Democratic leaders, including Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, JB Pritzker of Illinois, (newly elected) Josh Stein of North Carolina and Maura Healey of Massachusetts. They will be responsible not only for governing their states but also leading the resistance against federal overreach and repression.
A word about mainstream media outlets is in order. They have lost, and will continue to lose, market share as social media, podcasts and other platforms take their place. They will not regain it by cowering in fear or neglecting their obligation to pursue truth and democracy. There is no right-wing audience anxious for fair, fact-based and balanced news. MAGA Republicans have found their outlets in Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outfits. It is a responsible media’s obligation to hold the powerful accountable and to provide exacting coverage of Trump’s aberrant behavior and authoritarian policies.
The media’s mission is not to remain neutral in a battle between authoritarianism and democracy. It is not to play timekeeper when one candidate lies nonstop. It is to focus on the stakes when America gives way to fascism.
A new media model, perhaps one that is not based on the profit motive and not controlled by oligarchs, is required. The years ahead should be ones of experimentation and diversification. The current model is broken; what replaces it will be critical to the survival of our democracy.
A TUMULTUOUS ELECTION ENDS, AND VOTERS CHOOSE TRUMP’S GRIM VISION OF DISCORD AND RETRIBUTION
For many Trump supporters, the high price of eggs and gasoline mattered more than equal rights, the rule of law, or climate change, let alone four more years of chaos and corruption.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
On Election Day, the majority of Americans rejected Vice President Kamala Harris’ positive proposal to “turn the page” and create an “opportunity economy for all.”
Instead, voters looked in the mirror and decided they wanted a wannabe dictator — warts and all — to lead a democratic republic that has stood for nearly 250 years.
In doing so, they ignored Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, sexual harassment history, two impeachments, a mismanaged pandemic, a deadly insurrection, promises of retribution, unhinged ramblings, and incessant lies.
In one of the most topsy-turvy presidential elections ever, Harris was thrust to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden’s debate struggles raised questions about his age.
Over 100 days, Harris selected a strong running mate in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, raised a record $1 billion, and mounted an upbeat campaign aimed at uniting the country, standing up for women’s rights, lowering health care costs, helping middle-class families, and calling out the dangers of Trump’s return to power.
Many polls indicated a close race. Strong early voting and Election Day lines in Philadelphia and on college campuses seemed to bode well for Democrats. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and party boss Bob Brady boasted about turnout not seen in 60 years.
But in the end, they oversold and underdelivered as Trump added to his base of white male voters and even attracted more Black and Latino voters in Pennsylvania and other key battleground states — despite his history of racism and threats to deport millions of immigrants.
For many Trump supporters, the high price of eggs and gasoline mattered more than equal rights, the rule of law, or climate change, let alone four more years of chaos and corruption. For others, the thought of a Black and South Asian woman as commander in chief was a bridge too far — proving once again that systemic racism and sexism are hardwired into the American Experiment that began with the still unfulfilled promise that all are created equal.
For some, it was the broken immigration system that both parties have long failed to fix. For others, it was the war in Gaza or America’s support of Ukraine. Still, for others, it was a fear of transgender teens and books about sexuality. These real and perceived issues are the reality in the divided states of America. Democrats must do more to win back voters than be the loyal opposition.
For all of his many faults, Trump is keenly attuned to the worst instincts of many Americans. His chaotic campaign was a toxic stew of racism, misogyny, hate, and fear of the other. Indeed, Trump provided a big tent for prejudices. Despite being an entitled billionaire, he convinced supporters his criminal prosecutions were persecutions. Trump used a list of beefs to bulldoze past a mountain of personal legal trouble and back into the Oval Office.
Trump was aided by a sharp divide in where voters get their news and information and a Republican Party that bows to his command. Fox News, other far-right sites, and social media channels hammer away daily at high prices, imaginary migrant crime, and exaggerated liberal overreach.
For example, the majority of voters said the economy was the reason they backed Trump. But they ignored or are unaware that under the Biden-Harris administration, a record 16 million new jobs have been created, the stock market is at an all-time high, wages have increased, interest rates are dropping, and inflation has essentially disappeared.
Yes, prices remain high. But the spike in prices was brought on by supply-chain issues coming out of a pandemic that impacted the globe. Government spending added to inflation but also avoided a prolonged recession or worse. Indeed, the American economy bounced back quicker and stronger than any developed country in Europe and Asia and is considered the envy of the world.
It remains to be seen if Trump voters will eventually have buyer’s remorse. Economists have warned that Trump’s plans for large tax cuts aimed at the super-wealthy and steep tariffs on foreign goods will reignite inflation, balloon the federal deficit, and lead to layoffs.
More troubling is what will become of the vaunted American democracy and its system of checks and balances. Trump ignored the norms and laws during his last term in office. Now he may have unchecked power.
The GOP won control of the Senate and may retain control of the House. The U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with three conservative Trump appointees, recently granted presidents broad immunity powers, essentially placing them above the law. Trump, 78, has already threatened retribution and to be a dictator on Day One. He discussed rooting out the enemy within, jailing political foes, and silencing the media — all classic strongman tactics.
During his previous term, Trump cycled through administration officials, but nearly all of them worked to steer him away from his most extreme instincts like shooting protesters and bombing drug cartels in Mexico. But Trump is now surrounded by a slapdash crew of sycophants and conspiracy theorists. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading public health has the potential to be a superspreader of misinformation and disease.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of the social media platform X, helped lead Trump’s disinformation campaign. His extensive government contracts and regular contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin are a national security risk.
Trump promised to put Musk in charge of a newly created cabinet-level role of finding government efficiency. Musk promised to slash government spending by at least $2 trillion, or roughly one-third of the annual outlay. That would put nearly everything on the chopping block, including Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending. Musk acknowledged the cuts would cause “temporary hardship.” That’s easy for a billionaire to take, but millions of other citizens could be harmed.
Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and other grifters and loyalists will be looking to make mischief, as well. Of course, Project 2025, if implemented, will bring a wrecking ball to government institutions.
American allies — especially the European Union — may be on their own. The same goes for Ukraine. Perhaps the biggest winner in this election besides Trump is Russia’s Putin.
Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, freedom, justice, and equality must work to preserve the rights and ideals set out by the founders.
Scores of prominent Republicans crossed party lines and endorsed Harris, as did a number of officials who worked in the Trump administration, including retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump. Milley warned that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”
What have we wrought?
For many Trump supporters, the high price of eggs and gasoline mattered more than equal rights, the rule of law, or climate change, let alone four more years of chaos and corruption.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
On Election Day, the majority of Americans rejected Vice President Kamala Harris’ positive proposal to “turn the page” and create an “opportunity economy for all.”
Instead, voters looked in the mirror and decided they wanted a wannabe dictator — warts and all — to lead a democratic republic that has stood for nearly 250 years.
In doing so, they ignored Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, sexual harassment history, two impeachments, a mismanaged pandemic, a deadly insurrection, promises of retribution, unhinged ramblings, and incessant lies.
In one of the most topsy-turvy presidential elections ever, Harris was thrust to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden’s debate struggles raised questions about his age.
Over 100 days, Harris selected a strong running mate in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, raised a record $1 billion, and mounted an upbeat campaign aimed at uniting the country, standing up for women’s rights, lowering health care costs, helping middle-class families, and calling out the dangers of Trump’s return to power.
Many polls indicated a close race. Strong early voting and Election Day lines in Philadelphia and on college campuses seemed to bode well for Democrats. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and party boss Bob Brady boasted about turnout not seen in 60 years.
But in the end, they oversold and underdelivered as Trump added to his base of white male voters and even attracted more Black and Latino voters in Pennsylvania and other key battleground states — despite his history of racism and threats to deport millions of immigrants.
For many Trump supporters, the high price of eggs and gasoline mattered more than equal rights, the rule of law, or climate change, let alone four more years of chaos and corruption. For others, the thought of a Black and South Asian woman as commander in chief was a bridge too far — proving once again that systemic racism and sexism are hardwired into the American Experiment that began with the still unfulfilled promise that all are created equal.
For some, it was the broken immigration system that both parties have long failed to fix. For others, it was the war in Gaza or America’s support of Ukraine. Still, for others, it was a fear of transgender teens and books about sexuality. These real and perceived issues are the reality in the divided states of America. Democrats must do more to win back voters than be the loyal opposition.
For all of his many faults, Trump is keenly attuned to the worst instincts of many Americans. His chaotic campaign was a toxic stew of racism, misogyny, hate, and fear of the other. Indeed, Trump provided a big tent for prejudices. Despite being an entitled billionaire, he convinced supporters his criminal prosecutions were persecutions. Trump used a list of beefs to bulldoze past a mountain of personal legal trouble and back into the Oval Office.
Trump was aided by a sharp divide in where voters get their news and information and a Republican Party that bows to his command. Fox News, other far-right sites, and social media channels hammer away daily at high prices, imaginary migrant crime, and exaggerated liberal overreach.
For example, the majority of voters said the economy was the reason they backed Trump. But they ignored or are unaware that under the Biden-Harris administration, a record 16 million new jobs have been created, the stock market is at an all-time high, wages have increased, interest rates are dropping, and inflation has essentially disappeared.
Yes, prices remain high. But the spike in prices was brought on by supply-chain issues coming out of a pandemic that impacted the globe. Government spending added to inflation but also avoided a prolonged recession or worse. Indeed, the American economy bounced back quicker and stronger than any developed country in Europe and Asia and is considered the envy of the world.
It remains to be seen if Trump voters will eventually have buyer’s remorse. Economists have warned that Trump’s plans for large tax cuts aimed at the super-wealthy and steep tariffs on foreign goods will reignite inflation, balloon the federal deficit, and lead to layoffs.
More troubling is what will become of the vaunted American democracy and its system of checks and balances. Trump ignored the norms and laws during his last term in office. Now he may have unchecked power.
The GOP won control of the Senate and may retain control of the House. The U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with three conservative Trump appointees, recently granted presidents broad immunity powers, essentially placing them above the law. Trump, 78, has already threatened retribution and to be a dictator on Day One. He discussed rooting out the enemy within, jailing political foes, and silencing the media — all classic strongman tactics.
During his previous term, Trump cycled through administration officials, but nearly all of them worked to steer him away from his most extreme instincts like shooting protesters and bombing drug cartels in Mexico. But Trump is now surrounded by a slapdash crew of sycophants and conspiracy theorists. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading public health has the potential to be a superspreader of misinformation and disease.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of the social media platform X, helped lead Trump’s disinformation campaign. His extensive government contracts and regular contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin are a national security risk.
Trump promised to put Musk in charge of a newly created cabinet-level role of finding government efficiency. Musk promised to slash government spending by at least $2 trillion, or roughly one-third of the annual outlay. That would put nearly everything on the chopping block, including Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending. Musk acknowledged the cuts would cause “temporary hardship.” That’s easy for a billionaire to take, but millions of other citizens could be harmed.
Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and other grifters and loyalists will be looking to make mischief, as well. Of course, Project 2025, if implemented, will bring a wrecking ball to government institutions.
American allies — especially the European Union — may be on their own. The same goes for Ukraine. Perhaps the biggest winner in this election besides Trump is Russia’s Putin.
Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, freedom, justice, and equality must work to preserve the rights and ideals set out by the founders.
Scores of prominent Republicans crossed party lines and endorsed Harris, as did a number of officials who worked in the Trump administration, including retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump. Milley warned that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”
What have we wrought?
A ‘REPUBLIC IF WE CAN KEEP IT.’ PERHAPS WE CANNOT.
In this election, Americans have no one to blame but themselves.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Americans have no one to blame but themselves. Felon and President-elect Donald Trump did not conceal who he was. He did not hide his racism, misogyny, willful ignorance, cruelty or contempt for democracy. At some point, we must acknowledge that our fellow Americans voted for him because of those qualities, not despite them. How did it come to this?
We cannot attribute the defeat for democracy to tough economic times. President Joe Biden leaves a booming economy with wages outpacing inflation, manufacturing undergoing a renaissance and low unemployment.
We cannot attribute the loss to a defective Democratic campaign, intraparty infighting, lack of enthusiasm or a poor candidate. Vice President Kamala Harris did everything asked of her and more. She put in the long hours, produced an uplifting convention, delivered a smashing debate performance and drew in Republicans.
The media, it must be said, did not fulfill its role in educating the public and advancing truth as their primary objective. Refusal to explore Trump’s manifest defects and place him and his movement in the context of fascist strongmen and their cults had the effect of normalizing and legitimizing a candidate utterly unfit for office. But the facts nevertheless were there for anyone who cared to look. At some point, voters are responsible for their own decisions.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s failure to swiftly and aggressively prosecute Trump will go down as one of the most devastating legal blunders in history. Had Trump been promptly indicted, appeals could have been resolved and a verdict obtained months if not years ago. Garland was the wrong man for the job at a critical time. Rather than face accountability for his crime against democracy, Trump saw himself rewarded. And still, his role in the attempted coup was no secret. Americans simply refused to consider it disqualifying. They think that little of our democracy.
We return to the sad reality that for too many Americans, a strongman holds appeal. A multiracial democracy is threatening. Conspiracies seem more real than reality. Moreover, we need to acknowledge that a female president is a bridge too far for millions of voters. Trump’s whether-they-like-it-or-not attitude toward women resonates with many voters who resent their advancement and autonomy.
In sum, when a country deliberately rejects decency, truth, democratic values and good governance, the problem is not a candidate, a party, the media or a feckless attorney general. Democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires a virtuous people devoted to democratic ideals. Whether we can recover the habits of mind — what we used to call civic virtue — will be the challenge of the next four years and beyond.
In the meantime, Ukraine’s existence is imperiled and democratic movements and governments around the globe have suffered a blow. The last, great hope of mankind is AWOL.
In this election, Americans have no one to blame but themselves.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Americans have no one to blame but themselves. Felon and President-elect Donald Trump did not conceal who he was. He did not hide his racism, misogyny, willful ignorance, cruelty or contempt for democracy. At some point, we must acknowledge that our fellow Americans voted for him because of those qualities, not despite them. How did it come to this?
We cannot attribute the defeat for democracy to tough economic times. President Joe Biden leaves a booming economy with wages outpacing inflation, manufacturing undergoing a renaissance and low unemployment.
We cannot attribute the loss to a defective Democratic campaign, intraparty infighting, lack of enthusiasm or a poor candidate. Vice President Kamala Harris did everything asked of her and more. She put in the long hours, produced an uplifting convention, delivered a smashing debate performance and drew in Republicans.
The media, it must be said, did not fulfill its role in educating the public and advancing truth as their primary objective. Refusal to explore Trump’s manifest defects and place him and his movement in the context of fascist strongmen and their cults had the effect of normalizing and legitimizing a candidate utterly unfit for office. But the facts nevertheless were there for anyone who cared to look. At some point, voters are responsible for their own decisions.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s failure to swiftly and aggressively prosecute Trump will go down as one of the most devastating legal blunders in history. Had Trump been promptly indicted, appeals could have been resolved and a verdict obtained months if not years ago. Garland was the wrong man for the job at a critical time. Rather than face accountability for his crime against democracy, Trump saw himself rewarded. And still, his role in the attempted coup was no secret. Americans simply refused to consider it disqualifying. They think that little of our democracy.
We return to the sad reality that for too many Americans, a strongman holds appeal. A multiracial democracy is threatening. Conspiracies seem more real than reality. Moreover, we need to acknowledge that a female president is a bridge too far for millions of voters. Trump’s whether-they-like-it-or-not attitude toward women resonates with many voters who resent their advancement and autonomy.
In sum, when a country deliberately rejects decency, truth, democratic values and good governance, the problem is not a candidate, a party, the media or a feckless attorney general. Democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires a virtuous people devoted to democratic ideals. Whether we can recover the habits of mind — what we used to call civic virtue — will be the challenge of the next four years and beyond.
In the meantime, Ukraine’s existence is imperiled and democratic movements and governments around the globe have suffered a blow. The last, great hope of mankind is AWOL.
BE HONEST, AMERICA. THIS IS WHO WE ARE: A BITTER, BROKEN LAND THAT WANTS TRUMP TO LEAD US.
We've been living in a delusional dream state. Donald Trump's big victory is a reality slap: this is what America has become.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s been a rallying cry for years — when the horrifying sight of white supremacists marching with their tiki torches through Charlottesville, Va., prompted Joe Biden to unretire and run for president, when we watched federal agents yank little kids from their mothers at the southern border, and finally when a mob of insurrectionists overran the U.S. Capitol in an attempted coup seeking to break a 231-year chain of peacefully transferring power.
“This is not who we are, America.” But that was never true, and as I write this sentence in the dark at 5:38 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2024 — and as CNN just pronounced that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, literally as I was typing it — that cold, predawn dose of reality has just slapped America in the face, hard.
The irony is that yesterday, Nov. 5 — another date that will live in infamy — played out on a canvas that practically looked like a Norman Rockwell painting of America. It happened on an unseasonably warm and beautiful autumn day as citizens of every stripe, from college students at Temple University who snaked around gritty North Philadelphia blocks to seniors tugging their grandkids into musty school gym polling places, performed the ultimate act of democracy and voted in what by all accounts was a free and fair election.
It was only 46 months after Trump, as 45th president, tried to stay in power by overturning the results of the last free and fair presidential election, and by egging on that deadly Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. But on Jan. 20, 2025, barring another unthinkable development in a year that has already been chock full of them, Trump — promising “I will be your retribution” against political enemies — will achieve his goal of returning to the White House, not through bullets but through ballots.
Trump will raise his right hand and promise to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution because all the right voters in the right battleground states — and quite possibly a popular vote majority when all the ballots are finally counted — inked their square for a man under both a federal and a Georgia criminal indictment for interfering in the 2020 election, and who was convicted just this year of 34 felony charges in an election-related hush-money scheme.
The 78-year-old three-time Republican nominee won Tuesday, in part, because he dramatically increased his share of the critical Latino vote, and may have even won a majority of Latino men — even after his campaign’s notorious Madison Square Garden rally featuring a comedian whose calling Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage” wasn’t even his worst joke about Hispanics, and even after Trump branded migrants from Central America as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of America.
And for the third straight election, exit polls suggested that Trump also won a majority of white women, even after he was adjudicated the rapist of E. Jean Carroll by a Manhattan jury, after the infamous Access Hollywood braggadocio-on-tape of sexually assaulting women resurfaced as a TikTok meme, and after claiming from the campaign trail that he will protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
After a frantic final month of the 2024 campaign, in which Trump simulated oral sex with a microphone from the rally stage, told his supporters a story about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, swayed awkwardly on a stage in the Philly suburbs to canned music for 39 uncomfortable minutes, and found some time to hawk cryptocurrency, America chose this man — from a nation of 336 million people — as the one to carry the nuclear football.
Not because U.S. democracy failed — although, make no mistake, a Trump presidency will find many ways to stress and possibly break the American Experiment that was hatched here in Philadelphia 248 years ago — but because it worked. We woke up to a president-elect who ran a campaign that was openly misogynistic and racist, who threatened to use the military against his domestic political enemies, and who terrorized our transgender and immigrant communities — because it was the will of the American people.
Because this is who we are.
America’ pretended not to notice that an elite gaggle of the richest men in the history of human civilization has been gradually buying control of Congress through unlimited campaign contributions, by buying influence with the U.S. Supreme Court justices who allowed that flood of political money to happen, and by buying our social media sites and our legacy newsrooms to control the flow of information about this.
On Tuesday, those billionaires — led by Musk, the richest of them all — did their part to install an authoritarian strongman in charge of the United States, because they believe that will make their life easier. But despite their endless piles of cash, that wouldn’t have worked if America were not a bitter and broken nation, worn down by the systemic dismantling of the middle class (which is what voters really mean by “the economy”).
Some folks don’t want to hear this, but the Harris campaign could have knocked on 70 million doors this weekend and it wouldn’t have mattered. Quibble all you want about whether the Harris campaign leaned too hard on Liz Cheney, or should have spoken out on Gaza, or whether the editors of the New York Times should have more aggressively covered the threat to democracy, or whether the Washington Post should have published that endorsement, but none of that would have changed the outcome Tuesday.
Harris told the nation in her so-called closing argument on the Washington, D.C., Ellipse that “those who came before us, the patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms.” But Trump’s message spoke silently to the other America — the America of Colfax, La., Tulsa, Okla., Kent State, and Ferguson, Mo., that has never gone away, that is bearing us ceaselessly back into the past. Because while Trump doesn’t know much about history or climatology, he does instinctively understand that this is who we are.
And so the United States is following the path of Germany in the 1930s or Hungary in the 21st century and turning to a strongman ruler through a democratic, constitutional process. But what about the millions of us who still dream of a better America, who don’t want the story to end here? Looking out my window, the sun did rise — brightly, in fact — this morning. Take a moment to grieve what has happened to our nation, and then let’s not delay the conversation on what comes next.
I’d strongly recommend against protesting Trump’s inauguration or (heaven forbid) on Jan. 6 or anything like that. We asked for a democratic election, got one, and this was the result. But that doesn’t give the 47th president the right to violate the Constitution or commit illegal or immoral acts, and when those happen — and they will — they should be resisted by any and all means. We need to build both a culture of democratic resistance and also a new political movement that provides a true alternative to Trump’s reactionary autocracy, and we need to start quickly.
We need to remember what Winston Churchill — a man every bit as complicated and deeply flawed as the America of his own mother — told Britain during its darkest hour: that now is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
We've been living in a delusional dream state. Donald Trump's big victory is a reality slap: this is what America has become.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s been a rallying cry for years — when the horrifying sight of white supremacists marching with their tiki torches through Charlottesville, Va., prompted Joe Biden to unretire and run for president, when we watched federal agents yank little kids from their mothers at the southern border, and finally when a mob of insurrectionists overran the U.S. Capitol in an attempted coup seeking to break a 231-year chain of peacefully transferring power.
“This is not who we are, America.” But that was never true, and as I write this sentence in the dark at 5:38 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2024 — and as CNN just pronounced that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States, literally as I was typing it — that cold, predawn dose of reality has just slapped America in the face, hard.
The irony is that yesterday, Nov. 5 — another date that will live in infamy — played out on a canvas that practically looked like a Norman Rockwell painting of America. It happened on an unseasonably warm and beautiful autumn day as citizens of every stripe, from college students at Temple University who snaked around gritty North Philadelphia blocks to seniors tugging their grandkids into musty school gym polling places, performed the ultimate act of democracy and voted in what by all accounts was a free and fair election.
It was only 46 months after Trump, as 45th president, tried to stay in power by overturning the results of the last free and fair presidential election, and by egging on that deadly Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. But on Jan. 20, 2025, barring another unthinkable development in a year that has already been chock full of them, Trump — promising “I will be your retribution” against political enemies — will achieve his goal of returning to the White House, not through bullets but through ballots.
Trump will raise his right hand and promise to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution because all the right voters in the right battleground states — and quite possibly a popular vote majority when all the ballots are finally counted — inked their square for a man under both a federal and a Georgia criminal indictment for interfering in the 2020 election, and who was convicted just this year of 34 felony charges in an election-related hush-money scheme.
The 78-year-old three-time Republican nominee won Tuesday, in part, because he dramatically increased his share of the critical Latino vote, and may have even won a majority of Latino men — even after his campaign’s notorious Madison Square Garden rally featuring a comedian whose calling Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage” wasn’t even his worst joke about Hispanics, and even after Trump branded migrants from Central America as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of America.
And for the third straight election, exit polls suggested that Trump also won a majority of white women, even after he was adjudicated the rapist of E. Jean Carroll by a Manhattan jury, after the infamous Access Hollywood braggadocio-on-tape of sexually assaulting women resurfaced as a TikTok meme, and after claiming from the campaign trail that he will protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
After a frantic final month of the 2024 campaign, in which Trump simulated oral sex with a microphone from the rally stage, told his supporters a story about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, swayed awkwardly on a stage in the Philly suburbs to canned music for 39 uncomfortable minutes, and found some time to hawk cryptocurrency, America chose this man — from a nation of 336 million people — as the one to carry the nuclear football.
Not because U.S. democracy failed — although, make no mistake, a Trump presidency will find many ways to stress and possibly break the American Experiment that was hatched here in Philadelphia 248 years ago — but because it worked. We woke up to a president-elect who ran a campaign that was openly misogynistic and racist, who threatened to use the military against his domestic political enemies, and who terrorized our transgender and immigrant communities — because it was the will of the American people.
Because this is who we are.
America’ pretended not to notice that an elite gaggle of the richest men in the history of human civilization has been gradually buying control of Congress through unlimited campaign contributions, by buying influence with the U.S. Supreme Court justices who allowed that flood of political money to happen, and by buying our social media sites and our legacy newsrooms to control the flow of information about this.
On Tuesday, those billionaires — led by Musk, the richest of them all — did their part to install an authoritarian strongman in charge of the United States, because they believe that will make their life easier. But despite their endless piles of cash, that wouldn’t have worked if America were not a bitter and broken nation, worn down by the systemic dismantling of the middle class (which is what voters really mean by “the economy”).
Some folks don’t want to hear this, but the Harris campaign could have knocked on 70 million doors this weekend and it wouldn’t have mattered. Quibble all you want about whether the Harris campaign leaned too hard on Liz Cheney, or should have spoken out on Gaza, or whether the editors of the New York Times should have more aggressively covered the threat to democracy, or whether the Washington Post should have published that endorsement, but none of that would have changed the outcome Tuesday.
Harris told the nation in her so-called closing argument on the Washington, D.C., Ellipse that “those who came before us, the patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms.” But Trump’s message spoke silently to the other America — the America of Colfax, La., Tulsa, Okla., Kent State, and Ferguson, Mo., that has never gone away, that is bearing us ceaselessly back into the past. Because while Trump doesn’t know much about history or climatology, he does instinctively understand that this is who we are.
And so the United States is following the path of Germany in the 1930s or Hungary in the 21st century and turning to a strongman ruler through a democratic, constitutional process. But what about the millions of us who still dream of a better America, who don’t want the story to end here? Looking out my window, the sun did rise — brightly, in fact — this morning. Take a moment to grieve what has happened to our nation, and then let’s not delay the conversation on what comes next.
I’d strongly recommend against protesting Trump’s inauguration or (heaven forbid) on Jan. 6 or anything like that. We asked for a democratic election, got one, and this was the result. But that doesn’t give the 47th president the right to violate the Constitution or commit illegal or immoral acts, and when those happen — and they will — they should be resisted by any and all means. We need to build both a culture of democratic resistance and also a new political movement that provides a true alternative to Trump’s reactionary autocracy, and we need to start quickly.
We need to remember what Winston Churchill — a man every bit as complicated and deeply flawed as the America of his own mother — told Britain during its darkest hour: that now is not the end or even the beginning of the end, but, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
AMERICA MAKES A PERILOUS CHOICE
By The New York Times Editorial Board
American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee.
The founders of this country recognized the possibility that voters might someday elect an authoritarian leader and wrote safeguards into the Constitution, including powers granted to two other branches of government designed to be a check on a president who would bend and break laws to serve his own ends. And they enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.
Over the next four years, Americans must be cleareyed about the threat to the nation and its laws that will come from its 47th president and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong.
It can’t be ignored that millions of Americans voted for a candidate even some of his closest supporters acknowledge to be deeply flawed — convinced that he was more likely to change and fix what they regarded as the nation’s urgent problems: high prices, an infusion of immigrants, a porous southern border and economic policies that have flowed unequally through society. Some cast their votes out of a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo, politics or the state of American institutions more broadly.
Whatever drove this decision among these voters, however, all Americans should now be wary of an incoming Trump administration that is likely to put a top priority on amassing unchecked power and punishing its perceived enemies, both of which Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to do. All Americans, regardless of their party or politics, should insist that the fundamental pillars of the nation’s democracy — including constitutional checks and balances, fair-minded federal prosecutors and judges, an impartial election system and basic civil rights — be preserved against an assault that he has already begun and has said he would continue.
At this point, there can be no illusions about who Donald Trump is and how he intends to govern. He showed us in his first term and in the years after he left office that he has no respect for the law, let alone the values, norms and traditions of democracy. As he takes charge of the world’s most powerful state, he is transparently motivated only by the pursuit of power and the preservation of the cult of personality he has built around himself. These stark assessments are striking in part because they are held not just by his critics but also by those who served most closely with him.
We are a nation that has always emerged from a crucible with its ideals intact and often toughened and sharpened. The institutions of our government, hardened by nearly 250 years of disputation, turmoil, assassinations and wars, held firm when Mr. Trump assailed them four years ago. And Americans know how to counter Mr. Trump’s worst instincts — actions that were unjust, immoral or illegal — because they did so, over and over, during his first administration. Civil servants, members of Congress, members of his own party and people he appointed to high office often stood in the way of the former president’s plans, and other institutions of our society, including the free press and independent law enforcement agencies, held him accountable to the public.
Mr. Trump and his movement have all but taken over the Republican Party. Yet it is also important to remember that Mr. Trump can’t run for another term. From the day he enters the White House, he will be, in effect, a lame-duck president. The Constitution limits him to two terms. Congress has the power — and for some ambitious Republicans, perhaps the political incentive — to set a course away from Mr. Trump’s antidemocratic agenda, if it chooses to pursue it.
Governors and legislatures across the nation have spent months shoring up their state laws and Constitutions to protect civil rights and liberties, including access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care. Even states that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, including Kentucky, Ohio and Kansas, have rejected the most extreme positions on abortion. Other institutions of American civil society will play a crucial role in challenging the Trump administration in the courts, in our communities and in the protests that are sure to return.
The rest of the world, too, has no illusions about the leader who will soon again represent the United States on the world stage. The countries of the NATO alliance were shocked, during the first Trump administration, by his willingness to undermine that long and valuable partnership. But European nations, defying Mr. Trump’s predictions, not only came together with the United States in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but also expanded their ranks right up to Russia’s border.
For the Democratic Party, rear-guard action as the political opposition will not be enough. The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election. It took too long to recognize that President Biden was not capable of running for a second term. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system — which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.
The test for members of this new Congress will begin soon after they take their oath. The president-elect has promised to surround himself in his second term with enablers prepared to pledge loyalty to him, who will be willing to do whatever he commands. But a president needs the Senate to approve many of those appointments. Senators can stop the most extreme or unqualified candidates from taking cabinet positions like defense secretary and attorney general, as well as seats on the Supreme Court and the federal bench. They can act to keep clearly unfit candidates from holding any powerful position. The Senate did that in 2020, when it blocked Mr. Trump’s attempts to seat unqualified people on the board of the Federal Reserve, and the chamber should not hesitate to do so again.
Perhaps the most important responsibility lies with all of those who will serve in a second Trump administration. Those he appoints as attorney general, as secretary of defense and to other top leadership roles should expect that he may ask them to carry out illegal acts or violate their oaths to the Constitution on his behalf, as he did in his first term. We urge them to recognize that whatever pledge of loyalty he may demand, their first loyalty is to their country. Standing up to Mr. Trump is possible, and it is the duty of every American public servant when appropriate.
But the final responsibility for ensuring the continuity of America’s enduring values lies with its voters. Those who supported Mr. Trump in this election should closely observe his conduct in office to see if it matches their hopes and expectations, and if it does not, they should make their disappointment known and cast votes in the 2026 midterms and in 2028 to put the country back on course. Those who opposed him should not hesitate to raise alarms when he abuses his power, and if he attempts to use government power to retaliate against critics, the world will be watching.
Benjamin Franklin famously admonished the American people that the nation was “a republic, if you can keep it.” Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat to that republic, but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy. That outcome remains in the hands of the American people. It is the work of the next four years.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
American voters have made the choice to return Donald Trump to the White House, setting the nation on a precarious course that no one can fully foresee.
The founders of this country recognized the possibility that voters might someday elect an authoritarian leader and wrote safeguards into the Constitution, including powers granted to two other branches of government designed to be a check on a president who would bend and break laws to serve his own ends. And they enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.
Over the next four years, Americans must be cleareyed about the threat to the nation and its laws that will come from its 47th president and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong.
It can’t be ignored that millions of Americans voted for a candidate even some of his closest supporters acknowledge to be deeply flawed — convinced that he was more likely to change and fix what they regarded as the nation’s urgent problems: high prices, an infusion of immigrants, a porous southern border and economic policies that have flowed unequally through society. Some cast their votes out of a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo, politics or the state of American institutions more broadly.
Whatever drove this decision among these voters, however, all Americans should now be wary of an incoming Trump administration that is likely to put a top priority on amassing unchecked power and punishing its perceived enemies, both of which Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to do. All Americans, regardless of their party or politics, should insist that the fundamental pillars of the nation’s democracy — including constitutional checks and balances, fair-minded federal prosecutors and judges, an impartial election system and basic civil rights — be preserved against an assault that he has already begun and has said he would continue.
At this point, there can be no illusions about who Donald Trump is and how he intends to govern. He showed us in his first term and in the years after he left office that he has no respect for the law, let alone the values, norms and traditions of democracy. As he takes charge of the world’s most powerful state, he is transparently motivated only by the pursuit of power and the preservation of the cult of personality he has built around himself. These stark assessments are striking in part because they are held not just by his critics but also by those who served most closely with him.
We are a nation that has always emerged from a crucible with its ideals intact and often toughened and sharpened. The institutions of our government, hardened by nearly 250 years of disputation, turmoil, assassinations and wars, held firm when Mr. Trump assailed them four years ago. And Americans know how to counter Mr. Trump’s worst instincts — actions that were unjust, immoral or illegal — because they did so, over and over, during his first administration. Civil servants, members of Congress, members of his own party and people he appointed to high office often stood in the way of the former president’s plans, and other institutions of our society, including the free press and independent law enforcement agencies, held him accountable to the public.
Mr. Trump and his movement have all but taken over the Republican Party. Yet it is also important to remember that Mr. Trump can’t run for another term. From the day he enters the White House, he will be, in effect, a lame-duck president. The Constitution limits him to two terms. Congress has the power — and for some ambitious Republicans, perhaps the political incentive — to set a course away from Mr. Trump’s antidemocratic agenda, if it chooses to pursue it.
Governors and legislatures across the nation have spent months shoring up their state laws and Constitutions to protect civil rights and liberties, including access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care. Even states that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, including Kentucky, Ohio and Kansas, have rejected the most extreme positions on abortion. Other institutions of American civil society will play a crucial role in challenging the Trump administration in the courts, in our communities and in the protests that are sure to return.
The rest of the world, too, has no illusions about the leader who will soon again represent the United States on the world stage. The countries of the NATO alliance were shocked, during the first Trump administration, by his willingness to undermine that long and valuable partnership. But European nations, defying Mr. Trump’s predictions, not only came together with the United States in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but also expanded their ranks right up to Russia’s border.
For the Democratic Party, rear-guard action as the political opposition will not be enough. The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election. It took too long to recognize that President Biden was not capable of running for a second term. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system — which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.
The test for members of this new Congress will begin soon after they take their oath. The president-elect has promised to surround himself in his second term with enablers prepared to pledge loyalty to him, who will be willing to do whatever he commands. But a president needs the Senate to approve many of those appointments. Senators can stop the most extreme or unqualified candidates from taking cabinet positions like defense secretary and attorney general, as well as seats on the Supreme Court and the federal bench. They can act to keep clearly unfit candidates from holding any powerful position. The Senate did that in 2020, when it blocked Mr. Trump’s attempts to seat unqualified people on the board of the Federal Reserve, and the chamber should not hesitate to do so again.
Perhaps the most important responsibility lies with all of those who will serve in a second Trump administration. Those he appoints as attorney general, as secretary of defense and to other top leadership roles should expect that he may ask them to carry out illegal acts or violate their oaths to the Constitution on his behalf, as he did in his first term. We urge them to recognize that whatever pledge of loyalty he may demand, their first loyalty is to their country. Standing up to Mr. Trump is possible, and it is the duty of every American public servant when appropriate.
But the final responsibility for ensuring the continuity of America’s enduring values lies with its voters. Those who supported Mr. Trump in this election should closely observe his conduct in office to see if it matches their hopes and expectations, and if it does not, they should make their disappointment known and cast votes in the 2026 midterms and in 2028 to put the country back on course. Those who opposed him should not hesitate to raise alarms when he abuses his power, and if he attempts to use government power to retaliate against critics, the world will be watching.
Benjamin Franklin famously admonished the American people that the nation was “a republic, if you can keep it.” Mr. Trump’s election poses a grave threat to that republic, but he will not determine the long-term fate of American democracy. That outcome remains in the hands of the American people. It is the work of the next four years.
AMERICA HIRES A STRONGMAN
This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.
By Lisa Lerer, The New York Times
Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do. He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters. He would be a “dictator” — if only on Day 1.
And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes. This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.
After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, who would have become the first female U.S. president, Mr. Trump will bring his own historic firsts into the White House: the only president convicted of dozens of crimes, accused of dozens more and twice impeached.
Unlike in 2016, when he scored a surprise electoral victory but lost the popular vote, Mr. Trump will go to Washington able to claim a broad mandate. Over his four years out of power, he rebuilt the Republican Party in his image, creating a movement that only seemed to strengthen with every recrimination. He will begin his second term bound by few political norms, after a campaign in which he seemed to defy every one.
He did well in the battleground states, winning at least four of the seven, and appeared on track to win the popular vote — the first time a Republican candidate has done that since George W. Bush in 2004. His party flipped the Senate, and was in range of maintaining control of the House of Representatives. Blue areas shifted toward him, with Mr. Trump improving his performance in places like New York City by double digits. So did suburbs, rural areas, even college towns.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Mr. Trump told cheering supporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., for a victory party before the result was official. “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.” That mandate came not just from the American people, he said. “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” he said. “That reason was to save our country.”
His victory was a direct repudiation of some top aides, military brass and Republican officials who served in his first administration. They had publicly warned that he would not save the nation but destroy it.
In the wake of the pandemic, which critics said his administration badly mismanaged, the country grew more skeptical of government. Trust in the media, science, medicine, the judicial system and other mainstay institutions of American life plunged as more voters embraced the doubts Mr. Trump had sown for years.
Public opinion shifted in his direction on issues that had long been the centerpiece of his political movement. Even Democrats embraced stricter policies on immigration and crime in the 2024 race, underscoring how much his relentless focus on the border had resonated.
After his defeat, Mr. Trump spent four years tightening his grip on the Republican Party, to the point where both lawmakers and voters professed to believe his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The number of Americans identifying as Republican edged ahead of Democrats for the first time in decades.
Even the value of democracy itself was in question. In a poll conducted by The New York Times/Siena College last week, nearly half of all voters said they were skeptical that the American experiment in self-governance was working, with 45 percent saying that the nation’s democracy does not do a good job representing ordinary people.
Poll after poll showed that the economy remained the biggest issue, followed by immigration and frustration over the rising prices of groceries and housing. Mr. Trump ran hard on pledges to lower costs and seal the southern border, while offering ideas to eliminate entire categories of taxation, playing on economic anxieties to broaden his coalition.
But those economic promises were interwoven with a steadfast refusal to moderate his message. Unleashing a fire hose of insults and conspiracies, Mr. Trump gambled that a nation unmoored by a deadly pandemic and soaring inflation, and deeply dissatisfied with the incumbent who had defeated him, would be ready to re-embrace him as a blunt-speaking, menacing strongman who would fix it.
Rather than abandon his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, he leaned further into them. In Mr. Trump’s revisionist history, those convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, became “political prisoners.” The siege, which killed at least seven people and injured 150 more, was recast as a “day of love.”
Instead of softening the crude rhetoric that has long been one of his hallmarks, he became more obscene, even appearing to pantomime a sex act at a rally in the campaign’s final week. He wooed Black and Latino voters with false claims that migrants were stealing their jobs and were responsible for a wave of violent crime.
Mr. Trump uttered the kind of insults about Ms. Harris and other prominent female politicians that were once unthinkable to say in public. Even his appeals to women, a group he was struggling to win, were laced with a sense of menace: In the final weeks of the race, he promised to protect women — “whether the women like it or not.”
He proudly flouted the backlash to one of his signature accomplishments — overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to an abortion — and appeared to pay little price at the polls. And he ended the race by insulting the Puerto Rican voters his campaign had spent months trying to woo.
Throughout the race, Mr. Trump’s most faithful supporters showed little discomfort with this abrasive style. As for his policies, they embraced some and chose to disregard others. When asked about his most divisive plans — like wide-scale deportations and a radical reassessment of American commitment to NATO — many of his voters shrugged, saying they doubted that such extreme measures would ever come to fruition despite his repeated promises.
For these supporters, Mr. Trump’s win represents both the dawn of a new future and a rightful restoration. Yet whether Americans — even some of those who voted for him — will like the reality of Mr. Trump’s plans remains to be seen.
Throughout the campaign, economists said his policies would raise inflation, increase costs for families by thousands of dollars annually and spark global trade wars. His promises to empower public health officials who oppose vaccines could spark national outbreaks of disease not seen in decades. And his plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
It’s also unclear how Democrats will respond to these policies and their sudden ejection into the political wilderness. In 2016, they quickly organized into a self-proclaimed resistance movement that helped elect Democrats to Congress and send President Biden to the White House. Now, that movement has run its course, plunging the party into what is likely to be a new round of recriminations and soul-searching about its future.
What is clear, in the end, is that Americans wanted change. And now, they will surely get it.
This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.
By Lisa Lerer, The New York Times
Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do. He would use military force against his political opponents. He would fire thousands of career public servants. He would deport millions of immigrants in military-style roundups. He would crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad. He would turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters. He would be a “dictator” — if only on Day 1.
And, when asked to give him the power to do all of that, the voters said yes. This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.
After defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, who would have become the first female U.S. president, Mr. Trump will bring his own historic firsts into the White House: the only president convicted of dozens of crimes, accused of dozens more and twice impeached.
Unlike in 2016, when he scored a surprise electoral victory but lost the popular vote, Mr. Trump will go to Washington able to claim a broad mandate. Over his four years out of power, he rebuilt the Republican Party in his image, creating a movement that only seemed to strengthen with every recrimination. He will begin his second term bound by few political norms, after a campaign in which he seemed to defy every one.
He did well in the battleground states, winning at least four of the seven, and appeared on track to win the popular vote — the first time a Republican candidate has done that since George W. Bush in 2004. His party flipped the Senate, and was in range of maintaining control of the House of Representatives. Blue areas shifted toward him, with Mr. Trump improving his performance in places like New York City by double digits. So did suburbs, rural areas, even college towns.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Mr. Trump told cheering supporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., for a victory party before the result was official. “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.” That mandate came not just from the American people, he said. “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” he said. “That reason was to save our country.”
His victory was a direct repudiation of some top aides, military brass and Republican officials who served in his first administration. They had publicly warned that he would not save the nation but destroy it.
In the wake of the pandemic, which critics said his administration badly mismanaged, the country grew more skeptical of government. Trust in the media, science, medicine, the judicial system and other mainstay institutions of American life plunged as more voters embraced the doubts Mr. Trump had sown for years.
Public opinion shifted in his direction on issues that had long been the centerpiece of his political movement. Even Democrats embraced stricter policies on immigration and crime in the 2024 race, underscoring how much his relentless focus on the border had resonated.
After his defeat, Mr. Trump spent four years tightening his grip on the Republican Party, to the point where both lawmakers and voters professed to believe his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The number of Americans identifying as Republican edged ahead of Democrats for the first time in decades.
Even the value of democracy itself was in question. In a poll conducted by The New York Times/Siena College last week, nearly half of all voters said they were skeptical that the American experiment in self-governance was working, with 45 percent saying that the nation’s democracy does not do a good job representing ordinary people.
Poll after poll showed that the economy remained the biggest issue, followed by immigration and frustration over the rising prices of groceries and housing. Mr. Trump ran hard on pledges to lower costs and seal the southern border, while offering ideas to eliminate entire categories of taxation, playing on economic anxieties to broaden his coalition.
But those economic promises were interwoven with a steadfast refusal to moderate his message. Unleashing a fire hose of insults and conspiracies, Mr. Trump gambled that a nation unmoored by a deadly pandemic and soaring inflation, and deeply dissatisfied with the incumbent who had defeated him, would be ready to re-embrace him as a blunt-speaking, menacing strongman who would fix it.
Rather than abandon his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, he leaned further into them. In Mr. Trump’s revisionist history, those convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, became “political prisoners.” The siege, which killed at least seven people and injured 150 more, was recast as a “day of love.”
Instead of softening the crude rhetoric that has long been one of his hallmarks, he became more obscene, even appearing to pantomime a sex act at a rally in the campaign’s final week. He wooed Black and Latino voters with false claims that migrants were stealing their jobs and were responsible for a wave of violent crime.
Mr. Trump uttered the kind of insults about Ms. Harris and other prominent female politicians that were once unthinkable to say in public. Even his appeals to women, a group he was struggling to win, were laced with a sense of menace: In the final weeks of the race, he promised to protect women — “whether the women like it or not.”
He proudly flouted the backlash to one of his signature accomplishments — overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to an abortion — and appeared to pay little price at the polls. And he ended the race by insulting the Puerto Rican voters his campaign had spent months trying to woo.
Throughout the race, Mr. Trump’s most faithful supporters showed little discomfort with this abrasive style. As for his policies, they embraced some and chose to disregard others. When asked about his most divisive plans — like wide-scale deportations and a radical reassessment of American commitment to NATO — many of his voters shrugged, saying they doubted that such extreme measures would ever come to fruition despite his repeated promises.
For these supporters, Mr. Trump’s win represents both the dawn of a new future and a rightful restoration. Yet whether Americans — even some of those who voted for him — will like the reality of Mr. Trump’s plans remains to be seen.
Throughout the campaign, economists said his policies would raise inflation, increase costs for families by thousands of dollars annually and spark global trade wars. His promises to empower public health officials who oppose vaccines could spark national outbreaks of disease not seen in decades. And his plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
It’s also unclear how Democrats will respond to these policies and their sudden ejection into the political wilderness. In 2016, they quickly organized into a self-proclaimed resistance movement that helped elect Democrats to Congress and send President Biden to the White House. Now, that movement has run its course, plunging the party into what is likely to be a new round of recriminations and soul-searching about its future.
What is clear, in the end, is that Americans wanted change. And now, they will surely get it.
PROJECT 2025 OFFERS A CHILLING PREVIEW OF TRUMP’S AUTOCRATIC PLANS FOR A SECOND TERM
The plan would upend the rule of law, destabilize democracy, exacerbate climate change, increase poverty, jeopardize health care, increase inequality, weaken education, and benefit the very rich.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
While Donald Trump did lasting damage during his first term in office, the method to his madness was often scattershot. But a more devious and systemic plan awaits if Trump wins a second term.
It’s all spelled out in Project 2025, a detailed blueprint to strip away freedoms and turn the federal government into a Christian nationalist autocracy. If Trump wins, the 920-page proposal will be used to guide the new administration by taking direct aim at civil liberties, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the separation of church and state.
The plan starts by replacing many of the more than two million federal career civil service employees with Trump loyalists. Think climate change deniers running the Environmental Protection Agency, oil lobbyists controlling the U.S. Department of the Interior, and anti-vaccine proponents in charge of the Food and Drug Administration.
Project 2025 proposes closing entire agencies and remaking the rules to fit far-right views and fringe conspiracies. Under the plan, the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice would act “as a team.” Trump would have total control over federal investigations, eliminating the department’s independence and clearing the way for him to go after perceived enemies and protect loyal friends.
Trump has threatened to imprison President Joe Biden and others if he is reelected. Project 2025 even provides an example of how Trump could carry out this campaign. It calls for prosecuting Pennsylvania’s top election official for her role in overseeing the 2020 election that Trump continues to falsely claim was stolen.
Despite lacking any evidence of wrongdoing, the plan states that former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” by the Justice Department for her guidance on provisional ballots during the 2020 election.
Project 2025 would dismantle other federal agencies that protect citizens, including the FBI, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It also calls for closing the U.S. Departments of Education and Commerce.
However, the plan is not about reducing the size of government bureaucracy or making it more efficient. In fact, there is a reference to the need for a “vast expansion” of political appointees to replace the career civil servants and experts.
Nor is the plan designed to depoliticize the federal government. Instead, it would infuse extreme MAGA views into government policy. Here’s one example: Any research “conducted with taxpayer dollars” would be required to “serve the national interest” in line “with conservative principles.”
A portion of Project 2025 pushes an antiabortion agenda even though polls show that the majority of Americans support reproductive rights. That starts by renaming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the Department of Life.
The plan would withhold federal money from states that don’t report abortion data, including the number of abortions and when the procedure took place, and seek to ban drugs used in medication abortions.
Project 2025 would also upend fundamental freedoms by prohibiting same-sex marriage and eliminating protections for LGBTQ people. The plan even calls for outlawing pornography and jailing creators and distributors of pornographic content.
Under Project 2025, efforts to combat climate change would essentially stop. The plan calls for boosting oil, gas, and coal production while ending efforts to promote wind and solar energy. It would also do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it promotes climate change alarm awareness, which Trump calls a hoax.
The proposal would put millions of Americans at risk while increasing health-care costs and reducing help for the most vulnerable. For example, it calls for undoing policies designed to increase access to affordable housing. It would also roll back efforts to lower prescription drug costs, reduce access to Medicare, and end the popular Head
Other dubious provisions include privatizing the National Weather Service, the main agency that warns the public about hurricanes and other dangerous storms.
The plan backs Trump’s reckless war on immigration. It calls for rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants — a complex proposal that would be enormously expensive, take years to implement, and hurt the economy.
Overall, Project 2025 would upend the rule of law, destabilize democracy, exacerbate climate change, increase poverty, undermine national security, jeopardize health care, hurt farmers, increase inequality, weaken education, and benefit the very rich.
The plan is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, the influential think tank that morphed from Ronald Reagan’s conservatism to an extreme MAGA agenda.
After the public became aware of the extreme proposals, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. But, as is often the case, he was less than truthful.
More than 30 former Trump administration officials helped draft Project 2025, which was released last year. In 2022, Trump gave a keynote address at the Heritage Foundation where he praised the organization and said it would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Trump flew to the event on a private jet with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Roberts, who has called for a second American Revolution that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Project 2025 is bigger than Trump. He is just a vessel for the far-right to do away with checks and balances within the government to impose their extreme views on the country. Trump is callous enough to carry out the effort.
Under Project 2025, if Trump wins, everyone else loses.
The plan would upend the rule of law, destabilize democracy, exacerbate climate change, increase poverty, jeopardize health care, increase inequality, weaken education, and benefit the very rich.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
While Donald Trump did lasting damage during his first term in office, the method to his madness was often scattershot. But a more devious and systemic plan awaits if Trump wins a second term.
It’s all spelled out in Project 2025, a detailed blueprint to strip away freedoms and turn the federal government into a Christian nationalist autocracy. If Trump wins, the 920-page proposal will be used to guide the new administration by taking direct aim at civil liberties, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the separation of church and state.
The plan starts by replacing many of the more than two million federal career civil service employees with Trump loyalists. Think climate change deniers running the Environmental Protection Agency, oil lobbyists controlling the U.S. Department of the Interior, and anti-vaccine proponents in charge of the Food and Drug Administration.
Project 2025 proposes closing entire agencies and remaking the rules to fit far-right views and fringe conspiracies. Under the plan, the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice would act “as a team.” Trump would have total control over federal investigations, eliminating the department’s independence and clearing the way for him to go after perceived enemies and protect loyal friends.
Trump has threatened to imprison President Joe Biden and others if he is reelected. Project 2025 even provides an example of how Trump could carry out this campaign. It calls for prosecuting Pennsylvania’s top election official for her role in overseeing the 2020 election that Trump continues to falsely claim was stolen.
Despite lacking any evidence of wrongdoing, the plan states that former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” by the Justice Department for her guidance on provisional ballots during the 2020 election.
Project 2025 would dismantle other federal agencies that protect citizens, including the FBI, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It also calls for closing the U.S. Departments of Education and Commerce.
However, the plan is not about reducing the size of government bureaucracy or making it more efficient. In fact, there is a reference to the need for a “vast expansion” of political appointees to replace the career civil servants and experts.
Nor is the plan designed to depoliticize the federal government. Instead, it would infuse extreme MAGA views into government policy. Here’s one example: Any research “conducted with taxpayer dollars” would be required to “serve the national interest” in line “with conservative principles.”
A portion of Project 2025 pushes an antiabortion agenda even though polls show that the majority of Americans support reproductive rights. That starts by renaming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the Department of Life.
The plan would withhold federal money from states that don’t report abortion data, including the number of abortions and when the procedure took place, and seek to ban drugs used in medication abortions.
Project 2025 would also upend fundamental freedoms by prohibiting same-sex marriage and eliminating protections for LGBTQ people. The plan even calls for outlawing pornography and jailing creators and distributors of pornographic content.
Under Project 2025, efforts to combat climate change would essentially stop. The plan calls for boosting oil, gas, and coal production while ending efforts to promote wind and solar energy. It would also do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it promotes climate change alarm awareness, which Trump calls a hoax.
The proposal would put millions of Americans at risk while increasing health-care costs and reducing help for the most vulnerable. For example, it calls for undoing policies designed to increase access to affordable housing. It would also roll back efforts to lower prescription drug costs, reduce access to Medicare, and end the popular Head
Other dubious provisions include privatizing the National Weather Service, the main agency that warns the public about hurricanes and other dangerous storms.
The plan backs Trump’s reckless war on immigration. It calls for rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants — a complex proposal that would be enormously expensive, take years to implement, and hurt the economy.
Overall, Project 2025 would upend the rule of law, destabilize democracy, exacerbate climate change, increase poverty, undermine national security, jeopardize health care, hurt farmers, increase inequality, weaken education, and benefit the very rich.
The plan is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, the influential think tank that morphed from Ronald Reagan’s conservatism to an extreme MAGA agenda.
After the public became aware of the extreme proposals, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. But, as is often the case, he was less than truthful.
More than 30 former Trump administration officials helped draft Project 2025, which was released last year. In 2022, Trump gave a keynote address at the Heritage Foundation where he praised the organization and said it would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Trump flew to the event on a private jet with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Roberts, who has called for a second American Revolution that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Project 2025 is bigger than Trump. He is just a vessel for the far-right to do away with checks and balances within the government to impose their extreme views on the country. Trump is callous enough to carry out the effort.
Under Project 2025, if Trump wins, everyone else loses.
PENNSYLVANIA GAS DRILLER: OUR OPERATIONS POSE NO HEALTH RISK. YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS, ACTIVISTS RESPOND.
With billions up for grabs and scores of air quality violations to its name, CNX tries to recast itself as a climate warrior.
By Audrey Carleton, Capital & Main
CNX Resources Corporation, a major Pennsylvania natural gas producer, has racked up air quality violations by the hundreds and three years ago pleaded no contest to criminal charges of skirting state pollution laws for years by misreporting air emissions at one of its facilities.
The case against CNX was brought by Josh Shapiro, then the state’s attorney general and now its governor. At the time, Shapiro’s office called CNX’s behavior “fraudulent.”
Now, CNX is doing its best to resurrect itself as a white knight in the fossil fuel trade, and as proof offering up an industry-written study it says demonstrates its fracking operations pose “no public health risks.” The study was born from a partnership that CNX inked last year with its old nemesis — Shapiro.
The study, nicknamed “Radical Transparency” by the natural gas operator, has struck a nerve with climate activists who dismissed it as pseudoscience that flies in the face of peer-reviewed research as well as a 2020 grand jury report that found children and adults who lived near fracking sites were prone to intense nose bleeds, ulcers, and rashes. Drinking water near the fracking sites was sometimes rust-colored or filled with sediment, it said. And airborne chemicals burned the throats of residents and irritated their skin. The latter effect even earned a nickname among residents: “frack rash.”
“First, we allowed the timber in our Commonwealth to be plundered. Then it was our coal. Now it’s shale. Other industries will certainly come our way, for some new natural resource to exploit. This is the time to learn our lesson for the future: Who will bear the inevitable risks? We say it should be those who exploit the resources, not those who live among them,” the grand jury report said.
CNX’s study, which was released to investors in August, comes as the energy giant is trying to curry favor with the governor by pitching itself as an environmental justice leader and win federal funds for the production of hydrogen from the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature legislation to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Billions of dollars are in play.
Indeed, CNX’s ongoing “Radical Transparency” project has already been added to a list of energy producer initiatives that stand to receive a portion of $30 million in public funds allocated to a forthcoming hydrogen hub in Appalachia. These funds are being doled out by Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which is aimed at ensuring clean energy efforts — such as an envisioned Appalachian hydrogen hub — benefit low-income communities already overburdened by pollution.
A group of 40 environmental organizations, as well as State Sen. Katie Muth, have submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy in which they express their opposition to the inclusion of CNX’s “Radical Transparency” on the list of projects vying for the federal funds.
“The ‘Radical Transparency’ program is a cynical attempt to undermine those harmed by fracking by discrediting the thousands of peer-reviewed papers, government reports and media investigations that have demonstrated grave harms fracking poses to health, safety, the environment and climate,” the letter says.
If “Radical Transparency” was intended to win over doubters, it has not impressed climate activists, who have asked Shapiro to renounce it.
“CNX’s radically dishonest and irresponsible fracking report fails the fundamental tests of scientific integrity,” Alex Bomstein, executive director of Clean Air Council, wrote in a news release. “The Shapiro administration should immediately disavow the report and distance itself from this propaganda.”
David Hess, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and author of the daily PA Environment Digest blog, said the setup of the testing project alone gives him pause. “You only get a very narrow slice of what’s coming off any of those facilities,” Hess said. “If you wanted to do a very robust monitoring program, you would ring the entire site with monitors.”
Hess said a robust emissions study would have collected more data, and the testing would have lasted far longer before the announcement of any conclusions. He said the study should have lasted at least a full year, since each season “has an impact on what happens to pollutants and where they fall.” “I think from the beginning, this initiative was oversold,” Hess said.
Some health-care professionals said CNX can’t reasonably make such sweeping conclusions without studying the health conditions of people living near the pollutants.
One of the two sites surveyed in the project drew the attention of government officials as recently as March, when Department of Environmental Protection inspectors visited the site after receiving complaints from a resident about suspected water contamination — a category of pollution that CNX has committed to studying but did not account for in “Radical Transparency.” The state’s Department of Environmental Protection has not issued a notice of violation, but a spokesperson told Capital & Main that the resident’s complaint met “the conditions for creating a rebuttable presumption that a well operator is responsible for water pollution.” CNX disputed the claim. Following the inspection, CNX was ordered to install an alternate water source for the resident while the investigation continues.
“Their ‘radical transparency’ idea is really not at all transparent,” Ketyer said. Ketyer said he believes CNX’s rosy report was issued not as a good-faith effort to advance science, but to appease investors ahead of a ratings downgrade from investment bank Piper Sandler, which came the day after CNX issued its release.
Kathleen Nolan, coauthor of the compendium on the risks of fracking and cofounder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, said CNX’s report does not note whether there was a third-party review, which is standard for scientific papers. Though the emissions data may have averaged out to an acceptable level, they tended to spike in ways that Nolan believes would have been worth investigating. It is unclear whether CNX did that, and the gas producer did not respond to Capital & Main’s requests for comment.
CNX agreed to a suite of concessions that mimicked the eight recommendations in the 2020 grand jury report, which found that state regulators had failed to protect residents from the fracking boom. CNX agreed to move its fracking infrastructure an additional 100 feet beyond the legally mandated 500-foot distance from homes and 2,500-foot distance from hospitals and schools.
The grand jury also recommended that oil and gas operators be required to identify all the chemicals used in their operations. CNX and other operators are generally allowed to redact the names of chemicals they consider to be “trade secrets.”
Environmentalists have urged Shapiro’s office to reject the CNX project and adopt the grand jury recommendations instead.
With billions up for grabs and scores of air quality violations to its name, CNX tries to recast itself as a climate warrior.
By Audrey Carleton, Capital & Main
CNX Resources Corporation, a major Pennsylvania natural gas producer, has racked up air quality violations by the hundreds and three years ago pleaded no contest to criminal charges of skirting state pollution laws for years by misreporting air emissions at one of its facilities.
The case against CNX was brought by Josh Shapiro, then the state’s attorney general and now its governor. At the time, Shapiro’s office called CNX’s behavior “fraudulent.”
Now, CNX is doing its best to resurrect itself as a white knight in the fossil fuel trade, and as proof offering up an industry-written study it says demonstrates its fracking operations pose “no public health risks.” The study was born from a partnership that CNX inked last year with its old nemesis — Shapiro.
The study, nicknamed “Radical Transparency” by the natural gas operator, has struck a nerve with climate activists who dismissed it as pseudoscience that flies in the face of peer-reviewed research as well as a 2020 grand jury report that found children and adults who lived near fracking sites were prone to intense nose bleeds, ulcers, and rashes. Drinking water near the fracking sites was sometimes rust-colored or filled with sediment, it said. And airborne chemicals burned the throats of residents and irritated their skin. The latter effect even earned a nickname among residents: “frack rash.”
“First, we allowed the timber in our Commonwealth to be plundered. Then it was our coal. Now it’s shale. Other industries will certainly come our way, for some new natural resource to exploit. This is the time to learn our lesson for the future: Who will bear the inevitable risks? We say it should be those who exploit the resources, not those who live among them,” the grand jury report said.
CNX’s study, which was released to investors in August, comes as the energy giant is trying to curry favor with the governor by pitching itself as an environmental justice leader and win federal funds for the production of hydrogen from the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature legislation to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Billions of dollars are in play.
Indeed, CNX’s ongoing “Radical Transparency” project has already been added to a list of energy producer initiatives that stand to receive a portion of $30 million in public funds allocated to a forthcoming hydrogen hub in Appalachia. These funds are being doled out by Biden’s Justice40 initiative, which is aimed at ensuring clean energy efforts — such as an envisioned Appalachian hydrogen hub — benefit low-income communities already overburdened by pollution.
A group of 40 environmental organizations, as well as State Sen. Katie Muth, have submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy in which they express their opposition to the inclusion of CNX’s “Radical Transparency” on the list of projects vying for the federal funds.
“The ‘Radical Transparency’ program is a cynical attempt to undermine those harmed by fracking by discrediting the thousands of peer-reviewed papers, government reports and media investigations that have demonstrated grave harms fracking poses to health, safety, the environment and climate,” the letter says.
If “Radical Transparency” was intended to win over doubters, it has not impressed climate activists, who have asked Shapiro to renounce it.
“CNX’s radically dishonest and irresponsible fracking report fails the fundamental tests of scientific integrity,” Alex Bomstein, executive director of Clean Air Council, wrote in a news release. “The Shapiro administration should immediately disavow the report and distance itself from this propaganda.”
David Hess, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and author of the daily PA Environment Digest blog, said the setup of the testing project alone gives him pause. “You only get a very narrow slice of what’s coming off any of those facilities,” Hess said. “If you wanted to do a very robust monitoring program, you would ring the entire site with monitors.”
Hess said a robust emissions study would have collected more data, and the testing would have lasted far longer before the announcement of any conclusions. He said the study should have lasted at least a full year, since each season “has an impact on what happens to pollutants and where they fall.” “I think from the beginning, this initiative was oversold,” Hess said.
Some health-care professionals said CNX can’t reasonably make such sweeping conclusions without studying the health conditions of people living near the pollutants.
One of the two sites surveyed in the project drew the attention of government officials as recently as March, when Department of Environmental Protection inspectors visited the site after receiving complaints from a resident about suspected water contamination — a category of pollution that CNX has committed to studying but did not account for in “Radical Transparency.” The state’s Department of Environmental Protection has not issued a notice of violation, but a spokesperson told Capital & Main that the resident’s complaint met “the conditions for creating a rebuttable presumption that a well operator is responsible for water pollution.” CNX disputed the claim. Following the inspection, CNX was ordered to install an alternate water source for the resident while the investigation continues.
“Their ‘radical transparency’ idea is really not at all transparent,” Ketyer said. Ketyer said he believes CNX’s rosy report was issued not as a good-faith effort to advance science, but to appease investors ahead of a ratings downgrade from investment bank Piper Sandler, which came the day after CNX issued its release.
Kathleen Nolan, coauthor of the compendium on the risks of fracking and cofounder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, said CNX’s report does not note whether there was a third-party review, which is standard for scientific papers. Though the emissions data may have averaged out to an acceptable level, they tended to spike in ways that Nolan believes would have been worth investigating. It is unclear whether CNX did that, and the gas producer did not respond to Capital & Main’s requests for comment.
CNX agreed to a suite of concessions that mimicked the eight recommendations in the 2020 grand jury report, which found that state regulators had failed to protect residents from the fracking boom. CNX agreed to move its fracking infrastructure an additional 100 feet beyond the legally mandated 500-foot distance from homes and 2,500-foot distance from hospitals and schools.
The grand jury also recommended that oil and gas operators be required to identify all the chemicals used in their operations. CNX and other operators are generally allowed to redact the names of chemicals they consider to be “trade secrets.”
Environmentalists have urged Shapiro’s office to reject the CNX project and adopt the grand jury recommendations instead.
IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE ABORTION BANS KILLED SOMEONE
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the last two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls. In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton, sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.
And now ProPublica has identified at least two women who died “after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care.” According to ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana, “There are almost certainly others.”
On Monday, thanks to Surana, we learned the story of one of those women, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant from Georgia with a 6-year-old son. In 2022, Thurman and her child had just moved out of her family’s place and into their own apartment, and she was planning to start nursing school. When she found out she was pregnant with twins, her best friend told ProPublica, she felt she needed an abortion to preserve her newfound stability, but Georgia had enacted a 6-week abortion ban, and she’d just passed the deadline.
She waited, hoping the law would be put on hold, but eventually she arranged babysitting, took time off from work and borrowed a car in order to get a surgical abortion in North Carolina. Though she and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. for the drive, they hit terrible traffic on their way there. “The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect,” wrote Surana. It offered her a medication abortion instead.
Medication abortion is usually safe and effective, but in about 3 percent to 5 percent of cases, women end up needing either another dose of misoprostol, one of the two drugs in the regimen, or surgery. That’s what happened to Thurman. Days after taking her second pill, she was in pain and bleeding heavily. The clinic in North Carolina would have offered her free follow-up care, but it was too far away.
Eventually, suffering a severe infection, she passed out and ended up in a hospital in suburban Atlanta. She needed a D.&C., a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail. According to Surana, Thurman’s last words to her mother were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A state medical review committee ruled her death “preventable.”
ProPublica didn’t discover exactly why doctors let Thurman’s condition deteriorate for so long without treating her, but it’s not a stretch to assume they were scared. As in other states where women have been denied routine abortion care, Georgia’s ban includes an exception for procedures “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” But as we’ve seen again and again, hospitals aren’t sure how to interpret this language, especially with the threat of prison time hanging over everyone involved. So medical staff sometimes hesitate to act until the threat to a woman’s life is undeniable, at which point it may be too late.
The shattering fallout from abortion prohibition was entirely predictable for anyone who has paid attention to such bans in other countries. In Ireland, for example, 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar died of septicemia in 2012 after doctors refused to treat her for a miscarriage as long as her fetus had a heartbeat. Her case helped galvanize support for Ireland’s 2018 national referendum to make abortion legal, which passed in a landslide.
For now, it shouldn’t take even more stories of senseless suffering for these cruel laws to become politically untenable. In Ireland, the name Savita became a rallying cry. The name Amber should be one here.
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the last two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls. In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton, sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.
And now ProPublica has identified at least two women who died “after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care.” According to ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana, “There are almost certainly others.”
On Monday, thanks to Surana, we learned the story of one of those women, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant from Georgia with a 6-year-old son. In 2022, Thurman and her child had just moved out of her family’s place and into their own apartment, and she was planning to start nursing school. When she found out she was pregnant with twins, her best friend told ProPublica, she felt she needed an abortion to preserve her newfound stability, but Georgia had enacted a 6-week abortion ban, and she’d just passed the deadline.
She waited, hoping the law would be put on hold, but eventually she arranged babysitting, took time off from work and borrowed a car in order to get a surgical abortion in North Carolina. Though she and her best friend woke up at 4 a.m. for the drive, they hit terrible traffic on their way there. “The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect,” wrote Surana. It offered her a medication abortion instead.
Medication abortion is usually safe and effective, but in about 3 percent to 5 percent of cases, women end up needing either another dose of misoprostol, one of the two drugs in the regimen, or surgery. That’s what happened to Thurman. Days after taking her second pill, she was in pain and bleeding heavily. The clinic in North Carolina would have offered her free follow-up care, but it was too far away.
Eventually, suffering a severe infection, she passed out and ended up in a hospital in suburban Atlanta. She needed a D.&C., a procedure to empty the uterus, but doctors waited 20 hours to operate as her blood pressure sank, and her organs began to fail. According to Surana, Thurman’s last words to her mother were, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A state medical review committee ruled her death “preventable.”
ProPublica didn’t discover exactly why doctors let Thurman’s condition deteriorate for so long without treating her, but it’s not a stretch to assume they were scared. As in other states where women have been denied routine abortion care, Georgia’s ban includes an exception for procedures “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” But as we’ve seen again and again, hospitals aren’t sure how to interpret this language, especially with the threat of prison time hanging over everyone involved. So medical staff sometimes hesitate to act until the threat to a woman’s life is undeniable, at which point it may be too late.
The shattering fallout from abortion prohibition was entirely predictable for anyone who has paid attention to such bans in other countries. In Ireland, for example, 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar died of septicemia in 2012 after doctors refused to treat her for a miscarriage as long as her fetus had a heartbeat. Her case helped galvanize support for Ireland’s 2018 national referendum to make abortion legal, which passed in a landslide.
For now, it shouldn’t take even more stories of senseless suffering for these cruel laws to become politically untenable. In Ireland, the name Savita became a rallying cry. The name Amber should be one here.
IT’S THE GUNS. IT’S ALWAYS THE GUNS.
By Gabrielle Giffords, U.S. representative from Arizona from 2007 to 2012
After every shooting, blame and rationalizations fly. I know, because I was shot in the head at a 2011 congressional event near my home in Tucson, Ariz. Eighteen other people were shot at that event, six of whom died. In the weeks that followed, there were all kinds of arguments as to why and how that could have happened. To me, only one rang true: Someone dangerous had access to a gun.
There have now been two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump in just over two months. Two separate assailants, in possession of semiautomatic weapons, came terrifyingly close to inflicting great harm. But the through line here isn’t Mr. Trump. The through line isn’t the Secret Service. The through line isn’t heated rhetoric. The through line is, as it always is, the guns.
We are a country weary of repetitive gun violence. When that happens, you have a school shooting on a Wednesday and the country’s attention has moved on by Friday. You have a country where shootings on interstate highways appear to be a pattern and students in Kentucky miss several days of school during a manhunt for the perpetrator of the most recent interstate shooting. I imagine many people reading this right now might not even know about that shooting, or that manhunt, or those kids in Kentucky, doing schoolwork at home because it’s not safe to go to school.
Political rhetoric matters — but rhetoric wasn’t in the bushes around Mr. Trump’s golf course, or on the interstate in Kentucky, or in the school hallways in Georgia, or at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa. Dangerous people with guns were. The most recent would-be attack on the former president, on Sunday, is an indicator of where we are as a nation: a place where no one is safe from gun violence.
What’s not inevitable is angry or inexplicably violent people having such easy access to guns. In Pennsylvania, a gunman too young to buy a beer nonetheless got his hands on a semiautomatic rifle. In Georgia, the high school shooting suspect was 14, and used an AR-15-style rifle. In Kentucky, the suspected gunman reportedly sent a text message declaring his intention to “kill a lot of people” and then opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. Nothing about these episodes was inevitable.
I didn’t grow up in a country with a lot of school shootings, or mass shootings generally. The gun industry was granted broad legal immunity by Congress in 2005 through the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a major contributing factor to the soaring number of gun sales. That was great for gun company profits, and terrible for public safety. With the saturation of guns and loosening of gun laws came, unsurprisingly, a saturation of violence. Gun deaths have skyrocketed since the gun industry received that immunity. So when Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, says school shootings are a “fact of life,” he should know: They weren’t a fact of life in this country until guns proliferated and loopholes in our laws allowed dangerous people to get them.
How can we tell Americans it’s safe to send their kids to school, to head to the grocery store, to attend concerts or houses of worship — or political events with their families — if we won’t acknowledge the danger that weak gun laws present, and won’t take reasonable steps to keep them secure? All over the country parents are having to answer their children’s questions about whether school is protected, about why these guns threaten their childhoods and their lives.
One thing I learned as a candidate and elected official myself was never to try to talk people out of their own reality. Americans know the dangers of gun violence. They see it in their communities and on their news every week. Now they’ve seen a heavily guarded former president as the target of gun violence twice in just over two months.
And Americans know the difference between action and inaction. Recent research from my gun violence protection organization, Giffords, found that 95 percent of likely voters in battleground House districts — including 91 percent of people who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — support background checks on all gun sales, which would make it harder for dangerous people to get guns. Seventy-four percent of those survey respondents support banning weapons like the AR-15 and the AK-style rifles, the weapons implicated in the events this week, last week and the week before.
I have fought so hard to recover from my grievous wounds. I’ve fought hard to work, to stand shoulder to shoulder with other survivors and demand different gun laws. I’ve worked so hard to find my voice — as hard as it is, as much as I struggle to find the right words — to share not just my story of violence but also my deep belief in the American people, that we can find a different, safer way of living.
It’s Monday morning as I write this. Earlier today, students threw books and papers into their backpacks, grabbed lunch or their water bottles and headed out to school. We have promised them safety, but how can we look them, or their parents, in the face and pretend that the answer is anything other than changing easy access to guns? Our path forward requires us all — leaders, voters, Americans — to name the problem clearly and to take action.
By Gabrielle Giffords, U.S. representative from Arizona from 2007 to 2012
After every shooting, blame and rationalizations fly. I know, because I was shot in the head at a 2011 congressional event near my home in Tucson, Ariz. Eighteen other people were shot at that event, six of whom died. In the weeks that followed, there were all kinds of arguments as to why and how that could have happened. To me, only one rang true: Someone dangerous had access to a gun.
There have now been two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump in just over two months. Two separate assailants, in possession of semiautomatic weapons, came terrifyingly close to inflicting great harm. But the through line here isn’t Mr. Trump. The through line isn’t the Secret Service. The through line isn’t heated rhetoric. The through line is, as it always is, the guns.
We are a country weary of repetitive gun violence. When that happens, you have a school shooting on a Wednesday and the country’s attention has moved on by Friday. You have a country where shootings on interstate highways appear to be a pattern and students in Kentucky miss several days of school during a manhunt for the perpetrator of the most recent interstate shooting. I imagine many people reading this right now might not even know about that shooting, or that manhunt, or those kids in Kentucky, doing schoolwork at home because it’s not safe to go to school.
Political rhetoric matters — but rhetoric wasn’t in the bushes around Mr. Trump’s golf course, or on the interstate in Kentucky, or in the school hallways in Georgia, or at the Trump rally in Butler, Pa. Dangerous people with guns were. The most recent would-be attack on the former president, on Sunday, is an indicator of where we are as a nation: a place where no one is safe from gun violence.
What’s not inevitable is angry or inexplicably violent people having such easy access to guns. In Pennsylvania, a gunman too young to buy a beer nonetheless got his hands on a semiautomatic rifle. In Georgia, the high school shooting suspect was 14, and used an AR-15-style rifle. In Kentucky, the suspected gunman reportedly sent a text message declaring his intention to “kill a lot of people” and then opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. Nothing about these episodes was inevitable.
I didn’t grow up in a country with a lot of school shootings, or mass shootings generally. The gun industry was granted broad legal immunity by Congress in 2005 through the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a major contributing factor to the soaring number of gun sales. That was great for gun company profits, and terrible for public safety. With the saturation of guns and loosening of gun laws came, unsurprisingly, a saturation of violence. Gun deaths have skyrocketed since the gun industry received that immunity. So when Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, says school shootings are a “fact of life,” he should know: They weren’t a fact of life in this country until guns proliferated and loopholes in our laws allowed dangerous people to get them.
How can we tell Americans it’s safe to send their kids to school, to head to the grocery store, to attend concerts or houses of worship — or political events with their families — if we won’t acknowledge the danger that weak gun laws present, and won’t take reasonable steps to keep them secure? All over the country parents are having to answer their children’s questions about whether school is protected, about why these guns threaten their childhoods and their lives.
One thing I learned as a candidate and elected official myself was never to try to talk people out of their own reality. Americans know the dangers of gun violence. They see it in their communities and on their news every week. Now they’ve seen a heavily guarded former president as the target of gun violence twice in just over two months.
And Americans know the difference between action and inaction. Recent research from my gun violence protection organization, Giffords, found that 95 percent of likely voters in battleground House districts — including 91 percent of people who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — support background checks on all gun sales, which would make it harder for dangerous people to get guns. Seventy-four percent of those survey respondents support banning weapons like the AR-15 and the AK-style rifles, the weapons implicated in the events this week, last week and the week before.
I have fought so hard to recover from my grievous wounds. I’ve fought hard to work, to stand shoulder to shoulder with other survivors and demand different gun laws. I’ve worked so hard to find my voice — as hard as it is, as much as I struggle to find the right words — to share not just my story of violence but also my deep belief in the American people, that we can find a different, safer way of living.
It’s Monday morning as I write this. Earlier today, students threw books and papers into their backpacks, grabbed lunch or their water bottles and headed out to school. We have promised them safety, but how can we look them, or their parents, in the face and pretend that the answer is anything other than changing easy access to guns? Our path forward requires us all — leaders, voters, Americans — to name the problem clearly and to take action.
ON 9/11, AMERICA FACED FOREIGN ATTACKERS. TODAY, THE DANGER COMES FROM WITHIN.
There were 231 incidents of domestic terrorism between 2010 and 2021. Since 2020, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations has more than doubled.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
The United States and the world were forever changed by the terror attacks 23 years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people, brought down the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and saw passengers give their lives to stop a fourth hijacked plane that ultimately crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.
The traumatic events shocked Americans and united the country much like the bombing of Pearl Harbor did in 1941. But the bonds of fellowship and common purpose did not last after the shocking events of Sept. 11, 2001.
More than two decades after, the anniversary brings promises to “never forget.” Indeed, the many innocent lives lost deserve to be remembered. So does the valor of the first responders who gave their lives trying to help others. It is also worth remembering what else has been lost along the way.
The first casualty of war was the truth. Elected officials, starting with then-President George W. Bush, lied about the rationale for invading Iraq, while the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, remained at large for nearly a decade.
Global terrorism has risen across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The horrific war crimes and targeted attacks by Russia on hospitals and schools in Ukraine amounts to terrorism.
Here at home, occluded by all the global confrontations, there has been a sharp rise in domestic terrorism.
There were 231 incidents of domestic terrorism between 2010 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Since 2020, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations has more than doubled.
Since 2010, nearly every state has experienced at least one incident of domestic terrorism. Nearly every incident has involved an assault rifle. The killers are usually white males, including some born after 9/11.
In 2016, 49 people were killed at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in the deadliest attack against LGBTQ people in U.S. history. In 2017, one person was killed and 28 others were injured during a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
In 2018, 11 people were murdered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. In 2019, 23 people were killed and 20 others were injured in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman who wrote a manifesto that cited a supposed “Hispanic invasion.”
In 2022, 10 people were shot and killed in a grocery store by a white gunman in a racially motivated attack in Buffalo, N.Y. The 19-year-old white gunman, who was driven by hate, pleaded guilty to murder and domestic terrorism.
The killings underscore the assessment by Homeland Security that white supremacists here pose the same terror threat as ISIS to the United States.
The entire country watched the threat play out during the attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. FBI Director Christopher Wray condemned the insurrection as “domestic terrorism.”
Then-President Donald Trump was impeached for inciting the attack. He was also criminally indicted for efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which spurred the insurrection.
After Trump supporters breached the Capitol, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) correctly said, “There is a domestic enemy in the White House.”
That domestic enemy is once again running for president — with the support of white nationalist groups who Trump called “my people.” Indeed, a man dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes attended a rally for Trump on Sunday in Connecticut. It was not the first time such extremists turned out for Trump.
In just 20 years, America went from defending itself from a foreign terrorist group to a sharp rise in domestic terror. Instead of winning the war against violent extremists, a domestic enemy is knocking on the door of the Oval Office.
On this anniversary of Sept. 11, we should never forget that Trump is incapable of defending the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
That’s because Trump is the enemy within.
There were 231 incidents of domestic terrorism between 2010 and 2021. Since 2020, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations has more than doubled.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
The United States and the world were forever changed by the terror attacks 23 years ago that killed nearly 3,000 people, brought down the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and saw passengers give their lives to stop a fourth hijacked plane that ultimately crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.
The traumatic events shocked Americans and united the country much like the bombing of Pearl Harbor did in 1941. But the bonds of fellowship and common purpose did not last after the shocking events of Sept. 11, 2001.
More than two decades after, the anniversary brings promises to “never forget.” Indeed, the many innocent lives lost deserve to be remembered. So does the valor of the first responders who gave their lives trying to help others. It is also worth remembering what else has been lost along the way.
The first casualty of war was the truth. Elected officials, starting with then-President George W. Bush, lied about the rationale for invading Iraq, while the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, remained at large for nearly a decade.
Global terrorism has risen across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The horrific war crimes and targeted attacks by Russia on hospitals and schools in Ukraine amounts to terrorism.
Here at home, occluded by all the global confrontations, there has been a sharp rise in domestic terrorism.
There were 231 incidents of domestic terrorism between 2010 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Since 2020, the number of FBI domestic terrorism investigations has more than doubled.
Since 2010, nearly every state has experienced at least one incident of domestic terrorism. Nearly every incident has involved an assault rifle. The killers are usually white males, including some born after 9/11.
In 2016, 49 people were killed at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in the deadliest attack against LGBTQ people in U.S. history. In 2017, one person was killed and 28 others were injured during a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
In 2018, 11 people were murdered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. In 2019, 23 people were killed and 20 others were injured in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman who wrote a manifesto that cited a supposed “Hispanic invasion.”
In 2022, 10 people were shot and killed in a grocery store by a white gunman in a racially motivated attack in Buffalo, N.Y. The 19-year-old white gunman, who was driven by hate, pleaded guilty to murder and domestic terrorism.
The killings underscore the assessment by Homeland Security that white supremacists here pose the same terror threat as ISIS to the United States.
The entire country watched the threat play out during the attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. FBI Director Christopher Wray condemned the insurrection as “domestic terrorism.”
Then-President Donald Trump was impeached for inciting the attack. He was also criminally indicted for efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which spurred the insurrection.
After Trump supporters breached the Capitol, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) correctly said, “There is a domestic enemy in the White House.”
That domestic enemy is once again running for president — with the support of white nationalist groups who Trump called “my people.” Indeed, a man dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes attended a rally for Trump on Sunday in Connecticut. It was not the first time such extremists turned out for Trump.
In just 20 years, America went from defending itself from a foreign terrorist group to a sharp rise in domestic terror. Instead of winning the war against violent extremists, a domestic enemy is knocking on the door of the Oval Office.
On this anniversary of Sept. 11, we should never forget that Trump is incapable of defending the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
That’s because Trump is the enemy within.
THE SUPREME COURT IS GASLIGHTING US ALL
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
At the close of one of the most consequential and least constitutional terms in the Supreme Court’s history, it’s hard to ignore one particularly offensive trend: the right-wing justices’ repeated and patronizing attempts to minimize the importance of their unprecedented decisions.
There’s nothing to see here, they regularly seem to say; everyone who is upset at their decisions is being hysterical and should just calm down. Take a few recent examples:
“The court is trying to distance itself from the monsters it created,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution,” told me. “They’re trying to say, ‘We don’t know where you got these crazy ideas from!’ But of course we do know where they got them from.”
In the latest gun case, United States v. Rahimi, the crazy ideas came straight from the source: the Supreme Court’s jaw-dropping 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. For a gun law to be compatible with the Second Amendment, the decision said, the government “must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In other words, if the American founders didn’t pass a specific gun law in the 18th century, then we in the 21st century can’t either. Applying that reasoning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit determined that there were no founding-era laws keeping guns from domestic abusers, and so today’s law doing so could not stand.
The Bruen decision was written by Justice Clarence Thomas and signed by all five of his conservative colleagues. But when the Fifth Circuit’s decision protecting the gun rights of domestic abusers came before the court, the justices blinked. Eight of them, including the court’s three liberals, agreed that such laws are well within the federal government’s authority to enact. Only Justice Thomas held his ground and insisted on finding an exact historical analog. Give him credit for consistency at least.
If you find it hard to square the command in the Bruen case with the result in the Rahimi case, you’re not alone. Lower federal courts across the country have been flailing for two years as judges play amateur historians and try to figure out whether Americans two centuries ago passed laws that are similar enough to those today. In her concurrence, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said what the court’s majority would not.
“Make no mistake: Today’s effort to clear up ‘misunderstandings’ is a tacit admission that lower courts are struggling,” she wrote. “In my view, the blame may lie with us, not with them.”
Justice Jackson, the court’s most junior justice but its senior gaslighting fighter, had similar criticisms of her right-wing colleagues’ behavior in the Idaho abortion case. Late last month, the court dismissed the case without comment, on the grounds that it had agreed to hear it too soon. This meant the Idaho law would be put on hold, which some took as a victory for reproductive rights. Wrong, Justice Jackson explained in a partial dissent from the dismissal. The court itself had created the crisis by allowing the state’s draconian law to take effect and then taking five months to decide whether to hear the case at all.
“Our intervention has already distorted this litigation process,” Justice Jackson wrote. “It is too little, too late for the court to take a mulligan and just tell the lower courts to carry on as if none of this has happened. As the old adage goes: The court has made this bed, so now it must lie in it.”
Why all the gaslighting? Some of it can be understood as “an exercise in institutional self-preservation,” as the veteran Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse wrote recently of the gun case for Times Opinion. The court’s power derives from its perceived legitimacy, which in turn depends on its public approval. The more it issues unpopular, unhinged decisions, the more that approval rating, already at record lows, continues to plummet. The justices could choose to respond to this by showing a modicum of respect for the plain language of the Constitution, for longstanding federal law and for its own established precedents.
But that would betray the long effort by right-wing activists and lawmakers to transform this court into the sword and the shield in their culture war. Senator Mitch McConnell didn’t play the most egregious political hardball in living memory only to be rewarded with a bunch of moderate legal nerds in robes.
So instead the justices in the court’s supermajority have raced to push through a lengthy conservative wish list of decisions, upending decades of well-settled law even as they pretend they’re being measured and reasonable. In its way, this subterfuge is understandable: Who wants to be seen as allowing violent people to walk around armed, or forcing pregnant women to wait until they are on the verge of death before they can receive standard medical care?
And yet that is the real-world dystopia the right-wing justices are creating right now. “People are going to die, and have died, because of their decisions,” Ms. Franks at George Washington University said. She offered a way of thinking about the latest Supreme Court term, which, in addition to some rulings in favor of Donald Trump, included a decision upholding an Oregon city’s ban on homeless people sleeping outdoors.
“You could read this term with the framework of: Who seems vulnerable, who seems powerful?” she said. “Trump is vulnerable; homeless people are not. It’s this strange inverted world.”
Ms. Franks calls it “victim-claiming” — when privileged, powerful people take on the mantle of victimhood, displacing genuine victims, whether pregnant women without treatment or homeless people without a bed. The effect, she said, is to “replace actual victimhood with a fantasy of victimhood.”
That may be the most insidious gaslight of all: trying to sell Americans the right-wing fantasy of how the world was, or should be again, in place of how it really is.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
At the close of one of the most consequential and least constitutional terms in the Supreme Court’s history, it’s hard to ignore one particularly offensive trend: the right-wing justices’ repeated and patronizing attempts to minimize the importance of their unprecedented decisions.
There’s nothing to see here, they regularly seem to say; everyone who is upset at their decisions is being hysterical and should just calm down. Take a few recent examples:
- In his majority opinion in the case about presidential immunity, Chief Justice John Roberts mocked the three liberal dissenters for striking “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually does today.” (Reality check: The immunity ruling — which gave presidents carte blanche to break most criminal laws when carrying out their official duties — is not grounded in any clause of the Constitution. It went far beyond what even the most pessimistic court observers expected; the dissenters, if anything, responded with restraint.)
- During oral arguments in a case that pitted Idaho’s near-total abortion ban against the federally guaranteed right of a woman to end her pregnancy if necessary to stabilize a dire medical crisis, Justice Samuel Alito dismissed the government’s concerns. “Nobody’s suggesting that the woman is not an individual and she doesn’t — she doesn’t deserve stabilization,” the justice who wrote the opinion striking down Roe v. Wade said with his trademark irritation. “Nobody’s suggesting that.” (Reality check: That is precisely what Idaho was suggesting, by arguing that federal law doesn’t pre-empt the state ban.)
- Or take the chief justice again, writing for the court in upholding a federal law that prohibits domestic abusers from possessing guns. A federal appeals court had struck down the law as unconstitutional. “Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases,” the chief justice wrote, explaining why the lower court had been wrong. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” (Reality check: The lower court was following the letter of a Supreme Court ruling from two years ago, which held that any gun law without an almost exact analog from the founding era — like laws that apply to domestic abusers — is unconstitutional.)
“The court is trying to distance itself from the monsters it created,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution,” told me. “They’re trying to say, ‘We don’t know where you got these crazy ideas from!’ But of course we do know where they got them from.”
In the latest gun case, United States v. Rahimi, the crazy ideas came straight from the source: the Supreme Court’s jaw-dropping 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. For a gun law to be compatible with the Second Amendment, the decision said, the government “must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In other words, if the American founders didn’t pass a specific gun law in the 18th century, then we in the 21st century can’t either. Applying that reasoning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit determined that there were no founding-era laws keeping guns from domestic abusers, and so today’s law doing so could not stand.
The Bruen decision was written by Justice Clarence Thomas and signed by all five of his conservative colleagues. But when the Fifth Circuit’s decision protecting the gun rights of domestic abusers came before the court, the justices blinked. Eight of them, including the court’s three liberals, agreed that such laws are well within the federal government’s authority to enact. Only Justice Thomas held his ground and insisted on finding an exact historical analog. Give him credit for consistency at least.
If you find it hard to square the command in the Bruen case with the result in the Rahimi case, you’re not alone. Lower federal courts across the country have been flailing for two years as judges play amateur historians and try to figure out whether Americans two centuries ago passed laws that are similar enough to those today. In her concurrence, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said what the court’s majority would not.
“Make no mistake: Today’s effort to clear up ‘misunderstandings’ is a tacit admission that lower courts are struggling,” she wrote. “In my view, the blame may lie with us, not with them.”
Justice Jackson, the court’s most junior justice but its senior gaslighting fighter, had similar criticisms of her right-wing colleagues’ behavior in the Idaho abortion case. Late last month, the court dismissed the case without comment, on the grounds that it had agreed to hear it too soon. This meant the Idaho law would be put on hold, which some took as a victory for reproductive rights. Wrong, Justice Jackson explained in a partial dissent from the dismissal. The court itself had created the crisis by allowing the state’s draconian law to take effect and then taking five months to decide whether to hear the case at all.
“Our intervention has already distorted this litigation process,” Justice Jackson wrote. “It is too little, too late for the court to take a mulligan and just tell the lower courts to carry on as if none of this has happened. As the old adage goes: The court has made this bed, so now it must lie in it.”
Why all the gaslighting? Some of it can be understood as “an exercise in institutional self-preservation,” as the veteran Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse wrote recently of the gun case for Times Opinion. The court’s power derives from its perceived legitimacy, which in turn depends on its public approval. The more it issues unpopular, unhinged decisions, the more that approval rating, already at record lows, continues to plummet. The justices could choose to respond to this by showing a modicum of respect for the plain language of the Constitution, for longstanding federal law and for its own established precedents.
But that would betray the long effort by right-wing activists and lawmakers to transform this court into the sword and the shield in their culture war. Senator Mitch McConnell didn’t play the most egregious political hardball in living memory only to be rewarded with a bunch of moderate legal nerds in robes.
So instead the justices in the court’s supermajority have raced to push through a lengthy conservative wish list of decisions, upending decades of well-settled law even as they pretend they’re being measured and reasonable. In its way, this subterfuge is understandable: Who wants to be seen as allowing violent people to walk around armed, or forcing pregnant women to wait until they are on the verge of death before they can receive standard medical care?
And yet that is the real-world dystopia the right-wing justices are creating right now. “People are going to die, and have died, because of their decisions,” Ms. Franks at George Washington University said. She offered a way of thinking about the latest Supreme Court term, which, in addition to some rulings in favor of Donald Trump, included a decision upholding an Oregon city’s ban on homeless people sleeping outdoors.
“You could read this term with the framework of: Who seems vulnerable, who seems powerful?” she said. “Trump is vulnerable; homeless people are not. It’s this strange inverted world.”
Ms. Franks calls it “victim-claiming” — when privileged, powerful people take on the mantle of victimhood, displacing genuine victims, whether pregnant women without treatment or homeless people without a bed. The effect, she said, is to “replace actual victimhood with a fantasy of victimhood.”
That may be the most insidious gaslight of all: trying to sell Americans the right-wing fantasy of how the world was, or should be again, in place of how it really is.
ABOUT TIME: SENATORS DEMAND SPECIAL COUNSEL TO INVESTIGATE CLARENCE THOMAS
For once, Attorney General Merrick Garland should act quickly.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Fed up with the justice’s stonewalling, egregious violation of judicial ethics, inaccurate legal filings and gross money grubbing from right-wing billionaires with business before the Supreme Court, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week demanding a special counsel be appointed “to investigate possible violations of federal ethics and tax laws by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas.” Well, it’s about time someone took Thomas’s inexcusable conduct seriously. (Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s introduction of articles of impeachment in a Republican-controlled House, meanwhile, which followed on Wednesday, is a showy gesture but a nonstarter.)
The letter details “repeated and willful omissions of gifts and income from Justice Thomas’s financial disclosure reports required by the Ethics in Government Act.” And as the senators point out, investigations have been raised against other government officials for far less serious allegations.
This is not a complaint about failure to recuse, as reprehensible as it might be for Thomas to sit on cases concerning the insurrection in which his wife played a limited role, or about bribery; thanks to this court, such prosecutions are practically impossible. Instead, the letter concerns bread-and-butter allegations of false statements signed under oath and tax violations.
The list of issues is gobsmacking. For example: forgiveness of the principal on a $267,000 loan that was never reported as income. (“Documents obtained by the Senate Finance Committee indicate that no principal was ever repaid on the loan and that Justice Thomas only made interest payments on the loan prior to all payments ceasing on the loan. Forgiven or discharged debt is taxable income, and the Ethics in Government Act requires justices to disclose any ‘income from discharge of indebtedness.’”) This was never included on Thomas’s financial disclosure reports. Thomas has refused to say whether he accounted for the loan forgiveness on his income taxes.
Then there are the gifts — lots of gifts. The senators cite “undisclosed gifts from other wealthy donors … including private jet travel from Paul Anthony Novelly; private jet travel and country club membership from the late Wayne Huizenga; and private jet travel, luxury sports tickets, and lodging at a ranch from David Sokol.” The senator include an appendix detailing these lavish gratuities. The senators write, “Justice Thomas has claimed that some omissions were ‘inadvertent,’ and he has amended some past reports accordingly. However, Justice Thomas has not disclosed all of the gifts that have been uncovered, and there may well be more.” Therefore, they charge: “His long history of omissions indicates a pattern of willfulness meriting investigation under the Ethics in Government Act.”
Then there are the gifts specifically from Leonard Leo — the right-wing legal impresario and former vice president of the Federalist Society who has helped pick Supreme Court justices and contrived to bring cases before the court to advance his dark money groups agenda, according to Whitehouse. The senators explain:
Last year, the Washington Post reported that Leo directed payments of at least $25,000 to a consulting firm run by Justice Thomas’s spouse, with Leo specifying that the documents related to the payments should make “[n]o mention” of Mrs. Thomas. The furtive nature of the payments raises further questions about how many such payments were orchestrated, whether legitimate services were actually rendered, and whether such payments required additional reporting by Justice Thomas. We have not yet adequately been able to investigate the extent to which any or all these undisclosed gifts were part of a coordinated gifts program to reward recipient justices.
In sum, the senators raise allegations of willfully false statements on government disclosure forms and income tax and gift tax violations. At this stage, these are allegations only. But surely there is a basis for further inquiry, the senators argue. After detailing other investigations into less egregious conduct, the senators argue that only a special counsel can properly investigate. (“Since no litigant appears before the Supreme Court more frequently than the United States government, represented by the Department of Justice, the Department may understandably hesitate to offend a member of that Court.”)
The senators are not the only ones to have advanced these arguments. In April 2023, the anti-corruption group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Garland after Pro Publica broke news of lavish gifts Thomas received from another billionaire, Harlan Crow.
In that letter, CREW and several ethics experts wrote: “If true, Justice Thomas’ acceptance and failure to report these gifts and sales transactions on his annual mandatory financial disclosure statements not only undermines trust in his ability to impartially and fairly administer his duties as a member of the Court, but also threatens to corrode public confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution.” CREW’s president, Noah Bookbinder, tells me CREW never received a response.
One of the ethics experts who signed that letter, Richard Painter, tells me, “The attorney general may or may not decide to appoint a special counsel. I believe it is justified in this case.” If Garland does not appoint a special counsel or undertake any investigation, the Supreme Court justices, like the president in the new scheme of government concocted by this court, will conclude they operate in a world of criminal immunity, secure in the knowledge a partisan Senate will never remove them from the bench.
“Justice Thomas’s serious and frequent misconduct, including consistent failure to report lavish gifts from a wealthy benefactor with strong interests in the Supreme Court’s work and repeated failure to recuse from cases in which he had a clear conflict of interest, requires thorough investigation and genuine accountability,” Bookbinder tells me.
The Thomas scandal is what comes from refusing to adopt a mandatory ethics code for the Supreme Court and investing its justices with lifetime security. That leaves the rule of law dependent on the justices’ own good graces to remain ethical. That has obviously proven insufficient.
And so Whitehouse and Wyden, with no alternative, ask for the Justice Department to do its job. “The request is foundational to the rule of law,” constitutional scholar Dennis Aftergut tells me. “While many won’t expect Garland to pick it up before the election, if democracy survives November, the senators have written the bottom line for what must happen if we are to get corruption out of the court.”
Unfortunately, if felon and former president Donald Trump is elected, one can be sure no investigation will be undertaken. It therefore behooves Garland to move quickly, lest — again — justice delayed becomes justice denied.
For once, Attorney General Merrick Garland should act quickly.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Fed up with the justice’s stonewalling, egregious violation of judicial ethics, inaccurate legal filings and gross money grubbing from right-wing billionaires with business before the Supreme Court, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week demanding a special counsel be appointed “to investigate possible violations of federal ethics and tax laws by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas.” Well, it’s about time someone took Thomas’s inexcusable conduct seriously. (Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s introduction of articles of impeachment in a Republican-controlled House, meanwhile, which followed on Wednesday, is a showy gesture but a nonstarter.)
The letter details “repeated and willful omissions of gifts and income from Justice Thomas’s financial disclosure reports required by the Ethics in Government Act.” And as the senators point out, investigations have been raised against other government officials for far less serious allegations.
This is not a complaint about failure to recuse, as reprehensible as it might be for Thomas to sit on cases concerning the insurrection in which his wife played a limited role, or about bribery; thanks to this court, such prosecutions are practically impossible. Instead, the letter concerns bread-and-butter allegations of false statements signed under oath and tax violations.
The list of issues is gobsmacking. For example: forgiveness of the principal on a $267,000 loan that was never reported as income. (“Documents obtained by the Senate Finance Committee indicate that no principal was ever repaid on the loan and that Justice Thomas only made interest payments on the loan prior to all payments ceasing on the loan. Forgiven or discharged debt is taxable income, and the Ethics in Government Act requires justices to disclose any ‘income from discharge of indebtedness.’”) This was never included on Thomas’s financial disclosure reports. Thomas has refused to say whether he accounted for the loan forgiveness on his income taxes.
Then there are the gifts — lots of gifts. The senators cite “undisclosed gifts from other wealthy donors … including private jet travel from Paul Anthony Novelly; private jet travel and country club membership from the late Wayne Huizenga; and private jet travel, luxury sports tickets, and lodging at a ranch from David Sokol.” The senator include an appendix detailing these lavish gratuities. The senators write, “Justice Thomas has claimed that some omissions were ‘inadvertent,’ and he has amended some past reports accordingly. However, Justice Thomas has not disclosed all of the gifts that have been uncovered, and there may well be more.” Therefore, they charge: “His long history of omissions indicates a pattern of willfulness meriting investigation under the Ethics in Government Act.”
Then there are the gifts specifically from Leonard Leo — the right-wing legal impresario and former vice president of the Federalist Society who has helped pick Supreme Court justices and contrived to bring cases before the court to advance his dark money groups agenda, according to Whitehouse. The senators explain:
Last year, the Washington Post reported that Leo directed payments of at least $25,000 to a consulting firm run by Justice Thomas’s spouse, with Leo specifying that the documents related to the payments should make “[n]o mention” of Mrs. Thomas. The furtive nature of the payments raises further questions about how many such payments were orchestrated, whether legitimate services were actually rendered, and whether such payments required additional reporting by Justice Thomas. We have not yet adequately been able to investigate the extent to which any or all these undisclosed gifts were part of a coordinated gifts program to reward recipient justices.
In sum, the senators raise allegations of willfully false statements on government disclosure forms and income tax and gift tax violations. At this stage, these are allegations only. But surely there is a basis for further inquiry, the senators argue. After detailing other investigations into less egregious conduct, the senators argue that only a special counsel can properly investigate. (“Since no litigant appears before the Supreme Court more frequently than the United States government, represented by the Department of Justice, the Department may understandably hesitate to offend a member of that Court.”)
The senators are not the only ones to have advanced these arguments. In April 2023, the anti-corruption group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Garland after Pro Publica broke news of lavish gifts Thomas received from another billionaire, Harlan Crow.
In that letter, CREW and several ethics experts wrote: “If true, Justice Thomas’ acceptance and failure to report these gifts and sales transactions on his annual mandatory financial disclosure statements not only undermines trust in his ability to impartially and fairly administer his duties as a member of the Court, but also threatens to corrode public confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution.” CREW’s president, Noah Bookbinder, tells me CREW never received a response.
One of the ethics experts who signed that letter, Richard Painter, tells me, “The attorney general may or may not decide to appoint a special counsel. I believe it is justified in this case.” If Garland does not appoint a special counsel or undertake any investigation, the Supreme Court justices, like the president in the new scheme of government concocted by this court, will conclude they operate in a world of criminal immunity, secure in the knowledge a partisan Senate will never remove them from the bench.
“Justice Thomas’s serious and frequent misconduct, including consistent failure to report lavish gifts from a wealthy benefactor with strong interests in the Supreme Court’s work and repeated failure to recuse from cases in which he had a clear conflict of interest, requires thorough investigation and genuine accountability,” Bookbinder tells me.
The Thomas scandal is what comes from refusing to adopt a mandatory ethics code for the Supreme Court and investing its justices with lifetime security. That leaves the rule of law dependent on the justices’ own good graces to remain ethical. That has obviously proven insufficient.
And so Whitehouse and Wyden, with no alternative, ask for the Justice Department to do its job. “The request is foundational to the rule of law,” constitutional scholar Dennis Aftergut tells me. “While many won’t expect Garland to pick it up before the election, if democracy survives November, the senators have written the bottom line for what must happen if we are to get corruption out of the court.”
Unfortunately, if felon and former president Donald Trump is elected, one can be sure no investigation will be undertaken. It therefore behooves Garland to move quickly, lest — again — justice delayed becomes justice denied.
SUPREME COURT ETHICS REMAIN AT CENTER STAGE AFTER HARD-RIGHT RULINGS
Much of the public sees the Supreme Court as political, not impartial, even as the court’s defenders say its critics simply oppose the conservative majority.
By Justin Jouvenal, The Washington Post
The Supreme Court term that ended this week played out on a split screen: The justices issued blockbuster rulings that pushed the law sharply to the right, while outside the court some justices were buffeted by new ethics allegations that stoked questions from critics about their impartiality.
The dynamics may not seem related, but legal experts say they have mutually reinforced doubts among a large swath of the country over whether the nation’s highest court can be a neutral interpreter of the law.
“They’ve got a potential legitimacy problem,” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and expert on judicial ethics. “The traditional notion that we will accept the results of the court whether we agree with it or not … is decreasingly the case. A lot of the ethics problems the court confronts fuel the perception that it is an organization more political than legal.”
For a second term, headlines have centered on Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., with reports in recent months about politically charged flags and lavish free travel. Democrats and some independent experts have called in vain for the two justices to recuse from certain high-profile cases, and for a new court ethics overhaul.
The latter demand will almost certainly remain stalled in Congress unless Democrats wrest control of both chambers in the November election and retain control of the White House. And the outcome of the presidential contest will determine whether any retirements from the court lead to a strengthening or weakening of the 6-3 conservative-liberal split in coming years.
The increasingly partisan rancor surrounding the court was underscored by a sting of sorts at a recent Supreme Court Historical Society dinner — the type of hardball political tactic more commonly seen on the campaign trail. A liberal activist secretly recorded Alito and his wife answering politically leading questions, then released the recording on social media for all to behold.
Meanwhile, the final weeks of the term saw a series of major rulings on presidential immunity, the federal regulatory state and other topics that produced a dramatic lurch rightward — and were seen by critics as deeply political.
Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who clerked decades ago for then-Justice David H. Souter, said the decisions will probably increase the public perception that the justices are partisan, especially as lower courts start to make rulings that reflect new limits on agency power and on prosecuting alleged wrongdoing by former president Donald Trump.
“When we start seeing the consequences of some of these recent decisions like overruling Chevron and presidential immunity, I think its reputation will go down even further,” said Roosevelt, using the nickname for the decision on the federal regulatory state.
Several experts said the court needs to fully embrace an ethics overhaul to help reassure the public.
The Supreme Court released a long-awaited code of conduct early in the term, hoping to put to rest controversies such as the revelation last year that Thomas and Alito took unreported trips funded by wealthy benefactors. Thomas also faced calls to recuse himself from election-related cases because his wife had moved to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In announcing the code, the court said it wanted to correct a public misunderstanding “that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” But experts in judicial ethics panned the lack of an enforcement mechanism or specificity about lavish gifts or when a justice should recuse.
Renee Knake Jefferson, a University of Houston Law Center professor specializing in legal ethics, called the code “ceremonial at best.”
“It does not address the issues that were very concerning to the public,” she said.
Controversy flared anew in May.
The New York Times reported an upside-down American flag had flown at Alito’s Virginia home in the weeks after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The symbol has a long history as a sign of distress in the military and has been used by protesters of various political stripes, but at the time it had also been adopted by supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement and was flown by some rioters at the Capitol.
Alito said his wife, Martha-Ann, had raised the flag following a dispute with a neighbor. The neighbor said in an interview the disagreement began in December 2020 when Martha-Ann Alito made comments about political signs in her yard disparaging Trump and Republicans.
Days after the initial Times report, the newspaper revealed an “Appeal to Heaven” flag adopted by Christian nationalists was flying at Alito’s vacation home on the New Jersey shore last summer.
Democrats and judicial ethics experts said the flags raised questions about Alito’s impartiality. He rejected their calls to recuse from two high-profile cases: on presidential immunity and whether prosecutors improperly charged a Jan. 6 defendant with obstruction.
“As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days, she refused,” Alito wrote of the Virginia flag in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee members Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), explaining why he did not believe the incidents met the criteria for him to sit out a case. “My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also refused a call to meet with Democratic senators to discuss ethics, citing the separation of powers and the need for judicial independence.
Alito soon found himself mired in controversy again, when the liberal activist released the recording she made while posing as a Catholic conservative at the historical society event in June. Alito is heard saying “one side or the other is going to win” the nation’s polarized politics and seeming to endorse the activist’s contention that the nation needs to return to “godliness.”
Martha-Ann Alito is heard talking about the flag controversy and disparaging the flying of pro-LGBTQ Pride flags.
That same month, Thomas disclosed for the first time that his lodging during two 2019 trips was paid for by Texas billionaire and Republican donor Harlan Crow. The Senate Judiciary Committee also revealed three additional Thomas plane trips between 2017 and 2021 that were funded by Crow and that Thomas’s attorney has said he was not required to report.
Alito and Thomas did not respond to requests for comment this week.
As the ethics controversies piled up, momentum built among Democrats for Congress to take action on ethics legislation.
While praising steps already taken by the court, Whitehouse called for an independent watchdog that has the authority to investigate alleged violations and enforce the code. He pointed to discrepancies in Alito’s story about the upside-down American flag as a situation that merited a deeper look.
“They are still the only nine people in American government who don’t have to answer basic questions about what the facts are when basic ethics questions get raised,” Whitehouse said of the justices.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on July 13, 2023, that the Supreme Court is "at the lowest ebb" in terms of public opinion of their honesty and integrity. (Video: Washington Post Live)
In June, Durbin tried to pass Whitehouse’s stalled bill codifying for the Supreme Court a code of conduct, gifts reporting, recusal standards and disclosures about friend of the court briefs. But Republicans scuttled the effort to move the bill through “unanimous consent.”
Robert Ray, the former independent counsel who succeeded Ken Starr in the Whitewater investigation, said the push for ethics overhaul is really a political effort by Democrats to derail a court that has handed conservatives a string of major victories. He said some of the provisions of the bill improperly impinge on judicial authority and are likely unconstitutional.
Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on June 25 introduced a bill to cap gifts to justices at $50, the same limit in place for Congress. They also shot a letter off to Roberts demanding he answer questions about what he is doing to address the ethics concerns. More recently, Ocasio-Cortez floated a plan to impeach justices, and House Democrats floated a constitutional amendment to overturn the court’s presidential immunity decision.
Gabe Roth, the executive director of the court oversight group Fix the Court, said he sees the scrutiny directed at the court as a positive step.
“I’ve long believed that Supreme Court justices should be treated like politicians when it comes to assessing their moral character and potential entanglements,” Roth said. “We have moved to that place, and I think that’s positive given how powerful the justices are.”
Much of the public sees the Supreme Court as political, not impartial, even as the court’s defenders say its critics simply oppose the conservative majority.
By Justin Jouvenal, The Washington Post
The Supreme Court term that ended this week played out on a split screen: The justices issued blockbuster rulings that pushed the law sharply to the right, while outside the court some justices were buffeted by new ethics allegations that stoked questions from critics about their impartiality.
The dynamics may not seem related, but legal experts say they have mutually reinforced doubts among a large swath of the country over whether the nation’s highest court can be a neutral interpreter of the law.
“They’ve got a potential legitimacy problem,” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and expert on judicial ethics. “The traditional notion that we will accept the results of the court whether we agree with it or not … is decreasingly the case. A lot of the ethics problems the court confronts fuel the perception that it is an organization more political than legal.”
For a second term, headlines have centered on Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., with reports in recent months about politically charged flags and lavish free travel. Democrats and some independent experts have called in vain for the two justices to recuse from certain high-profile cases, and for a new court ethics overhaul.
The latter demand will almost certainly remain stalled in Congress unless Democrats wrest control of both chambers in the November election and retain control of the White House. And the outcome of the presidential contest will determine whether any retirements from the court lead to a strengthening or weakening of the 6-3 conservative-liberal split in coming years.
The increasingly partisan rancor surrounding the court was underscored by a sting of sorts at a recent Supreme Court Historical Society dinner — the type of hardball political tactic more commonly seen on the campaign trail. A liberal activist secretly recorded Alito and his wife answering politically leading questions, then released the recording on social media for all to behold.
Meanwhile, the final weeks of the term saw a series of major rulings on presidential immunity, the federal regulatory state and other topics that produced a dramatic lurch rightward — and were seen by critics as deeply political.
Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who clerked decades ago for then-Justice David H. Souter, said the decisions will probably increase the public perception that the justices are partisan, especially as lower courts start to make rulings that reflect new limits on agency power and on prosecuting alleged wrongdoing by former president Donald Trump.
“When we start seeing the consequences of some of these recent decisions like overruling Chevron and presidential immunity, I think its reputation will go down even further,” said Roosevelt, using the nickname for the decision on the federal regulatory state.
Several experts said the court needs to fully embrace an ethics overhaul to help reassure the public.
The Supreme Court released a long-awaited code of conduct early in the term, hoping to put to rest controversies such as the revelation last year that Thomas and Alito took unreported trips funded by wealthy benefactors. Thomas also faced calls to recuse himself from election-related cases because his wife had moved to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In announcing the code, the court said it wanted to correct a public misunderstanding “that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” But experts in judicial ethics panned the lack of an enforcement mechanism or specificity about lavish gifts or when a justice should recuse.
Renee Knake Jefferson, a University of Houston Law Center professor specializing in legal ethics, called the code “ceremonial at best.”
“It does not address the issues that were very concerning to the public,” she said.
Controversy flared anew in May.
The New York Times reported an upside-down American flag had flown at Alito’s Virginia home in the weeks after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The symbol has a long history as a sign of distress in the military and has been used by protesters of various political stripes, but at the time it had also been adopted by supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement and was flown by some rioters at the Capitol.
Alito said his wife, Martha-Ann, had raised the flag following a dispute with a neighbor. The neighbor said in an interview the disagreement began in December 2020 when Martha-Ann Alito made comments about political signs in her yard disparaging Trump and Republicans.
Days after the initial Times report, the newspaper revealed an “Appeal to Heaven” flag adopted by Christian nationalists was flying at Alito’s vacation home on the New Jersey shore last summer.
Democrats and judicial ethics experts said the flags raised questions about Alito’s impartiality. He rejected their calls to recuse from two high-profile cases: on presidential immunity and whether prosecutors improperly charged a Jan. 6 defendant with obstruction.
“As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down, but for several days, she refused,” Alito wrote of the Virginia flag in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee members Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), explaining why he did not believe the incidents met the criteria for him to sit out a case. “My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also refused a call to meet with Democratic senators to discuss ethics, citing the separation of powers and the need for judicial independence.
Alito soon found himself mired in controversy again, when the liberal activist released the recording she made while posing as a Catholic conservative at the historical society event in June. Alito is heard saying “one side or the other is going to win” the nation’s polarized politics and seeming to endorse the activist’s contention that the nation needs to return to “godliness.”
Martha-Ann Alito is heard talking about the flag controversy and disparaging the flying of pro-LGBTQ Pride flags.
That same month, Thomas disclosed for the first time that his lodging during two 2019 trips was paid for by Texas billionaire and Republican donor Harlan Crow. The Senate Judiciary Committee also revealed three additional Thomas plane trips between 2017 and 2021 that were funded by Crow and that Thomas’s attorney has said he was not required to report.
Alito and Thomas did not respond to requests for comment this week.
As the ethics controversies piled up, momentum built among Democrats for Congress to take action on ethics legislation.
While praising steps already taken by the court, Whitehouse called for an independent watchdog that has the authority to investigate alleged violations and enforce the code. He pointed to discrepancies in Alito’s story about the upside-down American flag as a situation that merited a deeper look.
“They are still the only nine people in American government who don’t have to answer basic questions about what the facts are when basic ethics questions get raised,” Whitehouse said of the justices.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on July 13, 2023, that the Supreme Court is "at the lowest ebb" in terms of public opinion of their honesty and integrity. (Video: Washington Post Live)
In June, Durbin tried to pass Whitehouse’s stalled bill codifying for the Supreme Court a code of conduct, gifts reporting, recusal standards and disclosures about friend of the court briefs. But Republicans scuttled the effort to move the bill through “unanimous consent.”
Robert Ray, the former independent counsel who succeeded Ken Starr in the Whitewater investigation, said the push for ethics overhaul is really a political effort by Democrats to derail a court that has handed conservatives a string of major victories. He said some of the provisions of the bill improperly impinge on judicial authority and are likely unconstitutional.
Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on June 25 introduced a bill to cap gifts to justices at $50, the same limit in place for Congress. They also shot a letter off to Roberts demanding he answer questions about what he is doing to address the ethics concerns. More recently, Ocasio-Cortez floated a plan to impeach justices, and House Democrats floated a constitutional amendment to overturn the court’s presidential immunity decision.
Gabe Roth, the executive director of the court oversight group Fix the Court, said he sees the scrutiny directed at the court as a positive step.
“I’ve long believed that Supreme Court justices should be treated like politicians when it comes to assessing their moral character and potential entanglements,” Roth said. “We have moved to that place, and I think that’s positive given how powerful the justices are.”
LET US DECLARE INDEPENDENCE FROM THE MONARCHIAL PRESIDENCY
Two centuries after defeating King George III, we must issue a new Declaration of Independence.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
On this Independence Day 2024, we find ourselves, as a nation, back under a monarchy’s hold on America. Credit this astonishing turn of events to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., plus the Supreme Court’s five other royalists who joined him to fashion a decision that bestows upon the American president immunity from accountability for “official” acts that might leave him open for prosecution were he an ordinary citizen. In her ferocious dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority’s decision makes the president a “king above the law.” So here we are, having defeated King George III in 1783, only to end up two centuries later with an American sovereign with powers that would make previous tyrants drool.
Were that not enough, the country is faced with the prospect of twice-impeached felon and former president Donald Trump returning to the White House. The thought of the mendacious, narcisstic, vengeful Trump with those powers is terrifying. Dismiss the notion that “there’s no telling what he would do.” We know better. Trump and his inner circle have told us what he’ll do.
It falls to people who cherish and live by democratic values to stave off that danger. The courts won’t do it. President Biden, healthy or otherwise, cannot do it by himself. Only we, the people, can do what needs doing, to wit: reject Trump and all that he stands for at the polls on Election Day.
Yes, votes are there to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, as they were in the previous presidential election. Trump, simply put, can’t win with only his base of MAGA supporters and fellow travelers, no matter how rabid they are.
Don’t get hung up for the moment on who should be the Democratic standard-bearer. There’s plenty of time to get that sorted out. And there is a rich field of possibilities, should Biden, upon reflection and after broad consultations regarding his health and ability to serve, decide that now is the time to hand on the torch to an able successor.
Better to keep focused, and spread the word to family, friends and neighbors, about the world that awaits them if Trump takes the oath of office.
Prosecutions will warp into persecutions. Political foes, real and imagined, in the press and online and in the politicians’ suites, will be subjected to Trump’s whims and power. Pardons and clemency will rain down like manna on Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists. Russian President Vladimir Putin will once again have a friend in the White House and an ally against NATO and the West. Immigrants and people from Muslim-majority countries will face an aggressively hostile federal government. Civil rights and LGBTQ+ progress will grind to a halt. The economy will function on behalf of the haves, to the detriment of the have-nots and the left-out. Oh, sure, Trump will go all out to create “Black jobs” — his racist reference to work left for people of color to perform.
So, right now and until Election Day, no matter who is at the top of the ticket, concentrate on defeating Trump and regaining Democratic control of the House and preventing a GOP takeover in the Senate. Visualize Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress. Can you imagine a Republican House doing anything to rein Trump in? A Republican Senate doing anything but acquiescing to any underqualified, politically subservient appointment he chooses to make? Can mules whistle? Armed with Roberts’s ruling, dictator Trump could operate with impunity.
Thus, here we are on the Fourth of July with democracy on the line.
Let this be the day a second Declaration for Independence is launched, proclaimed on behalf of people who reject the notion of an imperial president, and who hold dear democratic ideals and principles. Let us pledge to defend it with our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Let us begin today.
Two centuries after defeating King George III, we must issue a new Declaration of Independence.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
On this Independence Day 2024, we find ourselves, as a nation, back under a monarchy’s hold on America. Credit this astonishing turn of events to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., plus the Supreme Court’s five other royalists who joined him to fashion a decision that bestows upon the American president immunity from accountability for “official” acts that might leave him open for prosecution were he an ordinary citizen. In her ferocious dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority’s decision makes the president a “king above the law.” So here we are, having defeated King George III in 1783, only to end up two centuries later with an American sovereign with powers that would make previous tyrants drool.
Were that not enough, the country is faced with the prospect of twice-impeached felon and former president Donald Trump returning to the White House. The thought of the mendacious, narcisstic, vengeful Trump with those powers is terrifying. Dismiss the notion that “there’s no telling what he would do.” We know better. Trump and his inner circle have told us what he’ll do.
It falls to people who cherish and live by democratic values to stave off that danger. The courts won’t do it. President Biden, healthy or otherwise, cannot do it by himself. Only we, the people, can do what needs doing, to wit: reject Trump and all that he stands for at the polls on Election Day.
Yes, votes are there to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, as they were in the previous presidential election. Trump, simply put, can’t win with only his base of MAGA supporters and fellow travelers, no matter how rabid they are.
Don’t get hung up for the moment on who should be the Democratic standard-bearer. There’s plenty of time to get that sorted out. And there is a rich field of possibilities, should Biden, upon reflection and after broad consultations regarding his health and ability to serve, decide that now is the time to hand on the torch to an able successor.
Better to keep focused, and spread the word to family, friends and neighbors, about the world that awaits them if Trump takes the oath of office.
Prosecutions will warp into persecutions. Political foes, real and imagined, in the press and online and in the politicians’ suites, will be subjected to Trump’s whims and power. Pardons and clemency will rain down like manna on Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists. Russian President Vladimir Putin will once again have a friend in the White House and an ally against NATO and the West. Immigrants and people from Muslim-majority countries will face an aggressively hostile federal government. Civil rights and LGBTQ+ progress will grind to a halt. The economy will function on behalf of the haves, to the detriment of the have-nots and the left-out. Oh, sure, Trump will go all out to create “Black jobs” — his racist reference to work left for people of color to perform.
So, right now and until Election Day, no matter who is at the top of the ticket, concentrate on defeating Trump and regaining Democratic control of the House and preventing a GOP takeover in the Senate. Visualize Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress. Can you imagine a Republican House doing anything to rein Trump in? A Republican Senate doing anything but acquiescing to any underqualified, politically subservient appointment he chooses to make? Can mules whistle? Armed with Roberts’s ruling, dictator Trump could operate with impunity.
Thus, here we are on the Fourth of July with democracy on the line.
Let this be the day a second Declaration for Independence is launched, proclaimed on behalf of people who reject the notion of an imperial president, and who hold dear democratic ideals and principles. Let us pledge to defend it with our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Let us begin today.
THE SUPREME COURT AFFIRMS TRUMP’S MONARCHICAL VISION OF THE PRESIDENCY, PLACING THE OVAL OFFICE ABOVE THE LAW
The immediate impact of the justices' decision gives Trump more time to avoid criminal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
The United States has thrived for nearly 250 years under the core principle that no one is above the law. But a lopsided U.S. Supreme Court just gave Donald Trump and future presidents a license to cheat, steal, or worse.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the court ruled that presidents have “absolute” immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts in office, but no immunity for unofficial acts.
The long-term impact upends the legal landscape for what presidents can and can’t do in office, effectively giving them cover from acts that previously could be considered crimes.
The immediate impact buys Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in November, more time from criminal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Trump already delayed the criminal proceedings by claiming “absolute immunity” from acts while he was president.
That legal theory seemed like a long shot designed to stall the trial, which was scheduled to begin on March 4. Two lower courts — guided by the long-standing belief that the United States was a “government of laws, not of men” — rejected the argument. Most legal scholars thought the Supreme Court would do the same.
But an emboldened conservative high court — which includes three Trump appointees and has been taking a sledgehammer to other precedents — decided to take up the case. In doing so, the court stretched out the scheduling of oral arguments and then waited until the last day of its term to announce its decision.
The ruling, in turn, could weaken the case against Trump and give the former president even more time by sending the matter back to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will have to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine which charges in the special counsel’s indictment of Trump constitute official acts.
Trump could then appeal any future decisions, adding further delays. The legal battle will surely drag out well past the November presidential election. If Trump wins, he could then order the U.S. Justice Department to drop the case.
The ruling could even impede the state case against Trump for trying to overturn the results in Georgia. Trump’s lawyers have argued the case should be dismissed on immunity grounds, as well.
The ruling adds to the stakes of the November election as to whether Trump will be held accountable for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or for a separate criminal indictment for taking classified documents.
During his first term, Trump trampled on the norms of the presidency. Now, with the help of the conservative justices, Trump has essentially rewritten the laws for presidents.
Going forward, the decision in Trump v. United States opens the door for presidents to essentially abuse their power in office — provided they make sure it is an official act. During the oral arguments, the justices discussed some extreme examples of what presidents could do if granted immunity.
“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military to assassinate him, is that within his official acts to which he has immunity?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked.
Trump’s lawyer responded: “That could well be an official act.”
Justice Elena Kagan asked if a president would be immune from prosecution if they sold the country’s nuclear secrets to a foreign power. Trump’s lawyer argued, “Likely not immune,” before adding a chilling qualifier. “Now, if it’s structured as an official act, he’d have to be impeached and convicted first.”
Sotomayor wrote a strong dissent that made clear the ruling dramatically expanded the power of all presidents by granting immunity for “official acts,” such as assassinating a political rival or taking a bribe in exchange for a pardon.
Sotomayor said the court “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president,” adding that the immunity power “now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation.”
The Founding Fathers went to great lengths to create a government with checks and balances to ensure presidents were not treated as kings or dictators. The Supreme Court has undermined that concept by carving out special protection for presidents.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said immunity was “required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch, and to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution.” But until Trump came along, presidents were able to carry out their duties without protection from committing crimes.
Roberts added that a president “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”
Justice Clarence Thomas tried to push the envelope further in a concurring opinion that would essentially halt the federal prosecutions of Trump. Thomas’ opinion questioned if the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was even appropriate: “If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people.”
None of the other eight justices joined Thomas in his concurring opinion, but that is an issue Judge Aileen Cannon is mulling in Trump’s classified documents case.
It is outrageous that Thomas even participated in the case, given his wife’s direct contract with the Trump White House in the efforts to overturn the election. Most justices with any sense of impartiality would have recused themselves.
The same goes for Justice Samuel Alito, who gave the appearance of siding with Trump’s election fraud claims by flying flags at his homes in Virginia and New Jersey in support of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Alito blamed his wife for putting up the flags, which did little to quell the impartiality concerns.
The Supreme Court has gone off the rails providing cover to Trump, who continues to bend the Constitution to his will. If elected, an unbound Trump will be above the law.
Sotomayor concluded her dissent with a stark warning all voters should heed come November: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”
The immediate impact of the justices' decision gives Trump more time to avoid criminal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
The United States has thrived for nearly 250 years under the core principle that no one is above the law. But a lopsided U.S. Supreme Court just gave Donald Trump and future presidents a license to cheat, steal, or worse.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the court ruled that presidents have “absolute” immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts in office, but no immunity for unofficial acts.
The long-term impact upends the legal landscape for what presidents can and can’t do in office, effectively giving them cover from acts that previously could be considered crimes.
The immediate impact buys Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in November, more time from criminal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Trump already delayed the criminal proceedings by claiming “absolute immunity” from acts while he was president.
That legal theory seemed like a long shot designed to stall the trial, which was scheduled to begin on March 4. Two lower courts — guided by the long-standing belief that the United States was a “government of laws, not of men” — rejected the argument. Most legal scholars thought the Supreme Court would do the same.
But an emboldened conservative high court — which includes three Trump appointees and has been taking a sledgehammer to other precedents — decided to take up the case. In doing so, the court stretched out the scheduling of oral arguments and then waited until the last day of its term to announce its decision.
The ruling, in turn, could weaken the case against Trump and give the former president even more time by sending the matter back to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will have to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine which charges in the special counsel’s indictment of Trump constitute official acts.
Trump could then appeal any future decisions, adding further delays. The legal battle will surely drag out well past the November presidential election. If Trump wins, he could then order the U.S. Justice Department to drop the case.
The ruling could even impede the state case against Trump for trying to overturn the results in Georgia. Trump’s lawyers have argued the case should be dismissed on immunity grounds, as well.
The ruling adds to the stakes of the November election as to whether Trump will be held accountable for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or for a separate criminal indictment for taking classified documents.
During his first term, Trump trampled on the norms of the presidency. Now, with the help of the conservative justices, Trump has essentially rewritten the laws for presidents.
Going forward, the decision in Trump v. United States opens the door for presidents to essentially abuse their power in office — provided they make sure it is an official act. During the oral arguments, the justices discussed some extreme examples of what presidents could do if granted immunity.
“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military to assassinate him, is that within his official acts to which he has immunity?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked.
Trump’s lawyer responded: “That could well be an official act.”
Justice Elena Kagan asked if a president would be immune from prosecution if they sold the country’s nuclear secrets to a foreign power. Trump’s lawyer argued, “Likely not immune,” before adding a chilling qualifier. “Now, if it’s structured as an official act, he’d have to be impeached and convicted first.”
Sotomayor wrote a strong dissent that made clear the ruling dramatically expanded the power of all presidents by granting immunity for “official acts,” such as assassinating a political rival or taking a bribe in exchange for a pardon.
Sotomayor said the court “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president,” adding that the immunity power “now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation.”
The Founding Fathers went to great lengths to create a government with checks and balances to ensure presidents were not treated as kings or dictators. The Supreme Court has undermined that concept by carving out special protection for presidents.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said immunity was “required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch, and to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution.” But until Trump came along, presidents were able to carry out their duties without protection from committing crimes.
Roberts added that a president “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.”
Justice Clarence Thomas tried to push the envelope further in a concurring opinion that would essentially halt the federal prosecutions of Trump. Thomas’ opinion questioned if the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was even appropriate: “If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people.”
None of the other eight justices joined Thomas in his concurring opinion, but that is an issue Judge Aileen Cannon is mulling in Trump’s classified documents case.
It is outrageous that Thomas even participated in the case, given his wife’s direct contract with the Trump White House in the efforts to overturn the election. Most justices with any sense of impartiality would have recused themselves.
The same goes for Justice Samuel Alito, who gave the appearance of siding with Trump’s election fraud claims by flying flags at his homes in Virginia and New Jersey in support of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Alito blamed his wife for putting up the flags, which did little to quell the impartiality concerns.
The Supreme Court has gone off the rails providing cover to Trump, who continues to bend the Constitution to his will. If elected, an unbound Trump will be above the law.
Sotomayor concluded her dissent with a stark warning all voters should heed come November: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR DISSENT: ‘THE PRESIDENT IS NOW A KING ABOVE THE LAW’
Liberal justices said the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling makes even corrupt presidents immune from criminal prosecution.
By Perry Stein, The Washington Post
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices made clear Monday that they view the ruling by their conservative colleagues to extend presidential immunity to Donald Trump’s official acts as a threat to democracy with “disastrous consequences.”
The “extraordinary rule has no basis in law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a scathing 29-page dissent that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The ruling, Sotomayor wrote, makes a “mockery of the principle” that no one is above the law.
Sotomayor spent about 25 minutes reading her dissent from the bench Monday, a strong sign of her opposition to the ruling that came on the final day of the high court’s term. She said the ruling disregards motive and allows a president who wields power for even the most corrupt purposes to be immune from criminal prosecution.
“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she concluded.
Jackson also wrote separately.
The court’s conservative supermajority found that Trump — and future presidents — are immune from prosecution for official actions taken while in the White House, but that there is no immunity for vaguely defined unofficial acts.
It was a sweeping decision that expanded the definition of presidential powers in this country and narrowed the scope of Trump’s D.C. election interference trial, while adding what will probably be months of delay to the case.
Sotomayor warned that a president is now immune from criminal prosecution if he orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, or if he organizes a coup to hold on to political power.
If he takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon?
“Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” the dissent reads.
“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” Sotomayor continued. “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
She accused the majority of ignoring legal precedent and endorsing an “expansive vision of Presidential immunity” that goes far beyond what the founders, the executive branch — and even Trump’s lawyers — have ever recognized.
Particularly “nonsensical,” Sotomayor wrote, was the ruling that prosecutors could not use Trump’s official acts as evidence in a trial — even if the official acts are related to allegations around unofficial acts.
The indictment against Trump, for example, alleges that he exploited the power of his own Justice Department to convince states to replace their legitimate 2020 electors with Trump’s fraudulent electors. The justices ruled Monday that Trump’s conversations with his Justice Department officials would qualify as official acts and could not be used as evidence or to establish motive.
“Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force,” Sotomayor wrote, adding that the ruling narrows the line between official acts and unofficial ones so much that it makes prosecuting an unofficial act nearly impossible. “Under scrutiny, its arguments crumble.”
“Today’s Court, however, has replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts,” Sotomayor wrote.
Jackson, a former public defender, wrote that there are plenty of protections already in place for a criminal defendant facing trial — such as the presumption of innocence until proved guilty or the burden of prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
This model applies to every criminal defendant in the country, she wrote, and, up until the ruling Monday, the president of the United States.
Jackson wore a chunky white, beaded statement necklace on the bench Monday, similar to the dissent collars that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore to show disagreement.
In her dissent, she accused the majority of abandoning the “individual accountability model” and introducing a new “Presidential accountability model” that authorizes the judicial branch to exempt the president from punishment under law.
“The majority of my colleagues seem to have put their trust in our Court’s ability to prevent Presidents from becoming Kings through case-by-case application of the indeterminate standards of their new Presidential accountability paradigm,” Jackson wrote. “I fear that they are wrong.
Liberal justices said the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling makes even corrupt presidents immune from criminal prosecution.
By Perry Stein, The Washington Post
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices made clear Monday that they view the ruling by their conservative colleagues to extend presidential immunity to Donald Trump’s official acts as a threat to democracy with “disastrous consequences.”
The “extraordinary rule has no basis in law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a scathing 29-page dissent that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The ruling, Sotomayor wrote, makes a “mockery of the principle” that no one is above the law.
Sotomayor spent about 25 minutes reading her dissent from the bench Monday, a strong sign of her opposition to the ruling that came on the final day of the high court’s term. She said the ruling disregards motive and allows a president who wields power for even the most corrupt purposes to be immune from criminal prosecution.
“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she concluded.
Jackson also wrote separately.
The court’s conservative supermajority found that Trump — and future presidents — are immune from prosecution for official actions taken while in the White House, but that there is no immunity for vaguely defined unofficial acts.
It was a sweeping decision that expanded the definition of presidential powers in this country and narrowed the scope of Trump’s D.C. election interference trial, while adding what will probably be months of delay to the case.
Sotomayor warned that a president is now immune from criminal prosecution if he orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, or if he organizes a coup to hold on to political power.
If he takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon?
“Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” the dissent reads.
“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” Sotomayor continued. “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
She accused the majority of ignoring legal precedent and endorsing an “expansive vision of Presidential immunity” that goes far beyond what the founders, the executive branch — and even Trump’s lawyers — have ever recognized.
Particularly “nonsensical,” Sotomayor wrote, was the ruling that prosecutors could not use Trump’s official acts as evidence in a trial — even if the official acts are related to allegations around unofficial acts.
The indictment against Trump, for example, alleges that he exploited the power of his own Justice Department to convince states to replace their legitimate 2020 electors with Trump’s fraudulent electors. The justices ruled Monday that Trump’s conversations with his Justice Department officials would qualify as official acts and could not be used as evidence or to establish motive.
“Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force,” Sotomayor wrote, adding that the ruling narrows the line between official acts and unofficial ones so much that it makes prosecuting an unofficial act nearly impossible. “Under scrutiny, its arguments crumble.”
“Today’s Court, however, has replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts,” Sotomayor wrote.
Jackson, a former public defender, wrote that there are plenty of protections already in place for a criminal defendant facing trial — such as the presumption of innocence until proved guilty or the burden of prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
This model applies to every criminal defendant in the country, she wrote, and, up until the ruling Monday, the president of the United States.
Jackson wore a chunky white, beaded statement necklace on the bench Monday, similar to the dissent collars that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore to show disagreement.
In her dissent, she accused the majority of abandoning the “individual accountability model” and introducing a new “Presidential accountability model” that authorizes the judicial branch to exempt the president from punishment under law.
“The majority of my colleagues seem to have put their trust in our Court’s ability to prevent Presidents from becoming Kings through case-by-case application of the indeterminate standards of their new Presidential accountability paradigm,” Jackson wrote. “I fear that they are wrong.
THE SUPREME COURT GIVES A FREE PASS TO TRUMP AND FUTURE PRESIDENTS
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In a stunning finale to its term on Monday morning, the Supreme Court delivered a gift of inestimable worth to Donald Trump and all future presidents who intend to violate the law and their oaths to the Constitution. In a 6-to-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority said that official acts that are central to the presidency are given “absolute immunity” from prosecution. Other acts, even those that reach to the outer edge of a president’s official duties, are “presumptively immune,” the court said, making them much harder to be prosecuted.
The immediate effect of the decision — one of the most consequential ever produced by the court on the subject of presidential powers and constitutional government — was to delay indefinitely the prosecution of Mr. Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The vote this fall will now almost certainly move forward with no legal accountability for that act. But the long-term danger to the Constitution and the American government is even more serious, particularly given the real possibility that Mr. Trump, whose recent criminal conviction in New York is only the latest demonstration of his contempt for legal boundaries, could be returned to office in just a few months.
As of Monday, the bedrock principle that no one is above the law has been set aside. In the very week that the nation celebrates its founding, the court undermined the reason for the American Revolution by giving presidents what one dissenting justice called a “law-free zone” in which to act, taking a step toward restoring the monarchy that the Declaration of Independence rejected. Presidents can still be impeached for their crimes in office, but it is hard to see how they can ever be prosecuted. They can take once-unimaginable actions, like encouraging an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with no fear of later going to jail or being held legally accountable.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a blistering dissent along with the other two liberal justices, the ruling creates a series of “nightmare scenarios” for what a president is now allowed to do. “Orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
She added: “The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, significantly raises the stakes of the coming election. Not only does it make clear the importance of a president’s appointments to the Supreme Court — all three of Mr. Trump’s nominees voted to give him the immunity he sought — but it also hands Mr. Trump carte blanche to act even more determinedly in a second term than he did in his first. The chief justice explicitly said that Mr. Trump’s speech and tweets on Jan. 6, 2021, urging his supporters to go to the Capitol and disrupt the certification of the vote, could well be protected as a standard use of the presidential bully pulpit. The court sent the case back to the district court to make factual determinations on that and other questions, a process that, including appeals, will take months if not longer.
And yet we know that Mr. Trump’s speech and tweets led to a violent insurrection. Now that Mr. Trump knows he could get away with that, how much worse would things get in a second term? The most urgent danger is his possible abuse of the legal system, because as the dissent suggests, if every conversation between the president and the Justice Department is considered a protected official act, there is no limit to the kinds of illegal conduct that could be plotted, even fabricating evidence.
What doesn’t count as an official act? The justices in the majority would not say, but it is hard to identify any clear guiding principle — perhaps because they couldn’t find any.
Prior to this decision, there was no grant of criminal immunity to presidents; though the authors of the Constitution gave a form of that privilege to members of Congress, they declined to do so for the chief executive. For a conservative majority that pretends to rely on historical precedent, the newly created standard is remarkable for its lack of basis in the Constitution, law or any precedent of the court. It was made up out of thin air.
The product of the majority’s invention runs counter to the entire notion of a government based on the rule of law. It also runs counter to the long-settled understanding of a president’s exposure to criminal prosecution, regardless of whether his acts were considered “official.” As Justice Sotomayor pointed out, why would Richard Nixon have accepted a pardon for his role in the Watergate scandal if not because everyone agreed that he could otherwise be prosecuted for his actions?
This same understanding was clear during Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, in 2021, when his lawyers insisted to senators that acquitting Mr. Trump for his actions on and around Jan. 6 would not leave him “in any way above the law.” They acknowledged that a former president “is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Not any more. In Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words, it’s “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance and the normal operations of our government.”
Chief Justice Roberts tried to dismiss the concerns about the implications of the court’s ruling by saying that “the president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law.”
But unofficial acts, like a campaign speech, were never at the core of this dispute. Even Mr. Trump’s attorneys conceded he was not immune from prosecution for unofficial acts. The problem is that the scope of what is “official,” according to this court, has no definition. The majority refused to label any of Mr. Trump’s actions as clearly unofficial, even actions that Mr. Trump’s own attorneys conceded were not official, such as conspiring to organize fraudulent slates of electors.
“The courts have spoken,” Mr. Trump said after the ruling. As always, the only legitimate outcomes Mr. Trump recognizes in American government are the ones that benefit him personally. This is the attitude he has promised to bring to the 2024 election. If he loses, he has already said it will be because of fraud. If he wins, he will take the message the court gave him on Monday and act accordingly. And the country will undoubtedly be left worse off for it.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In a stunning finale to its term on Monday morning, the Supreme Court delivered a gift of inestimable worth to Donald Trump and all future presidents who intend to violate the law and their oaths to the Constitution. In a 6-to-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority said that official acts that are central to the presidency are given “absolute immunity” from prosecution. Other acts, even those that reach to the outer edge of a president’s official duties, are “presumptively immune,” the court said, making them much harder to be prosecuted.
The immediate effect of the decision — one of the most consequential ever produced by the court on the subject of presidential powers and constitutional government — was to delay indefinitely the prosecution of Mr. Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The vote this fall will now almost certainly move forward with no legal accountability for that act. But the long-term danger to the Constitution and the American government is even more serious, particularly given the real possibility that Mr. Trump, whose recent criminal conviction in New York is only the latest demonstration of his contempt for legal boundaries, could be returned to office in just a few months.
As of Monday, the bedrock principle that no one is above the law has been set aside. In the very week that the nation celebrates its founding, the court undermined the reason for the American Revolution by giving presidents what one dissenting justice called a “law-free zone” in which to act, taking a step toward restoring the monarchy that the Declaration of Independence rejected. Presidents can still be impeached for their crimes in office, but it is hard to see how they can ever be prosecuted. They can take once-unimaginable actions, like encouraging an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with no fear of later going to jail or being held legally accountable.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a blistering dissent along with the other two liberal justices, the ruling creates a series of “nightmare scenarios” for what a president is now allowed to do. “Orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
She added: “The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, significantly raises the stakes of the coming election. Not only does it make clear the importance of a president’s appointments to the Supreme Court — all three of Mr. Trump’s nominees voted to give him the immunity he sought — but it also hands Mr. Trump carte blanche to act even more determinedly in a second term than he did in his first. The chief justice explicitly said that Mr. Trump’s speech and tweets on Jan. 6, 2021, urging his supporters to go to the Capitol and disrupt the certification of the vote, could well be protected as a standard use of the presidential bully pulpit. The court sent the case back to the district court to make factual determinations on that and other questions, a process that, including appeals, will take months if not longer.
And yet we know that Mr. Trump’s speech and tweets led to a violent insurrection. Now that Mr. Trump knows he could get away with that, how much worse would things get in a second term? The most urgent danger is his possible abuse of the legal system, because as the dissent suggests, if every conversation between the president and the Justice Department is considered a protected official act, there is no limit to the kinds of illegal conduct that could be plotted, even fabricating evidence.
What doesn’t count as an official act? The justices in the majority would not say, but it is hard to identify any clear guiding principle — perhaps because they couldn’t find any.
Prior to this decision, there was no grant of criminal immunity to presidents; though the authors of the Constitution gave a form of that privilege to members of Congress, they declined to do so for the chief executive. For a conservative majority that pretends to rely on historical precedent, the newly created standard is remarkable for its lack of basis in the Constitution, law or any precedent of the court. It was made up out of thin air.
The product of the majority’s invention runs counter to the entire notion of a government based on the rule of law. It also runs counter to the long-settled understanding of a president’s exposure to criminal prosecution, regardless of whether his acts were considered “official.” As Justice Sotomayor pointed out, why would Richard Nixon have accepted a pardon for his role in the Watergate scandal if not because everyone agreed that he could otherwise be prosecuted for his actions?
This same understanding was clear during Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, in 2021, when his lawyers insisted to senators that acquitting Mr. Trump for his actions on and around Jan. 6 would not leave him “in any way above the law.” They acknowledged that a former president “is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Not any more. In Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words, it’s “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance and the normal operations of our government.”
Chief Justice Roberts tried to dismiss the concerns about the implications of the court’s ruling by saying that “the president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law.”
But unofficial acts, like a campaign speech, were never at the core of this dispute. Even Mr. Trump’s attorneys conceded he was not immune from prosecution for unofficial acts. The problem is that the scope of what is “official,” according to this court, has no definition. The majority refused to label any of Mr. Trump’s actions as clearly unofficial, even actions that Mr. Trump’s own attorneys conceded were not official, such as conspiring to organize fraudulent slates of electors.
“The courts have spoken,” Mr. Trump said after the ruling. As always, the only legitimate outcomes Mr. Trump recognizes in American government are the ones that benefit him personally. This is the attitude he has promised to bring to the 2024 election. If he loses, he has already said it will be because of fraud. If he wins, he will take the message the court gave him on Monday and act accordingly. And the country will undoubtedly be left worse off for it.
GOD SAVE US FROM THIS DISHONORABLE COURT
An egregious, unconscionable ruling on presidential immunity from the Supreme Court.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
Ignore the majority’s protestations to the contrary. The Supreme Court has just ruled that the president is, in fact, above the law — absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for some conduct and “presumptively” immune for much else. This broad grant of immunity raises the stakes for November’s election immeasurably. The risk is no longer just that Donald Trump will evade responsibility for his actions as president, though that seems close to foreordained by Monday’s ruling. It is that he will be emboldened by the protection the court just gave him to behave even more unconscionably in a second term.
If I sound worked up, it is because a six-justice majority opinion in the aptly named Trump v. United States is bad beyond my wildest imaginings. The court might have had legitimate concerns about the implications of its rulings not for Trump but for future presidents who might be chilled in exercising their constitutional duties by the prospect of criminal prosecution, and the consequent “enfeebling of the Presidency.” It is correct that “we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.”
But the opinion, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., went way further than necessary to insulate Trump from prosecution — not simply before the election, which the court, by its lassitude, had nearly guaranteed, but forever, even in the event that President Biden wins reelection. The court could have carved out an oasis of protection for reasonable presidents engaging in reasonable executive actions. It chose not to.
Instead, as the dissenting liberal justices said, it has “replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts” and created “a law-free zone” protecting the president: immunity for deploying Seal Team 6 to assassinate a rival, for organizing a military coup to retain power, for taking a bribe in return for a pardon.
“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”
The majority accused the dissenters of striking “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today” and “fearmongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” It proclaimed that the president “is not above the law.”
Then it squarely placed him there.
An egregious, unconscionable ruling on presidential immunity from the Supreme Court.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
Ignore the majority’s protestations to the contrary. The Supreme Court has just ruled that the president is, in fact, above the law — absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for some conduct and “presumptively” immune for much else. This broad grant of immunity raises the stakes for November’s election immeasurably. The risk is no longer just that Donald Trump will evade responsibility for his actions as president, though that seems close to foreordained by Monday’s ruling. It is that he will be emboldened by the protection the court just gave him to behave even more unconscionably in a second term.
If I sound worked up, it is because a six-justice majority opinion in the aptly named Trump v. United States is bad beyond my wildest imaginings. The court might have had legitimate concerns about the implications of its rulings not for Trump but for future presidents who might be chilled in exercising their constitutional duties by the prospect of criminal prosecution, and the consequent “enfeebling of the Presidency.” It is correct that “we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.”
But the opinion, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., went way further than necessary to insulate Trump from prosecution — not simply before the election, which the court, by its lassitude, had nearly guaranteed, but forever, even in the event that President Biden wins reelection. The court could have carved out an oasis of protection for reasonable presidents engaging in reasonable executive actions. It chose not to.
Instead, as the dissenting liberal justices said, it has “replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts” and created “a law-free zone” protecting the president: immunity for deploying Seal Team 6 to assassinate a rival, for organizing a military coup to retain power, for taking a bribe in return for a pardon.
“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”
The majority accused the dissenters of striking “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today” and “fearmongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.” It proclaimed that the president “is not above the law.”
Then it squarely placed him there.
THE SUPREME COURT GIVES THE RIGHT A HUGE VICTORY OVER EXPERTISE
In rejecting the decades-long practice of deferring to government agencies, the conservative court gave the right a huge win in its push to sideline experts.
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
One of the defining characteristics of this moment in American politics is the widespread rejection of expertise and authority, particularly on the right.
That’s a useful lens for considering the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, handed down Friday. It is certainly a victory for business interests seeking to avoid regulation, but one that sits on a foundational belief that everyone can be an expert, so no one really is.
The decision in Loper Bright mirrors the court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In both decisions, the court actively chose to throw out decades-old precedent in service of an outcome fervently sought by conservative and right-wing activists. In Dobbs, it was curtailing abortion access. In Loper Bright, it was reducing the power of government agencies to implement laws.
At issue is the inevitable gap between laws as written and laws as implemented. Congress doesn’t and can’t think of every eventuality when creating new rules, so details are left to the agencies tasked with implementing them. Under the 1984 Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council decision, courts deferred to the judgment of those agencies when the implementation was challenged and congressional intent was unclear. Loper Bright undoes Chevron, explicitly.
“Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in Loper Bright’s majority opinion. “Courts do. The Framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment.”
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan offered examples of what those “ambiguities” often look like in practice. When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a particular protein? How should the “distinct population segments” of certain endangered animal populations be determined? What constitutes “natural quiet” and when has that quiet been “substantially restored”?
Kagan dug into the endangered animal question.
“Deciding when one squirrel population is ‘distinct’ from another (and thus warrants protection) requires knowing about species more than it does consulting a dictionary,” she wrote. “How much variation of what kind — geographic, genetic, morphological, or behavioral — should be required? A court could, if forced to, muddle through that issue and announce a result. But wouldn’t the Fish and Wildlife Service, with all its specialized expertise, do a better job of the task — of saying what, in the context of species protection, the open-ended term ‘distinct’ means?”
Answering such questions “does not mainly demand the interpretive skills courts possess,” she wrote at another point. “Instead, it demands one or more of: subject-matter expertise, long engagement with a regulatory scheme, and policy choice.”
She chastised the majority for assuming that it knew better on such issues.
“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” she wrote. She later added another pointed criticism: “In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law.”
“As if it did not have enough on its plate,” Kagan continued, “the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
The decision is unquestionably a function of the business-friendliness of the conservative majority. Revoking Chevron means that businesses frustrated by regulations don’t have to appeal to scientists and bureaucrats but can, instead, hire lawyers and talk to judges — terrain where their odds of success are much higher in part because the judges aren’t subject-matter experts.
It is also, of course, a reflection of the right’s long-standing effort to undercut the power of the federal government. But that sits alongside the more politically salient factor, that fundamental rejection of expertise.
There are two acute reasons that the right in particular has embraced an explicitly anti-expert worldview, shifted toward believing that anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s.
The first is that the internet has facilitated an approach to knowledge rooted in what people dig up for themselves. This is not necessarily detrimental, but, in practice, it means that people sift through information less for edification purposes than to seek out what reinforces their existing beliefs. Why should we listen to infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci’s assessment of the coronavirus when this podcast says that horse dewormer does the trick?
The other factor here is Donald Trump. Trump ran as the nongovernment guy, the guy who would uproot the “deep state” that did things like assess how best to implement regulations. He was an outsider, someone untainted by the expertise of having held office or served in government. (This, too, leveraged the right’s hostility to government — which is of course intertwined with hostility to paying taxes.) Then Trump won, and he made hostility to government and to expertise a hallmark of his government. He pushed for a way to make it easier to replace government experts with political loyalists. He’s the guy who made Fauci a target in the first place.
Given a choice between having a regulation assessed by bureaucrats steeped in knowledge of an issue or having a Trump-appointed judge do so, it seems clear whom those Republicans would pick.
In her dissent, Kagan quoted from the original Chevron ruling, offered back when more than half of Republicans told the American National Election Studies poll that they trusted the government to do the right thing all or most of the time. (In 2020, fewer than a quarter did.)
“Judges are not experts in the field,” that decision noted, “and are not part of either political branch of the Government.”
“Those were the days, when we knew what we are not,” Kagan observed. “When we knew that as between courts and agencies, Congress would usually think agencies the better choice to resolve the ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes. Because agencies are ‘experts in the field.’”
In rejecting the decades-long practice of deferring to government agencies, the conservative court gave the right a huge win in its push to sideline experts.
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
One of the defining characteristics of this moment in American politics is the widespread rejection of expertise and authority, particularly on the right.
That’s a useful lens for considering the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, handed down Friday. It is certainly a victory for business interests seeking to avoid regulation, but one that sits on a foundational belief that everyone can be an expert, so no one really is.
The decision in Loper Bright mirrors the court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In both decisions, the court actively chose to throw out decades-old precedent in service of an outcome fervently sought by conservative and right-wing activists. In Dobbs, it was curtailing abortion access. In Loper Bright, it was reducing the power of government agencies to implement laws.
At issue is the inevitable gap between laws as written and laws as implemented. Congress doesn’t and can’t think of every eventuality when creating new rules, so details are left to the agencies tasked with implementing them. Under the 1984 Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council decision, courts deferred to the judgment of those agencies when the implementation was challenged and congressional intent was unclear. Loper Bright undoes Chevron, explicitly.
“Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in Loper Bright’s majority opinion. “Courts do. The Framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment.”
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan offered examples of what those “ambiguities” often look like in practice. When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a particular protein? How should the “distinct population segments” of certain endangered animal populations be determined? What constitutes “natural quiet” and when has that quiet been “substantially restored”?
Kagan dug into the endangered animal question.
“Deciding when one squirrel population is ‘distinct’ from another (and thus warrants protection) requires knowing about species more than it does consulting a dictionary,” she wrote. “How much variation of what kind — geographic, genetic, morphological, or behavioral — should be required? A court could, if forced to, muddle through that issue and announce a result. But wouldn’t the Fish and Wildlife Service, with all its specialized expertise, do a better job of the task — of saying what, in the context of species protection, the open-ended term ‘distinct’ means?”
Answering such questions “does not mainly demand the interpretive skills courts possess,” she wrote at another point. “Instead, it demands one or more of: subject-matter expertise, long engagement with a regulatory scheme, and policy choice.”
She chastised the majority for assuming that it knew better on such issues.
“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” she wrote. She later added another pointed criticism: “In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law.”
“As if it did not have enough on its plate,” Kagan continued, “the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
The decision is unquestionably a function of the business-friendliness of the conservative majority. Revoking Chevron means that businesses frustrated by regulations don’t have to appeal to scientists and bureaucrats but can, instead, hire lawyers and talk to judges — terrain where their odds of success are much higher in part because the judges aren’t subject-matter experts.
It is also, of course, a reflection of the right’s long-standing effort to undercut the power of the federal government. But that sits alongside the more politically salient factor, that fundamental rejection of expertise.
There are two acute reasons that the right in particular has embraced an explicitly anti-expert worldview, shifted toward believing that anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s.
The first is that the internet has facilitated an approach to knowledge rooted in what people dig up for themselves. This is not necessarily detrimental, but, in practice, it means that people sift through information less for edification purposes than to seek out what reinforces their existing beliefs. Why should we listen to infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci’s assessment of the coronavirus when this podcast says that horse dewormer does the trick?
The other factor here is Donald Trump. Trump ran as the nongovernment guy, the guy who would uproot the “deep state” that did things like assess how best to implement regulations. He was an outsider, someone untainted by the expertise of having held office or served in government. (This, too, leveraged the right’s hostility to government — which is of course intertwined with hostility to paying taxes.) Then Trump won, and he made hostility to government and to expertise a hallmark of his government. He pushed for a way to make it easier to replace government experts with political loyalists. He’s the guy who made Fauci a target in the first place.
Given a choice between having a regulation assessed by bureaucrats steeped in knowledge of an issue or having a Trump-appointed judge do so, it seems clear whom those Republicans would pick.
In her dissent, Kagan quoted from the original Chevron ruling, offered back when more than half of Republicans told the American National Election Studies poll that they trusted the government to do the right thing all or most of the time. (In 2020, fewer than a quarter did.)
“Judges are not experts in the field,” that decision noted, “and are not part of either political branch of the Government.”
“Those were the days, when we knew what we are not,” Kagan observed. “When we knew that as between courts and agencies, Congress would usually think agencies the better choice to resolve the ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes. Because agencies are ‘experts in the field.’”
MAGA JUSTICES ALREADY GAVE TRUMP DE FACTO IMMUNITY — AND DISGRACED THE COURT
All Trump ever wanted was a delay.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Another day of Supreme Court decisions passed on Friday, another day without an opinion on presidential immunity. No better evidence of the bad faith and bias on the part of the right-wing Supreme Court majority exists than its foot-dragging on the decision concerning whether felon and former president Donald Trump can be prosecuted for an attempted insurrection. In deciding to delay the case for more than six months, the court itself commits election interference.
Trump’s strategy in his four criminal matters has always been to delay any reckoning beyond the election in hopes he would get elected, whereupon he could shut down federal prosecutions and put state cases on hold. Now, thanks to U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s near comedic stalling of Trump’s Espionage Act case and the Supreme Court’s equally blatant procrastination, Trump may get his way.
Cannon’s obvious favoritism toward Trump in entertaining specious arguments, holding nonsensical hearings (including a bizarre hours-long hearing featuring nonparty lawyers debating a well-settled issue) and delaying definitive decisions that could be appealed has been widely panned. No wonder her fellow judges — including the chief judge in her Southern District of Florida — wanted her to recuse. But is the Supreme Court’s majority any better?
“By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election,” writes longtime Democratic activist and consultant Michael Podhorzer. “Most importantly, when we finally do get the immunity ruling in the days or more likely weeks ahead, it will set the stage for a historic crisis.”
If Trump’s Jan. 6 trial speeds ahead, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan will be seen as meddling in the election; if she holds off until after the election, it will be clear the Supreme Court already did Trump’s bidding. “It didn’t have to be this way: had the Republican majority on the Court not intervened at the last minute, we would already have a verdict in the case,” Podhorzer writes. “We would also have a verdict if they had not rejected Jack Smith when he asked them to decide the same issues last December.”
Dragging this case out since Smith first asked the court to rule in December stands in sharp contrast to the Supreme Court’s swift decisions issued in other time-sensitive cases such as the Pentagon Papers (oral argument on June 26, 1971 decision on June 30) and Bush v. Gore (decided less than a week after the court agreed to hear it), the Trump 14th Amendment disqualification case (decided 25 days after oral argument) or the Watergate tapes case (the court took up the case May 31, 1974, heard oral argument on July 8, handed down its decision on July 24).
The delay is all the more outrageous because virtually no credible court watcher expects the Supreme Court to find that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity. Had the court simply affirmed the decisions of either the U.S. District Court in D.C. or the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the district court trial could have commenced in routine fashion. In whatever way the Supreme Court eventually decides to parse which acts are subject to immunity (rather than simply decide no immunity could exist in a coup attempt) and contrives a process for proceeding in the lower court, the justice system entitling the people as well as defendants to a timely trial will be undermined.
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe (who litigated Bush v. Gore) recently told Salon magazine: “It could have taken the case in December when the special counsel asked it to be heard directly, or they could have declined to take the case after the court of appeals quite comprehensively rejected Trump’s appeal, so the trial could be over by now. Instead, the court has dragged its feet.” And now it lets the clock run down on a case argued nearly two months ago.
Even if the Supreme Court rejects a sweeping absolute immunity claim, the court’s blatant procrastination will have signaled to the Aileen Cannons and other lower court judges that manipulation of justice simply through delay and procedural gimmicks is acceptable. The Supreme Court’s conduct opens the door to widespread and deliberate finagling with court schedules to benefit favored parties.
All of this comes amid the worst scandals in the court’s history, which raise serious doubt about the justices’ independence and integrity (e.g., Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s insurrectionist flag flying, Justice Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself despite his wife’s participation in the coup attempt, Thomas’ multiple financial disclosure violations and receipts of millions of dollars in gifts). These, coupled with obvious gamesmanship to benefit “their side,” will permanently besmirch this court.
The Supreme Court justices’ egregious conduct has only underscored that lifetime tenure leads to abuse of power. To preserve any hope of restoring the court’s integrity, voters, Congress and the president must insist on strict ethics reform, term limits and rebalancing of the court with additional justices who appreciate judicial norms and ethics. The current crew of justices can no longer be relied upon to render fair, impartial — or timely — justice.
All Trump ever wanted was a delay.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Another day of Supreme Court decisions passed on Friday, another day without an opinion on presidential immunity. No better evidence of the bad faith and bias on the part of the right-wing Supreme Court majority exists than its foot-dragging on the decision concerning whether felon and former president Donald Trump can be prosecuted for an attempted insurrection. In deciding to delay the case for more than six months, the court itself commits election interference.
Trump’s strategy in his four criminal matters has always been to delay any reckoning beyond the election in hopes he would get elected, whereupon he could shut down federal prosecutions and put state cases on hold. Now, thanks to U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s near comedic stalling of Trump’s Espionage Act case and the Supreme Court’s equally blatant procrastination, Trump may get his way.
Cannon’s obvious favoritism toward Trump in entertaining specious arguments, holding nonsensical hearings (including a bizarre hours-long hearing featuring nonparty lawyers debating a well-settled issue) and delaying definitive decisions that could be appealed has been widely panned. No wonder her fellow judges — including the chief judge in her Southern District of Florida — wanted her to recuse. But is the Supreme Court’s majority any better?
“By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election,” writes longtime Democratic activist and consultant Michael Podhorzer. “Most importantly, when we finally do get the immunity ruling in the days or more likely weeks ahead, it will set the stage for a historic crisis.”
If Trump’s Jan. 6 trial speeds ahead, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan will be seen as meddling in the election; if she holds off until after the election, it will be clear the Supreme Court already did Trump’s bidding. “It didn’t have to be this way: had the Republican majority on the Court not intervened at the last minute, we would already have a verdict in the case,” Podhorzer writes. “We would also have a verdict if they had not rejected Jack Smith when he asked them to decide the same issues last December.”
Dragging this case out since Smith first asked the court to rule in December stands in sharp contrast to the Supreme Court’s swift decisions issued in other time-sensitive cases such as the Pentagon Papers (oral argument on June 26, 1971 decision on June 30) and Bush v. Gore (decided less than a week after the court agreed to hear it), the Trump 14th Amendment disqualification case (decided 25 days after oral argument) or the Watergate tapes case (the court took up the case May 31, 1974, heard oral argument on July 8, handed down its decision on July 24).
The delay is all the more outrageous because virtually no credible court watcher expects the Supreme Court to find that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity. Had the court simply affirmed the decisions of either the U.S. District Court in D.C. or the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the district court trial could have commenced in routine fashion. In whatever way the Supreme Court eventually decides to parse which acts are subject to immunity (rather than simply decide no immunity could exist in a coup attempt) and contrives a process for proceeding in the lower court, the justice system entitling the people as well as defendants to a timely trial will be undermined.
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe (who litigated Bush v. Gore) recently told Salon magazine: “It could have taken the case in December when the special counsel asked it to be heard directly, or they could have declined to take the case after the court of appeals quite comprehensively rejected Trump’s appeal, so the trial could be over by now. Instead, the court has dragged its feet.” And now it lets the clock run down on a case argued nearly two months ago.
Even if the Supreme Court rejects a sweeping absolute immunity claim, the court’s blatant procrastination will have signaled to the Aileen Cannons and other lower court judges that manipulation of justice simply through delay and procedural gimmicks is acceptable. The Supreme Court’s conduct opens the door to widespread and deliberate finagling with court schedules to benefit favored parties.
All of this comes amid the worst scandals in the court’s history, which raise serious doubt about the justices’ independence and integrity (e.g., Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s insurrectionist flag flying, Justice Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself despite his wife’s participation in the coup attempt, Thomas’ multiple financial disclosure violations and receipts of millions of dollars in gifts). These, coupled with obvious gamesmanship to benefit “their side,” will permanently besmirch this court.
The Supreme Court justices’ egregious conduct has only underscored that lifetime tenure leads to abuse of power. To preserve any hope of restoring the court’s integrity, voters, Congress and the president must insist on strict ethics reform, term limits and rebalancing of the court with additional justices who appreciate judicial norms and ethics. The current crew of justices can no longer be relied upon to render fair, impartial — or timely — justice.
THE RUSSIA-NORTH KOREA PACT BOLSTERS A GROWING ‘ALIGNMENT OF EVIL’
The democratic world needs increased solidarity to counter Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
JERUSALEM — The “comprehensive strategic partnership” treaty signed on Wednesday by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is only the latest manifestation of one of the most sinister and troubling trends in world affairs today: Russia, Iran, North Korea and China are all working together, to a greater or lesser degree, to challenge the U.S.-led, rules-based international order.
Iraq and North Korea to justify his invasion of Iraq. Those states had little to do with one another; far from being allies, Iran and Iraq were enemies that had fought a bloody war in the 1980s. A more apt way to describe the current situation was suggested by Yoel Guzansky, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, when I met him Thursday. He calls it an “alignment of evil,” a phrase that accurately captured the dynamic.
The four dictatorships in question — Russia, Iran, North Korea and China — do not constitute a formal security alliance akin to NATO or the old Warsaw Pact, but they are broadly united in their desire to challenge the United States and its allies, ranging from Ukraine to Israel to South Korea.
North Korea has provided Russia with dozens of short-range missiles and as many as 5 million artillery shells to use against Ukraine. In return, Russia, which once supported international sanctions against North Korea over its weapons of mass destruction program, vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution in March to authorize a panel of independent experts to track compliance with North Korean sanctions. More significantly, Russia is expected to provide North Korea with economic aid (such as low-cost oil and gas) and technological help to upgrade its arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles. Thus, while North Korean aid is making Russia more dangerous to Ukraine, Russian aid is likely to make North Korea more dangerous to South Korea, Japan and the United States.
Iran is the other country that is providing weapons to Russia. It has sent artillery shells, drones and ballistic missiles and has even opened a factory in Russia to produce its Shahed self-detonating drones. In return, Tehran said that it would be getting Su-35 fighter jets, Mi-28 attack helicopters and other Russian military equipment it needs to upgrade its own armed forces. Russia has even lofted Iranian satellites into orbit.
This military relationship represents a deepening of the ties between Moscow and Tehran, which had been growing closer ever since Putin decided in 2015 to send the Russian air force to aid Iran’s ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to brutally quell a rebellion against his rule. The Russia intervention helped turn the tide in the Syrian civil war, entrenching Assad in power. It also led to close ties between Russia and Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon, which had dispatched its own troops to fight for Assad.
Unlike North Korea or Iran, China apparently has not been supplying Russia with munitions, but it has provided microchips, machine tools and other dual-use components that have enabled Russian factories to keep manufacturing weapons for use against Ukraine. Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, told Congress last month: “China’s provision of dual use components and material to Russia’s defense industry is one of several factors that tilted the momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine in Moscow’s favor, while also accelerating a reconstitution of Russia’s military strength after their extraordinarily costly invasion.”
We should not exaggerate the extent of cooperation in the “alignment of evil” or ignore the real rivalries and frictions that exist under the surface. Beijing, for example, can hardly be overjoyed to see its allies in Pyongyang drawing so close to Moscow, thereby diluting Chinese influence in North Korea. Beijing and Moscow, for their part, have been at loggerheads over a proposed gas pipeline from Russia to China. Putin has been desperate to sell to China gas that he can no longer sell to Europe, but the Siberia 2 pipeline project has stalled because Xi Jinping would not commit to buying as much gas as Russia wants to sell at the price that it wants to charge.
But we should also not ignore the growing threat confronting the West from the alignment of its enemies. The democratic world must respond with at least as much solidarity as the autocracies are displaying. A good start would be to draw tighter links among U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. There has already been considerable movement in this direction: Last year’s NATO summit was attended by the leaders of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan, and those Pacific partners have also been invited to next month’s NATO summit in Washington.
All four of those Pacific nations have applied sanctions on Russia and sent aid to Ukraine. South Korea and Japan have so far refused to provide direct military aid to Ukraine, but The Post reported in December that South Korea had sent artillery shells to the United States to pass along to Ukraine, while the Japan News reported in February that Japan was poised to send to the United States ammunition for the Patriot air-defense system to pass along to Ukraine.
Given that Russia now seems determined to upgrade North Korean military capabilities — thereby increasing the danger to Japan and South Korea — it would make sense for those two countries to provide direct military aid to Ukraine. Australia is already providing direct military assistance, but, as retired Australian Gen. Mick Ryan argues, it can and should do more.
Israel has been the big laggard among the world’s democracies in supporting Ukraine, even as Russia has taken an increasingly pro-Hamas stance. But while Israel — mired in war in Gaza and facing the possibility of another war in Lebanon — can no longer afford to donate military equipment to Ukraine, it could still join the sanctions regime on Russia. That would be the perfect riposte to Russian demands that the United Nations impose sanctions on Israel.
The world’s leading illiberal powers recognize their congruence of interests and are drawing closer together to tear down the rules-based international order. The world’s democracies need to be at least as staunch in staring down the threat from the “alignment of evil.”
The democratic world needs increased solidarity to counter Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
JERUSALEM — The “comprehensive strategic partnership” treaty signed on Wednesday by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is only the latest manifestation of one of the most sinister and troubling trends in world affairs today: Russia, Iran, North Korea and China are all working together, to a greater or lesser degree, to challenge the U.S.-led, rules-based international order.
Iraq and North Korea to justify his invasion of Iraq. Those states had little to do with one another; far from being allies, Iran and Iraq were enemies that had fought a bloody war in the 1980s. A more apt way to describe the current situation was suggested by Yoel Guzansky, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, when I met him Thursday. He calls it an “alignment of evil,” a phrase that accurately captured the dynamic.
The four dictatorships in question — Russia, Iran, North Korea and China — do not constitute a formal security alliance akin to NATO or the old Warsaw Pact, but they are broadly united in their desire to challenge the United States and its allies, ranging from Ukraine to Israel to South Korea.
North Korea has provided Russia with dozens of short-range missiles and as many as 5 million artillery shells to use against Ukraine. In return, Russia, which once supported international sanctions against North Korea over its weapons of mass destruction program, vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution in March to authorize a panel of independent experts to track compliance with North Korean sanctions. More significantly, Russia is expected to provide North Korea with economic aid (such as low-cost oil and gas) and technological help to upgrade its arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles. Thus, while North Korean aid is making Russia more dangerous to Ukraine, Russian aid is likely to make North Korea more dangerous to South Korea, Japan and the United States.
Iran is the other country that is providing weapons to Russia. It has sent artillery shells, drones and ballistic missiles and has even opened a factory in Russia to produce its Shahed self-detonating drones. In return, Tehran said that it would be getting Su-35 fighter jets, Mi-28 attack helicopters and other Russian military equipment it needs to upgrade its own armed forces. Russia has even lofted Iranian satellites into orbit.
This military relationship represents a deepening of the ties between Moscow and Tehran, which had been growing closer ever since Putin decided in 2015 to send the Russian air force to aid Iran’s ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, to brutally quell a rebellion against his rule. The Russia intervention helped turn the tide in the Syrian civil war, entrenching Assad in power. It also led to close ties between Russia and Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon, which had dispatched its own troops to fight for Assad.
Unlike North Korea or Iran, China apparently has not been supplying Russia with munitions, but it has provided microchips, machine tools and other dual-use components that have enabled Russian factories to keep manufacturing weapons for use against Ukraine. Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, told Congress last month: “China’s provision of dual use components and material to Russia’s defense industry is one of several factors that tilted the momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine in Moscow’s favor, while also accelerating a reconstitution of Russia’s military strength after their extraordinarily costly invasion.”
We should not exaggerate the extent of cooperation in the “alignment of evil” or ignore the real rivalries and frictions that exist under the surface. Beijing, for example, can hardly be overjoyed to see its allies in Pyongyang drawing so close to Moscow, thereby diluting Chinese influence in North Korea. Beijing and Moscow, for their part, have been at loggerheads over a proposed gas pipeline from Russia to China. Putin has been desperate to sell to China gas that he can no longer sell to Europe, but the Siberia 2 pipeline project has stalled because Xi Jinping would not commit to buying as much gas as Russia wants to sell at the price that it wants to charge.
But we should also not ignore the growing threat confronting the West from the alignment of its enemies. The democratic world must respond with at least as much solidarity as the autocracies are displaying. A good start would be to draw tighter links among U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. There has already been considerable movement in this direction: Last year’s NATO summit was attended by the leaders of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan, and those Pacific partners have also been invited to next month’s NATO summit in Washington.
All four of those Pacific nations have applied sanctions on Russia and sent aid to Ukraine. South Korea and Japan have so far refused to provide direct military aid to Ukraine, but The Post reported in December that South Korea had sent artillery shells to the United States to pass along to Ukraine, while the Japan News reported in February that Japan was poised to send to the United States ammunition for the Patriot air-defense system to pass along to Ukraine.
Given that Russia now seems determined to upgrade North Korean military capabilities — thereby increasing the danger to Japan and South Korea — it would make sense for those two countries to provide direct military aid to Ukraine. Australia is already providing direct military assistance, but, as retired Australian Gen. Mick Ryan argues, it can and should do more.
Israel has been the big laggard among the world’s democracies in supporting Ukraine, even as Russia has taken an increasingly pro-Hamas stance. But while Israel — mired in war in Gaza and facing the possibility of another war in Lebanon — can no longer afford to donate military equipment to Ukraine, it could still join the sanctions regime on Russia. That would be the perfect riposte to Russian demands that the United Nations impose sanctions on Israel.
The world’s leading illiberal powers recognize their congruence of interests and are drawing closer together to tear down the rules-based international order. The world’s democracies need to be at least as staunch in staring down the threat from the “alignment of evil.”
NO, THE SUPREME COURT HAS NOT BECOME REASONABLE. IT DID NOT ‘SAVE’ MIFEPRISTONE.
Its ruling on mifepristone is nothing to celebrate.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just as they did when the Supreme Court managed to reject the utterly outlandish independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, too many credulous court watchers rushed forward last week to praise the high court for its “reasonableness” in rejecting a half-baked claim to restrict access to mifepristone, the medical abortion drug. It gets no brownie points for knocking down on technical standing grounds one of the more outlandish opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and antiabortion activist District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Despite headlines that the court was saving or preserving mifepristone, it did nothing of the sort. Worse, Americans have plenty of reason to fear what the most radical and aggressive Supreme Court since Dred Scott is up to.
The majority found that the respondent, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, lacked standing because the group’s members were already spared from any obligation to perform medical abortions by federal conscience clause protections, had only the most speculative injuries, and had to do more than prove it devoted resources to the issue to qualify for “associational” standing. (Plaintiffs cannot “spend” their way into standing, the majority held.)
As a preliminary matter, Justice Clarence Thomas (under fire for yet more unreported lavish gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow) filed a concurrence that was downright scary. He argued that no organization or association should ever be allowed to assert organizational standing. Here, he went after a nearly 50-year-old precedent.
As Reuters explained, “Thomas essentially attacked a long-recognized legal doctrine relied upon by associations ranging from the nation’s biggest business lobby — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — to environmental groups and gun rights advocacy organizations to challenge government policies by suing on behalf of their members.” By depriving the most able plaintiffs from challenging statutes, Thomas would give the federal government and states license to run roughshod over individual rights without necessarily changing the substantive law.
Following his attack on Brown v. Board of Education in the South Carolina redistricting case and his assault on Griswold v. Connecticut in the Dobbs case, Thomas once more reveals just how radical the Supreme Court, with the addition of more radical justices, might become in the future.
One could simply substitute Thomas for Robert Bork, the radical nominee whose appointment was scuttled in 1987, in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s famous denunciation:
[Clarence Thomas’s] America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
What was hyperbole is now a road map straight from the concurrences of one of the most radical justices. In the upcoming election, Democrats would do well to focus on the extremism of the Supreme Court as they explain how even more extreme the court would become with more MAGA appointees.
Drilling down on the majority opinion, one finds that the court says nothing that would restrict states from banning all abortions, medical or otherwise. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern remind us, “It remains unlawful to prescribe in states that criminalize abortion; it has even been deemed a ‘controlled substance’ in Louisiana.” Moreover, Thomas and other radicals’ pet theory for banning all abortions — expansion and contortion of the Comstock Act to prevent use of the mail to send abortion devices or literature — “will roar back with a vengeance,” the authors note, if Trump prevails and the Supreme Court, freed from worries about a national backlash, decides to take the issue on squarely.
Furthermore, while this particular plaintiff was denied standing, another party, such as a state or individual doctor, might easily establish standing to take another crack at outlawing mifepristone. Jenner & Block, a litigation firm, explains on its blog:
First and foremost, this decision does not spell the end of the mifepristone litigation. While this case was pending at the Supreme Court, three states — Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas — successfully intervened at the district court. Now that the case has been remanded, these three states will continue their challenge to the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, and based on their complaint, they intend to make many of the same arguments as the Alliance. Specifically, the three states have challenged the FDA’s decisions to expand access to mifepristone from 2016 onward, including the ability to have mifepristone dispensed via telehealth services and distributed by retail pharmacies. Given the district court’s willingness to enjoin the FDA’s approval entirely and the Supreme Court’s failure to reach the merits, it is likely that the states will prevail on at least some of their claims. This would mean another year or more of appeals to the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court, with continuing uncertainty surrounding the regulation of mifepristone in the interim.
Mifepristone, therefore, has not been “saved” in any sense. If anything, it’s on life support, pending an election that would give the court a green light to go wild and/or offer felon and former president Donald Trump the chance to add to the ranks of the most extreme justices.
Beyond the court looms a much greater threat to mifepristone access and to all reproductive rights: the Republican Party. On the same day as the mifepristone case came down, all but two Republican senators blocked protection for IVF.
“Once again, Senate Republicans refused to protect access to fertility treatments for women who are desperately trying to get pregnant,” President Biden said in a statement. “And just last week, Senate Republicans blocked nationwide protections for birth control.” He added, “Republican officials have had every opportunity to protect reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court’s extreme decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but they refuse to do so.” And if Republicans go after IVF, you can be certain they would, if given the chance, ban mifepristone.
Indeed, Republicans would feel politically compelled to do so. Last week, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Southern Baptists, voted “for the resolution opposing IVF, which also urged the denomination’s members ‘to advocate for the government to restrain actions inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.’” No one should doubt that if the GOP prevails in the fall, its base will demand Republicans ban it all: contraception, IVF, mifepristone and all other forms of abortion.
So be forewarned: If MAGA extremists return power, they and their radical handmaidens on the Supreme Court will not hesitate to create Clarence Thomas’s America. It won’t be a place that the vast majority of Americans find congenial — or even recognizable.
Its ruling on mifepristone is nothing to celebrate.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just as they did when the Supreme Court managed to reject the utterly outlandish independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, too many credulous court watchers rushed forward last week to praise the high court for its “reasonableness” in rejecting a half-baked claim to restrict access to mifepristone, the medical abortion drug. It gets no brownie points for knocking down on technical standing grounds one of the more outlandish opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and antiabortion activist District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Despite headlines that the court was saving or preserving mifepristone, it did nothing of the sort. Worse, Americans have plenty of reason to fear what the most radical and aggressive Supreme Court since Dred Scott is up to.
The majority found that the respondent, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, lacked standing because the group’s members were already spared from any obligation to perform medical abortions by federal conscience clause protections, had only the most speculative injuries, and had to do more than prove it devoted resources to the issue to qualify for “associational” standing. (Plaintiffs cannot “spend” their way into standing, the majority held.)
As a preliminary matter, Justice Clarence Thomas (under fire for yet more unreported lavish gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow) filed a concurrence that was downright scary. He argued that no organization or association should ever be allowed to assert organizational standing. Here, he went after a nearly 50-year-old precedent.
As Reuters explained, “Thomas essentially attacked a long-recognized legal doctrine relied upon by associations ranging from the nation’s biggest business lobby — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — to environmental groups and gun rights advocacy organizations to challenge government policies by suing on behalf of their members.” By depriving the most able plaintiffs from challenging statutes, Thomas would give the federal government and states license to run roughshod over individual rights without necessarily changing the substantive law.
Following his attack on Brown v. Board of Education in the South Carolina redistricting case and his assault on Griswold v. Connecticut in the Dobbs case, Thomas once more reveals just how radical the Supreme Court, with the addition of more radical justices, might become in the future.
One could simply substitute Thomas for Robert Bork, the radical nominee whose appointment was scuttled in 1987, in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s famous denunciation:
[Clarence Thomas’s] America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
What was hyperbole is now a road map straight from the concurrences of one of the most radical justices. In the upcoming election, Democrats would do well to focus on the extremism of the Supreme Court as they explain how even more extreme the court would become with more MAGA appointees.
Drilling down on the majority opinion, one finds that the court says nothing that would restrict states from banning all abortions, medical or otherwise. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern remind us, “It remains unlawful to prescribe in states that criminalize abortion; it has even been deemed a ‘controlled substance’ in Louisiana.” Moreover, Thomas and other radicals’ pet theory for banning all abortions — expansion and contortion of the Comstock Act to prevent use of the mail to send abortion devices or literature — “will roar back with a vengeance,” the authors note, if Trump prevails and the Supreme Court, freed from worries about a national backlash, decides to take the issue on squarely.
Furthermore, while this particular plaintiff was denied standing, another party, such as a state or individual doctor, might easily establish standing to take another crack at outlawing mifepristone. Jenner & Block, a litigation firm, explains on its blog:
First and foremost, this decision does not spell the end of the mifepristone litigation. While this case was pending at the Supreme Court, three states — Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas — successfully intervened at the district court. Now that the case has been remanded, these three states will continue their challenge to the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, and based on their complaint, they intend to make many of the same arguments as the Alliance. Specifically, the three states have challenged the FDA’s decisions to expand access to mifepristone from 2016 onward, including the ability to have mifepristone dispensed via telehealth services and distributed by retail pharmacies. Given the district court’s willingness to enjoin the FDA’s approval entirely and the Supreme Court’s failure to reach the merits, it is likely that the states will prevail on at least some of their claims. This would mean another year or more of appeals to the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court, with continuing uncertainty surrounding the regulation of mifepristone in the interim.
Mifepristone, therefore, has not been “saved” in any sense. If anything, it’s on life support, pending an election that would give the court a green light to go wild and/or offer felon and former president Donald Trump the chance to add to the ranks of the most extreme justices.
Beyond the court looms a much greater threat to mifepristone access and to all reproductive rights: the Republican Party. On the same day as the mifepristone case came down, all but two Republican senators blocked protection for IVF.
“Once again, Senate Republicans refused to protect access to fertility treatments for women who are desperately trying to get pregnant,” President Biden said in a statement. “And just last week, Senate Republicans blocked nationwide protections for birth control.” He added, “Republican officials have had every opportunity to protect reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court’s extreme decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but they refuse to do so.” And if Republicans go after IVF, you can be certain they would, if given the chance, ban mifepristone.
Indeed, Republicans would feel politically compelled to do so. Last week, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Southern Baptists, voted “for the resolution opposing IVF, which also urged the denomination’s members ‘to advocate for the government to restrain actions inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.’” No one should doubt that if the GOP prevails in the fall, its base will demand Republicans ban it all: contraception, IVF, mifepristone and all other forms of abortion.
So be forewarned: If MAGA extremists return power, they and their radical handmaidens on the Supreme Court will not hesitate to create Clarence Thomas’s America. It won’t be a place that the vast majority of Americans find congenial — or even recognizable.
THE SUPREME COURT’S BUMP STOCK DECISION WILL PROVE FATAL
By David Firestone, The New York Times
There was nothing abstract about the 6-to-3 decision issued Friday morning by the Supreme Court to permit bump stocks to be used on semiautomatic rifles. It is one of the most astonishingly dangerous decisions ever issued by the court, and it will almost surely result in a loss of American lives in another mass shooting.
Bump stocks attach to the back of a rifle and use the gun’s recoil to enable shooting hundreds of bullets at a very rapid pace, far faster than anyone could shoot by pressing the trigger multiple times. The device is the reason the Las Vegas shooter in 2017 was able to kill 60 people and wound more than 400 others so quickly in the nation’s worst mass shooting in modern history.
Bump stock devices were banned the next year, just as all fully automatic machine guns are banned for public use, but the six conservative members of the court seemed entirely unbothered by their deadly potential. The opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, parses in a ridiculous level of detail whether bump stocks truly fit the precise mechanical definition of a machine gun. Because the court feels the need to give the greatest possible deference to the ownership of guns, however they might be used, the court concluded that they are not really machine guns, as they do not allow firing multiple rounds “by a single function of the trigger.”
The opinion, full of lovingly detailed close-up drawings of a gun’s innards (provided by the Firearms Policy Foundation, a pro-gun nonprofit group), says nothing about the purpose of a bump stock. Why would someone buy the device and use it? Only to fire a lightning burst of rounds. In the hands of an angry shooter — and there are so many of them — it would produce far more carnage, which is why even the Trump administration banned it.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent laced with astonishment at what her colleagues had done, didn’t hesitate to explain what was really happening. “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote, and in this case, the duck is an illegal machine gun. (Which, by the way, is not typically used for killing ducks.) Skilled shooters using an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle can fire 180 rounds per minute, she wrote, but a bump stock allows them to fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute, which is the ordinary understanding of a fully automatic machine gun.
“Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” And when the next Las Vegas happens, it will not be enough to blame it on the madness of a single deranged individual. There are so many others.
By David Firestone, The New York Times
There was nothing abstract about the 6-to-3 decision issued Friday morning by the Supreme Court to permit bump stocks to be used on semiautomatic rifles. It is one of the most astonishingly dangerous decisions ever issued by the court, and it will almost surely result in a loss of American lives in another mass shooting.
Bump stocks attach to the back of a rifle and use the gun’s recoil to enable shooting hundreds of bullets at a very rapid pace, far faster than anyone could shoot by pressing the trigger multiple times. The device is the reason the Las Vegas shooter in 2017 was able to kill 60 people and wound more than 400 others so quickly in the nation’s worst mass shooting in modern history.
Bump stock devices were banned the next year, just as all fully automatic machine guns are banned for public use, but the six conservative members of the court seemed entirely unbothered by their deadly potential. The opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, parses in a ridiculous level of detail whether bump stocks truly fit the precise mechanical definition of a machine gun. Because the court feels the need to give the greatest possible deference to the ownership of guns, however they might be used, the court concluded that they are not really machine guns, as they do not allow firing multiple rounds “by a single function of the trigger.”
The opinion, full of lovingly detailed close-up drawings of a gun’s innards (provided by the Firearms Policy Foundation, a pro-gun nonprofit group), says nothing about the purpose of a bump stock. Why would someone buy the device and use it? Only to fire a lightning burst of rounds. In the hands of an angry shooter — and there are so many of them — it would produce far more carnage, which is why even the Trump administration banned it.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent laced with astonishment at what her colleagues had done, didn’t hesitate to explain what was really happening. “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote, and in this case, the duck is an illegal machine gun. (Which, by the way, is not typically used for killing ducks.) Skilled shooters using an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle can fire 180 rounds per minute, she wrote, but a bump stock allows them to fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute, which is the ordinary understanding of a fully automatic machine gun.
“Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” And when the next Las Vegas happens, it will not be enough to blame it on the madness of a single deranged individual. There are so many others.
EUROPEANS SEEM TO GRASP THE THREAT TO U.S. DEMOCRACY BETTER THAN WE DO
Our friends are warning us about authoritarianism.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
STOCKHOLM — Sometimes, things come into focus more clearly at a distance.
Friends of the United States in Europe seem far more aware of the stakes in our election than we Americans are. They understand the threat posed to long-standing alliances among democratic nations and to a political consensus that transcended ideological lines in resisting extremism and authoritarian impulses.
preservation of democracy a central issue in the 2024 election, as he underscored during his trip to Europe last week honoring the anniversary of D-Day. Meanwhile, Donald Trump regularly praises the effectiveness of repressive regimes from Russia, China, Hungary and even North Korea. Their leaders are “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not,” the former president said late last month.
But it should not be viewed as partisan to describe what is at issue in an election, and in my conversations with Europeans over the past few weeks, I was struck that so many — of various political inclinations — were acutely aware of how different the world would look and how much trouble democracy would face if Trump were victorious. Outside the ranks of supporters of far-right parties, there are few Trumpists in Europe.
In one sense, this transatlantic disconnect is not shocking. In most democratic nations, voters typically cast ballots in response to workaday domestic concerns — prices, housing, employment, health care, crime and immigration. For a fair share of the U.S. electorate, “defending democracy” is a rather abstract issue.
If you live in Europe, on the other hand, American food prices or the future of Obamacare make little difference to your life, but how a U.S. election outcome might affect global alliances matters. So does whether American influence and power will be deployed against the threats posed by Russia’s aggression, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
There’s another reason for Europe’s relative sensitivity to the democracy question: Dictatorship is a relatively recent reality there in a way it has never been in the United States. Consider not only the experience of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and early 1940s, but also the relatively recent transition to democracy in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s or in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Soviet occupation.
My go-to formulation about this moment’s political choices comes not from a political philosopher but from folk singer Joni Mitchell, who declared that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” In Europe, the cost of losing democracy is a vivid memory.
My fear is that it’s not vivid enough. Europeans and American alike are losing their appreciation for democracy — because it’s old hat, or because democratic governments are seen as failing to solve problems, or because politicians are viewed as serving the interests of one elite or another.
In the United States, Gallup found that confidence in the way democracy is working fell from a high of 61 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in late 2023. An Ipsos poll taken around the same time found majorities or pluralities declaring their dissatisfaction with the way democracy was working in Poland, France, Britain, Italy and Croatia, as well as the United States. Among the countries polled, only in Sweden did a majority express satisfaction with democracy.
Champions of democracy might thus look outside the wealthy nations of the North and West for reminders of democracy’s capacity to give voters opportunities to express their desire for change, to speak up against social and economic exclusion, to hold governments accountable — and to defend democracy itself.
Recent weeks offered two heartening examples of the value of free elections and how they empower those without wealth or privilege to make their voices heard.
In India, voters denied Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party a majority after Modi — and most polls — predicted he would win a landslide victory. The rebuke came from poorer Indian voters who felt left out of the country’s prosperity and from those who feared that Modi’s Hindu nationalism would lead to constitutional changes disadvantaging Muslims as well as lower-caste Hindus.
In South Africa, the African National Congress lost its majority for the first time since inclusive elections were instituted in 1994 after the end of apartheid. On Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to the rebuke by calling for a national unity government.
On their own, neither these elections nor European worries about a Trump presidency are enough to transform democracy into a voting issue this year. But Americans would do well to pay attention to how friends of democracy around the globe will interpret the choice we make. They’re warning us that flirting with authoritarianism never turns out well.
Our friends are warning us about authoritarianism.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
STOCKHOLM — Sometimes, things come into focus more clearly at a distance.
Friends of the United States in Europe seem far more aware of the stakes in our election than we Americans are. They understand the threat posed to long-standing alliances among democratic nations and to a political consensus that transcended ideological lines in resisting extremism and authoritarian impulses.
preservation of democracy a central issue in the 2024 election, as he underscored during his trip to Europe last week honoring the anniversary of D-Day. Meanwhile, Donald Trump regularly praises the effectiveness of repressive regimes from Russia, China, Hungary and even North Korea. Their leaders are “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not,” the former president said late last month.
But it should not be viewed as partisan to describe what is at issue in an election, and in my conversations with Europeans over the past few weeks, I was struck that so many — of various political inclinations — were acutely aware of how different the world would look and how much trouble democracy would face if Trump were victorious. Outside the ranks of supporters of far-right parties, there are few Trumpists in Europe.
In one sense, this transatlantic disconnect is not shocking. In most democratic nations, voters typically cast ballots in response to workaday domestic concerns — prices, housing, employment, health care, crime and immigration. For a fair share of the U.S. electorate, “defending democracy” is a rather abstract issue.
If you live in Europe, on the other hand, American food prices or the future of Obamacare make little difference to your life, but how a U.S. election outcome might affect global alliances matters. So does whether American influence and power will be deployed against the threats posed by Russia’s aggression, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
There’s another reason for Europe’s relative sensitivity to the democracy question: Dictatorship is a relatively recent reality there in a way it has never been in the United States. Consider not only the experience of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and early 1940s, but also the relatively recent transition to democracy in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s or in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Soviet occupation.
My go-to formulation about this moment’s political choices comes not from a political philosopher but from folk singer Joni Mitchell, who declared that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” In Europe, the cost of losing democracy is a vivid memory.
My fear is that it’s not vivid enough. Europeans and American alike are losing their appreciation for democracy — because it’s old hat, or because democratic governments are seen as failing to solve problems, or because politicians are viewed as serving the interests of one elite or another.
In the United States, Gallup found that confidence in the way democracy is working fell from a high of 61 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in late 2023. An Ipsos poll taken around the same time found majorities or pluralities declaring their dissatisfaction with the way democracy was working in Poland, France, Britain, Italy and Croatia, as well as the United States. Among the countries polled, only in Sweden did a majority express satisfaction with democracy.
Champions of democracy might thus look outside the wealthy nations of the North and West for reminders of democracy’s capacity to give voters opportunities to express their desire for change, to speak up against social and economic exclusion, to hold governments accountable — and to defend democracy itself.
Recent weeks offered two heartening examples of the value of free elections and how they empower those without wealth or privilege to make their voices heard.
In India, voters denied Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party a majority after Modi — and most polls — predicted he would win a landslide victory. The rebuke came from poorer Indian voters who felt left out of the country’s prosperity and from those who feared that Modi’s Hindu nationalism would lead to constitutional changes disadvantaging Muslims as well as lower-caste Hindus.
In South Africa, the African National Congress lost its majority for the first time since inclusive elections were instituted in 1994 after the end of apartheid. On Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa responded to the rebuke by calling for a national unity government.
On their own, neither these elections nor European worries about a Trump presidency are enough to transform democracy into a voting issue this year. But Americans would do well to pay attention to how friends of democracy around the globe will interpret the choice we make. They’re warning us that flirting with authoritarianism never turns out well.
THERE’S NO SENSE OF SHAME AT THE SUPREME COURT
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
An earlier generation of Supreme Court justices seemed to possess the capacity for shame. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat for accepting a $20,000 consulting fee (which he returned) from a foundation led by a man who was convicted of securities fraud.
Whatever Justice Fortas believed about his honor and morality, he understood that the Supreme Court is an inherently fragile institution and that its nine justices cannot afford the slightest whiff of bias or corruption. As the Times editorial board wrote then, “A judge not only has to be innocent of any wrongdoing but he also has to be above reproach.” Placing the court’s and the country’s interests above his own, Justice Fortas stepped down.
That sort of humility is nowhere in evidence on today’s court, which is finding new ways to embarrass itself, thanks largely to the brazen behavior of two of its most senior members, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who are making a mockery of their obligation to at least appear neutral and independent. They fail to report large gifts, luxury vacations and payments to their family members by wealthy donors, at least one of whom had business before the court, and they express nakedly partisan opinions or fail to adequately distance themselves when their spouses express such views.
They are saying, in effect, that they don’t care if any of this bothers you. To go by recent polls showing that this court’s public approval has approached record lows, it bothers many millions of Americans. And yet no one in Washington seems willing to act.
It can’t go on. The court’s refusal to police itself, willingly allowing a few justices to trample on its reputation, demands that Congress step up and take far stronger action to enforce judicial ethics and to require justices to recuse themselves when they have or appear to have clear conflicts of interest.
The latest in a long list of examples became public last week, when The Times reported that an upside-down American flag flew over the front lawn of the Alito family home in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection incited by then-President Donald Trump. The flag, a clear pro-Trump statement widely flown by those who believed the 2020 election was stolen, apparently stayed up for days, even as the court was weighing whether to hear a case challenging the outcome of the election. (The court voted not to hear the case. Justice Alito, like Mr. Trump, was on the losing side.)
In a statement to The Times, Justice Alito placed the blame for the hoisting of the flag on his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, in response to a dispute with some neighbors. He said nothing about any attempt to remove it, nor did he apologize for the glaring ethical violation. To the contrary, he has failed to recuse himself from any of the several Jan. 6-related cases currently before the court, including Mr. Trump’s claim that he is absolutely immune from prosecution for his role in the Capitol assault.
Justice Thomas may be even more compromised when it comes to Jan. 6. His wife, Ginni Thomas, participated in the legal effort to subvert the election and keep Mr. Trump in power. And yet with one minor exception, he has also refused to recuse himself from any of the Jan. 6 cases.
Other justices revealed political biases in the recent past. In 2016 the Times editorial board criticized Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for referring to Mr. Trump as a “faker,” comments for which she quickly expressed regret. That was the right response, but it couldn’t unring the bell.
As all justices are aware, federal recusal law is clear: “Any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
In the Jan. 6 cases, recusal should not be a close call. At the least, reasonable people are justified in questioning Justice Alito’s impartiality based on his failure to take down the inverted flag, especially during a period of intense national conflict over an issue that was at that very moment before the justices.
Justice Thomas’s extreme closeness with his wife (he has described them as being melded “into one being”) raises similar doubts about his ability to be impartial. He is further implicated by a separate provision of the law, which requires a judge to recuse when his or her spouse is “to the judge’s knowledge likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.” That sure sounds like Ginni Thomas, who testified, under threat of a subpoena, before the House Jan. 6 committee.
In short, Justices Alito and Thomas appear to be breaking federal law, tanking what remains of the court’s legitimacy in the process. The challenge is whether anyone is willing to do anything about it.
“If there’s no recusal in this situation, if a justice is flying a banner to support a violent insurrection while he is sitting on a case that implicates the scheme to steal the election, is the recusal statute a dead letter?” Alex Aronson, the executive director of Court Accountability, a judicial reform organization, asked me.
It’s a fair question. The Ethics in Government Act requires the Judicial Conference, which is chaired by Chief Justice John Roberts, to refer to the Justice Department any case in which there is reason to believe a judge willfully broke the law. The attorney general does not have to wait for a referral, but based on how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department handled the Trump investigations, I’m not holding my breath.
The Supreme Court’s recently adopted ethics code isn’t much help, either. If anything, it makes matters worse, undercutting the authority of existing law and giving the justices even more space to act with impunity.
Mark L. Wolf, a senior federal district judge in Massachusetts who worked in Gerald Ford’s Justice Department, said in a lecture this year that in adopting the code, “the Supreme Court has essentially asserted the power, if not the right, to disobey laws enacted by Congress and the president. Thus, the code undermines the system of checks and balances that safeguard our constitutional democracy, threatens the impartiality of the Supreme Court and jeopardizes crucial public confidence in the federal judiciary.”
Chief Justice Roberts may not have the power to force any of his colleagues to do the right thing, but he does have moral and institutional authority. And yet it appears the new code of ethics is no match for the old code of omertà that has bound justices for generations. As The Times reported, the Alito flag incident soon became known to the court (where, by the way, regular staff members are barred from any political activity, down to displaying bumper stickers), and yet it was suppressed for more than three years.
For now, Democrats control the Senate, and yet they have remained largely silent, resorting to sending admonishing letters.
On Monday, Richard Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, punted once again, calling for Justice Alito to recuse himself from Jan. 6 cases but dismissing the idea of anything more forceful. “I don’t think there’s much to be gained” by holding a hearing, Mr. Durbin said.
Perhaps he and other Democrats were scared off by Justice Alito’s shocking assertion in The Wall Street Journal last year about Congress’s power.
“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” he said. That would be a surprise to the nation’s founders, who said no such thing. To the contrary, Congress has been regulating the court — its size, its salaries, its jurisdictions, its ethical obligations — from the start.
We are faced with flatly unacceptable behavior from the most powerful judges in the land. If nothing else, Congress has the power to call that to light, to name and shame the wrongdoers. This would be a truth-seeking mission as well as a public service, showing the American people just how corrupt some justices are.
So what is Congress afraid of? Committees can and should hold hearings and subpoena witnesses to answer questions before the nation. They can subpoena Justice Alito himself. If he declines to show, subpoena his wife. He implicated her, after all, and she certainly has no separation-of-powers claim. Then subpoena Chief Justice Roberts, who declined to testify last year when he was asked politely. If he still doesn’t show up, Congress should remember it has the power of the purse and can reduce the court’s nonsecurity budget.
As right-wing activists have understood about an institution with lifetime tenure, it’s all part of the long game. Justices Alito and Thomas may be in their mid-70s, but a new generation of even more extreme, more partisan activists is coming up through the judicial ranks. Many of them were appointed to the federal bench in Mr. Trump’s first term, and many more would surely be in a second term. These men and women will take the absence of meaningful congressional action as carte blanche to run roughshod over ethical norms.
This is about the future as much as the past. Young Americans who are voting for the first time this year were born after Bush v. Gore; some were not even in high school when Senator Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama. For all they know, this is how the court has always been and always will be.
That’s why now is the time to show future generations that the nation needs a court that can be trusted to be fair, a court whose justices have the capacity for shame. The Supreme Court is an institution that we depend on as much as it depends on us.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
An earlier generation of Supreme Court justices seemed to possess the capacity for shame. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat for accepting a $20,000 consulting fee (which he returned) from a foundation led by a man who was convicted of securities fraud.
Whatever Justice Fortas believed about his honor and morality, he understood that the Supreme Court is an inherently fragile institution and that its nine justices cannot afford the slightest whiff of bias or corruption. As the Times editorial board wrote then, “A judge not only has to be innocent of any wrongdoing but he also has to be above reproach.” Placing the court’s and the country’s interests above his own, Justice Fortas stepped down.
That sort of humility is nowhere in evidence on today’s court, which is finding new ways to embarrass itself, thanks largely to the brazen behavior of two of its most senior members, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who are making a mockery of their obligation to at least appear neutral and independent. They fail to report large gifts, luxury vacations and payments to their family members by wealthy donors, at least one of whom had business before the court, and they express nakedly partisan opinions or fail to adequately distance themselves when their spouses express such views.
They are saying, in effect, that they don’t care if any of this bothers you. To go by recent polls showing that this court’s public approval has approached record lows, it bothers many millions of Americans. And yet no one in Washington seems willing to act.
It can’t go on. The court’s refusal to police itself, willingly allowing a few justices to trample on its reputation, demands that Congress step up and take far stronger action to enforce judicial ethics and to require justices to recuse themselves when they have or appear to have clear conflicts of interest.
The latest in a long list of examples became public last week, when The Times reported that an upside-down American flag flew over the front lawn of the Alito family home in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection incited by then-President Donald Trump. The flag, a clear pro-Trump statement widely flown by those who believed the 2020 election was stolen, apparently stayed up for days, even as the court was weighing whether to hear a case challenging the outcome of the election. (The court voted not to hear the case. Justice Alito, like Mr. Trump, was on the losing side.)
In a statement to The Times, Justice Alito placed the blame for the hoisting of the flag on his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, in response to a dispute with some neighbors. He said nothing about any attempt to remove it, nor did he apologize for the glaring ethical violation. To the contrary, he has failed to recuse himself from any of the several Jan. 6-related cases currently before the court, including Mr. Trump’s claim that he is absolutely immune from prosecution for his role in the Capitol assault.
Justice Thomas may be even more compromised when it comes to Jan. 6. His wife, Ginni Thomas, participated in the legal effort to subvert the election and keep Mr. Trump in power. And yet with one minor exception, he has also refused to recuse himself from any of the Jan. 6 cases.
Other justices revealed political biases in the recent past. In 2016 the Times editorial board criticized Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for referring to Mr. Trump as a “faker,” comments for which she quickly expressed regret. That was the right response, but it couldn’t unring the bell.
As all justices are aware, federal recusal law is clear: “Any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
In the Jan. 6 cases, recusal should not be a close call. At the least, reasonable people are justified in questioning Justice Alito’s impartiality based on his failure to take down the inverted flag, especially during a period of intense national conflict over an issue that was at that very moment before the justices.
Justice Thomas’s extreme closeness with his wife (he has described them as being melded “into one being”) raises similar doubts about his ability to be impartial. He is further implicated by a separate provision of the law, which requires a judge to recuse when his or her spouse is “to the judge’s knowledge likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.” That sure sounds like Ginni Thomas, who testified, under threat of a subpoena, before the House Jan. 6 committee.
In short, Justices Alito and Thomas appear to be breaking federal law, tanking what remains of the court’s legitimacy in the process. The challenge is whether anyone is willing to do anything about it.
“If there’s no recusal in this situation, if a justice is flying a banner to support a violent insurrection while he is sitting on a case that implicates the scheme to steal the election, is the recusal statute a dead letter?” Alex Aronson, the executive director of Court Accountability, a judicial reform organization, asked me.
It’s a fair question. The Ethics in Government Act requires the Judicial Conference, which is chaired by Chief Justice John Roberts, to refer to the Justice Department any case in which there is reason to believe a judge willfully broke the law. The attorney general does not have to wait for a referral, but based on how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department handled the Trump investigations, I’m not holding my breath.
The Supreme Court’s recently adopted ethics code isn’t much help, either. If anything, it makes matters worse, undercutting the authority of existing law and giving the justices even more space to act with impunity.
Mark L. Wolf, a senior federal district judge in Massachusetts who worked in Gerald Ford’s Justice Department, said in a lecture this year that in adopting the code, “the Supreme Court has essentially asserted the power, if not the right, to disobey laws enacted by Congress and the president. Thus, the code undermines the system of checks and balances that safeguard our constitutional democracy, threatens the impartiality of the Supreme Court and jeopardizes crucial public confidence in the federal judiciary.”
Chief Justice Roberts may not have the power to force any of his colleagues to do the right thing, but he does have moral and institutional authority. And yet it appears the new code of ethics is no match for the old code of omertà that has bound justices for generations. As The Times reported, the Alito flag incident soon became known to the court (where, by the way, regular staff members are barred from any political activity, down to displaying bumper stickers), and yet it was suppressed for more than three years.
For now, Democrats control the Senate, and yet they have remained largely silent, resorting to sending admonishing letters.
On Monday, Richard Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, punted once again, calling for Justice Alito to recuse himself from Jan. 6 cases but dismissing the idea of anything more forceful. “I don’t think there’s much to be gained” by holding a hearing, Mr. Durbin said.
Perhaps he and other Democrats were scared off by Justice Alito’s shocking assertion in The Wall Street Journal last year about Congress’s power.
“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” he said. That would be a surprise to the nation’s founders, who said no such thing. To the contrary, Congress has been regulating the court — its size, its salaries, its jurisdictions, its ethical obligations — from the start.
We are faced with flatly unacceptable behavior from the most powerful judges in the land. If nothing else, Congress has the power to call that to light, to name and shame the wrongdoers. This would be a truth-seeking mission as well as a public service, showing the American people just how corrupt some justices are.
So what is Congress afraid of? Committees can and should hold hearings and subpoena witnesses to answer questions before the nation. They can subpoena Justice Alito himself. If he declines to show, subpoena his wife. He implicated her, after all, and she certainly has no separation-of-powers claim. Then subpoena Chief Justice Roberts, who declined to testify last year when he was asked politely. If he still doesn’t show up, Congress should remember it has the power of the purse and can reduce the court’s nonsecurity budget.
As right-wing activists have understood about an institution with lifetime tenure, it’s all part of the long game. Justices Alito and Thomas may be in their mid-70s, but a new generation of even more extreme, more partisan activists is coming up through the judicial ranks. Many of them were appointed to the federal bench in Mr. Trump’s first term, and many more would surely be in a second term. These men and women will take the absence of meaningful congressional action as carte blanche to run roughshod over ethical norms.
This is about the future as much as the past. Young Americans who are voting for the first time this year were born after Bush v. Gore; some were not even in high school when Senator Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama. For all they know, this is how the court has always been and always will be.
That’s why now is the time to show future generations that the nation needs a court that can be trusted to be fair, a court whose justices have the capacity for shame. The Supreme Court is an institution that we depend on as much as it depends on us.
THE SUPREME COURT’S REPUBLICAN BIAS HANGS OVER THE TRUMP IMMUNITY CASE
The conservative justices must navigate a crisis moment of their own making.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
It is naive and ahistorical to pretend that the U.S. Supreme Court floats above politics as a quasi-sacred institution. The court has always been political, particularly when it comes to preserving its own influence.
One of its earliest and most celebrated decisions, Marbury v. Madison in 1803, can fairly be seen as a power grab for the ages: Chief Justice John Marshall established that the court had the ability to strike down laws, declaring that this unelected body can override the wishes of the branches of government chosen by the people.
But precisely because the court has arrogated itself so much authority, it is always in danger of squandering the legitimacy of its claims, especially when it acts with exceptional arrogance or in a blatantly partisan way.
As members of its 6-3 conservative majority ponder how and when they will rule on Donald Trump’s absolute immunity claim, they should understand how much they have already done to paint themselves as instruments of the Republican Party and the political right. They have created a crisis moment.
You can see what such a crisis looks like by examining one of the court’s worst decisions, Dred Scott v. Sandford. It was politics all the way down: The court colluded with two Democratic presidents, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, in a blatant effort to stop a rising Republican Party and a popular movement seeking to end the spread of slavery.
By declaring in 1857 that people of African descent could never be citizens and that Congress could not restrict slavery in the territories, the court persuaded millions of northerners that the “slave power” — the rallying cry against the plantation South’s elite — dominated the government. The north struck back three years later by electing Abraham Lincoln president. We know what followed.
Despite the popularity of the recent movie “Civil War,” we are not on the verge of outright military conflict. But the conservative justices seem hellbent on taking a side in the searing partisan battle that is dividing the country into closely matched halves, at a cost to its own legitimacy and the nation’s confidence in the rule of law.
Consider its decisions undercutting the regulation of large political contributions, gutting the Voting Rights Act and slow-walking reapportionment cases aimed at protecting Black political representation. Together, these decisions empower the wealthiest and most privileged people in the country and undercut the electoral clout of long-marginalized citizens. There’s a clear direction here.
Add to this the invention of the “major questions doctrine,” through which the court has seized the power to strike down executive agency actions of “vast economic and political significance” unless Congress clearly authorized them. It’s a move that allows the court’s conservatives to throw out any regulations and executive actions by Democratic administrations that they don’t like.
When the court invalidated President Biden’s student loan debt relief program last year, Justice Elena Kagan rightly complained that in “every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance,” based on the “made-up major questions doctrine.”
Responding to Kagan, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that it “has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” No, what’s disturbing is the court itself going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.
Through such overreach, the court has created the cloud of suspicion that hangs over its deliberations on the former president’s absolute immunity claim.
Trump’s contention is both absurd and dangerous to a free republic. Yet in last week’s oral arguments, most of the conservative justices were more eager to worry about entirely hypothetical problems future presidents might confront than to deal with the facts before them involving a president who plainly tried to overturn a legitimate election.
If the court delays its ruling until late June or forces the trial court to litigate new issues it might raise, it knows it will be delaying Trump’s most important trial until after this year’s election. The court already fed skepticism about its motives in December when it denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request for the court to bypass the appeals process and fast-track a hearing on matters Smith knew the justices would want to address.
There is a way for the court to prove its willingness to suspend partisanship at least some of the time. Instead of wasting precious time to rule on issues not directly raised by this case, it could take up Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s suggestion that it confine itself to answering the question Trump raised: “whether all official acts [by a president] get immunity.” She proposed that it wait for a case that “actually presents” the issues that preoccupy the conservatives.
One of her fellow justices has made an excellent argument for this approach. “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more,” Roberts wrote in a 2022 opinion. In the Trump case, he would do a lot for the court’s reputation by following his own advice and bringing another conservative with him.
The conservative justices must navigate a crisis moment of their own making.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
It is naive and ahistorical to pretend that the U.S. Supreme Court floats above politics as a quasi-sacred institution. The court has always been political, particularly when it comes to preserving its own influence.
One of its earliest and most celebrated decisions, Marbury v. Madison in 1803, can fairly be seen as a power grab for the ages: Chief Justice John Marshall established that the court had the ability to strike down laws, declaring that this unelected body can override the wishes of the branches of government chosen by the people.
But precisely because the court has arrogated itself so much authority, it is always in danger of squandering the legitimacy of its claims, especially when it acts with exceptional arrogance or in a blatantly partisan way.
As members of its 6-3 conservative majority ponder how and when they will rule on Donald Trump’s absolute immunity claim, they should understand how much they have already done to paint themselves as instruments of the Republican Party and the political right. They have created a crisis moment.
You can see what such a crisis looks like by examining one of the court’s worst decisions, Dred Scott v. Sandford. It was politics all the way down: The court colluded with two Democratic presidents, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, in a blatant effort to stop a rising Republican Party and a popular movement seeking to end the spread of slavery.
By declaring in 1857 that people of African descent could never be citizens and that Congress could not restrict slavery in the territories, the court persuaded millions of northerners that the “slave power” — the rallying cry against the plantation South’s elite — dominated the government. The north struck back three years later by electing Abraham Lincoln president. We know what followed.
Despite the popularity of the recent movie “Civil War,” we are not on the verge of outright military conflict. But the conservative justices seem hellbent on taking a side in the searing partisan battle that is dividing the country into closely matched halves, at a cost to its own legitimacy and the nation’s confidence in the rule of law.
Consider its decisions undercutting the regulation of large political contributions, gutting the Voting Rights Act and slow-walking reapportionment cases aimed at protecting Black political representation. Together, these decisions empower the wealthiest and most privileged people in the country and undercut the electoral clout of long-marginalized citizens. There’s a clear direction here.
Add to this the invention of the “major questions doctrine,” through which the court has seized the power to strike down executive agency actions of “vast economic and political significance” unless Congress clearly authorized them. It’s a move that allows the court’s conservatives to throw out any regulations and executive actions by Democratic administrations that they don’t like.
When the court invalidated President Biden’s student loan debt relief program last year, Justice Elena Kagan rightly complained that in “every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance,” based on the “made-up major questions doctrine.”
Responding to Kagan, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that it “has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” No, what’s disturbing is the court itself going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.
Through such overreach, the court has created the cloud of suspicion that hangs over its deliberations on the former president’s absolute immunity claim.
Trump’s contention is both absurd and dangerous to a free republic. Yet in last week’s oral arguments, most of the conservative justices were more eager to worry about entirely hypothetical problems future presidents might confront than to deal with the facts before them involving a president who plainly tried to overturn a legitimate election.
If the court delays its ruling until late June or forces the trial court to litigate new issues it might raise, it knows it will be delaying Trump’s most important trial until after this year’s election. The court already fed skepticism about its motives in December when it denied special counsel Jack Smith’s request for the court to bypass the appeals process and fast-track a hearing on matters Smith knew the justices would want to address.
There is a way for the court to prove its willingness to suspend partisanship at least some of the time. Instead of wasting precious time to rule on issues not directly raised by this case, it could take up Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s suggestion that it confine itself to answering the question Trump raised: “whether all official acts [by a president] get immunity.” She proposed that it wait for a case that “actually presents” the issues that preoccupy the conservatives.
One of her fellow justices has made an excellent argument for this approach. “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more,” Roberts wrote in a 2022 opinion. In the Trump case, he would do a lot for the court’s reputation by following his own advice and bringing another conservative with him.
WHY IS THE SUPREME COURT MAKING AN EASY CASE RELATED TO JAN. 6 RIOTERS HARD?
By Randall D. Eliason, former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Imagine that during a Supreme Court argument, protesters angry about the case storm the court building. The mob breaks doors and windows and assaults security officers while forcing its way into the chamber. Some shout that they want to hang the chief justice. The justices and attorneys are forced to flee for their lives. It’s several hours before law enforcement secures the building and the argument can resume.
Has the court proceeding been obstructed or impeded? That doesn’t seem like a difficult question. But that’s essentially what the Supreme Court heard debated in arguments last week in Fischer v. United States, a case challenging a law being used to prosecute hundreds of people, including Donald Trump, for the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Joseph Fischer is charged with being part of the mob that rioted at the Capitol, forcing members of Congress to flee and disrupting the electoral vote count. Along with assaulting police officers and other charges, he is charged under 18 U.S.C. 1512(c), which provides:
(c) Whoever corruptly --
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
Prosecutors charge that by participating in the Capitol riot, Mr. Fischer corruptly obstructed and impeded the joint congressional proceeding to certify the election, in violation of 1512(c)(2). More than 300 other Jan. 6 rioters have faced the same charge. In the D.C. federal indictment of Mr. Trump, two of the four counts also rely on this statute, alleging that through his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, he conspired to and did obstruct the congressional proceeding.
Jan. 6 defendants have repeatedly challenged the use of 1512(c) in their prosecutions. More than a dozen federal judges in Washington have rejected those challenges. But in Mr. Fischer’s case, a Trump-appointed judge, Carl Nichols, concluded the statute must be limited to obstructive acts involving documents, records or other objects. Because Mr. Fischer wasn’t charged with impairing the availability or integrity of any physical evidence, Judge Nichols dismissed the charge.
Prosecutors appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed and reinstated the charge, with one judge — also a Trump appointee — dissenting. The Supreme Court is reviewing that decision.
The language of the statute seems clear. Subsection 1 prohibits obstructing a proceeding by tampering with physical evidence, and Subsection 2 is a catchall, backstop provision that prohibits “otherwise” obstructing a proceeding by means not encompassed by Subsection 1. Connected by the word “or,” they define alternative ways to violate the statute. You have to struggle pretty hard to find any ambiguity here.
As the majority in the D.C. Circuit held, that should be the end of the matter. In describing the D.C. Circuit dissent, Judge Florence Pan borrowed a line from an earlier Supreme Court case to say that it seemed like “elaborate efforts to avoid the most natural reading of the text.” After all, textualism — relying on the plain text of a statute and the common understanding of its terms — is the favored method of statutory interpretation today, especially among conservatives.
Despite the plain language of the law, Mr. Fischer and his supporters argue it should be limited based on the reason behind its passage. During the Enron scandal in the early 2000s, the prosecution of the accounting giant Arthur Andersen for shredding an enormous number of documents was hamstrung by weaknesses in the existing obstruction laws. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, which included section 1512(c), in response to that scandal. Mr. Fischer claims the statute must therefore be limited based on Congress’s intent to respond to crimes involving evidence impairment.
But as Justice Elena Kagan noted during oral arguments, that’s not what the statute says. As she also pointed out, Congress easily could have written the statute that way if that was what it meant.
Limiting the statute as Mr. Fischer proposes would lead to absurd outcomes. Members of a violent mob who shut down a proceeding would not be guilty of obstructing that proceeding. But if in the process they happened to damage an exhibit, the statute would apply. Filing a false affidavit in a proceeding would be covered, even if it had no effect at all; violently halting the entire proceeding would not.
There’s no reason Congress would pass a law that makes such irrational distinctions. Congress might have been motivated by document shredding during the Enron scandal, but it sensibly responded by passing a statute that bars all obstruction, not one that prohibits certain types of obstruction while condoning others.
Nevertheless, Jan. 6 defendants maintain the court must disregard the statute’s clear language based on fears about how it might be applied. They argue that if the law is not limited to evidence impairment, prosecutors might target trivial offenses or otherwise protected activities, like lobbying or peaceful protests.
Several of the conservative justices seemed sympathetic to this argument. Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, questioned whether a sit-in that disrupts a trial or heckler at the State of the Union address would violate the law. Pointing to such supposed dangers, Fischer’s counsel, Jeffrey Green, urged the court not to unleash this sweeping new prosecutorial power.
Except it’s not new. Section 1512(c) has been on the books for more than 20 years. Another federal statute that prohibits the corrupt obstruction of congressional proceedings has been around since the 1940s. If prosecutors were itching to prosecute peaceful protesters and legitimate lobbyists for felony obstruction, they’ve had the tools for decades. And yet we haven’t seen those cases.
As Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out, that’s because “inherent constraints” built into the statute — chiefly the requirement of corrupt intent — limit its reach. It’s true there are many nonviolent and lawful ways to influence a proceeding. But only those for which prosecutors can prove corrupt intent beyond a reasonable doubt risk running afoul of the law. That’s why, as General Prelogar noted, out of more than 1,300 Capitol rioters prosecuted so far, only about one-fourth — generally the most violent, egregious offenders — have been charged under 1512(c).
Mr. Fischer also argues that Section 1512(c) has never been used in a similar case and that this proves the statute does not apply to the events of Jan. 6. But all this really demonstrates is that unprecedented crimes lead to unprecedented prosecutions. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed, because we’ve never had an event like Jan. 6 before, “I’m not sure what a lack of history proves.”
The use of a relevant, clearly applicable obstruction law to prosecute the unique events of Jan. 6 does not mean prosecutors will suddenly abandon the discretion and judgment they’ve used for decades when applying the law to more routine cases, any more than prosecuting Mr. Trump for those events means that criminal prosecutions of former presidents will become routine.
It would be foolish to ignore the plain language of the statute to excuse the Capitol rioters based on feared abuses that live only in the imaginations of those seeking to avoid liability.
Even if the Supreme Court agrees that 1512(c) is limited to obstruction involving evidence impairment, the charges against Mr. Trump will probably survive. Prosecutors can argue that attempting to submit slates of phony electors and efforts to have the real ballots discarded constituted evidence-based obstruction. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson both raised that possibility during the argument, although without referring to Mr. Trump’s case.
But a ruling for Mr. Fischer would call into question the convictions, guilty pleas and prosecutions of scores of other Jan. 6 defendants. And it would provide an unjustified rallying cry for those who protest that the Justice Department has overreached when prosecuting Jan. 6 defendants.
Such a disruptive ruling is possible only if the court goes out of its way to disregard the statutory language and create ambiguity where none exists. If the Supreme Court stays true to its textualist principles, this is an easy case.
By Randall D. Eliason, former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Imagine that during a Supreme Court argument, protesters angry about the case storm the court building. The mob breaks doors and windows and assaults security officers while forcing its way into the chamber. Some shout that they want to hang the chief justice. The justices and attorneys are forced to flee for their lives. It’s several hours before law enforcement secures the building and the argument can resume.
Has the court proceeding been obstructed or impeded? That doesn’t seem like a difficult question. But that’s essentially what the Supreme Court heard debated in arguments last week in Fischer v. United States, a case challenging a law being used to prosecute hundreds of people, including Donald Trump, for the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Joseph Fischer is charged with being part of the mob that rioted at the Capitol, forcing members of Congress to flee and disrupting the electoral vote count. Along with assaulting police officers and other charges, he is charged under 18 U.S.C. 1512(c), which provides:
(c) Whoever corruptly --
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
Prosecutors charge that by participating in the Capitol riot, Mr. Fischer corruptly obstructed and impeded the joint congressional proceeding to certify the election, in violation of 1512(c)(2). More than 300 other Jan. 6 rioters have faced the same charge. In the D.C. federal indictment of Mr. Trump, two of the four counts also rely on this statute, alleging that through his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, he conspired to and did obstruct the congressional proceeding.
Jan. 6 defendants have repeatedly challenged the use of 1512(c) in their prosecutions. More than a dozen federal judges in Washington have rejected those challenges. But in Mr. Fischer’s case, a Trump-appointed judge, Carl Nichols, concluded the statute must be limited to obstructive acts involving documents, records or other objects. Because Mr. Fischer wasn’t charged with impairing the availability or integrity of any physical evidence, Judge Nichols dismissed the charge.
Prosecutors appealed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed and reinstated the charge, with one judge — also a Trump appointee — dissenting. The Supreme Court is reviewing that decision.
The language of the statute seems clear. Subsection 1 prohibits obstructing a proceeding by tampering with physical evidence, and Subsection 2 is a catchall, backstop provision that prohibits “otherwise” obstructing a proceeding by means not encompassed by Subsection 1. Connected by the word “or,” they define alternative ways to violate the statute. You have to struggle pretty hard to find any ambiguity here.
As the majority in the D.C. Circuit held, that should be the end of the matter. In describing the D.C. Circuit dissent, Judge Florence Pan borrowed a line from an earlier Supreme Court case to say that it seemed like “elaborate efforts to avoid the most natural reading of the text.” After all, textualism — relying on the plain text of a statute and the common understanding of its terms — is the favored method of statutory interpretation today, especially among conservatives.
Despite the plain language of the law, Mr. Fischer and his supporters argue it should be limited based on the reason behind its passage. During the Enron scandal in the early 2000s, the prosecution of the accounting giant Arthur Andersen for shredding an enormous number of documents was hamstrung by weaknesses in the existing obstruction laws. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, which included section 1512(c), in response to that scandal. Mr. Fischer claims the statute must therefore be limited based on Congress’s intent to respond to crimes involving evidence impairment.
But as Justice Elena Kagan noted during oral arguments, that’s not what the statute says. As she also pointed out, Congress easily could have written the statute that way if that was what it meant.
Limiting the statute as Mr. Fischer proposes would lead to absurd outcomes. Members of a violent mob who shut down a proceeding would not be guilty of obstructing that proceeding. But if in the process they happened to damage an exhibit, the statute would apply. Filing a false affidavit in a proceeding would be covered, even if it had no effect at all; violently halting the entire proceeding would not.
There’s no reason Congress would pass a law that makes such irrational distinctions. Congress might have been motivated by document shredding during the Enron scandal, but it sensibly responded by passing a statute that bars all obstruction, not one that prohibits certain types of obstruction while condoning others.
Nevertheless, Jan. 6 defendants maintain the court must disregard the statute’s clear language based on fears about how it might be applied. They argue that if the law is not limited to evidence impairment, prosecutors might target trivial offenses or otherwise protected activities, like lobbying or peaceful protests.
Several of the conservative justices seemed sympathetic to this argument. Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, questioned whether a sit-in that disrupts a trial or heckler at the State of the Union address would violate the law. Pointing to such supposed dangers, Fischer’s counsel, Jeffrey Green, urged the court not to unleash this sweeping new prosecutorial power.
Except it’s not new. Section 1512(c) has been on the books for more than 20 years. Another federal statute that prohibits the corrupt obstruction of congressional proceedings has been around since the 1940s. If prosecutors were itching to prosecute peaceful protesters and legitimate lobbyists for felony obstruction, they’ve had the tools for decades. And yet we haven’t seen those cases.
As Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar pointed out, that’s because “inherent constraints” built into the statute — chiefly the requirement of corrupt intent — limit its reach. It’s true there are many nonviolent and lawful ways to influence a proceeding. But only those for which prosecutors can prove corrupt intent beyond a reasonable doubt risk running afoul of the law. That’s why, as General Prelogar noted, out of more than 1,300 Capitol rioters prosecuted so far, only about one-fourth — generally the most violent, egregious offenders — have been charged under 1512(c).
Mr. Fischer also argues that Section 1512(c) has never been used in a similar case and that this proves the statute does not apply to the events of Jan. 6. But all this really demonstrates is that unprecedented crimes lead to unprecedented prosecutions. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed, because we’ve never had an event like Jan. 6 before, “I’m not sure what a lack of history proves.”
The use of a relevant, clearly applicable obstruction law to prosecute the unique events of Jan. 6 does not mean prosecutors will suddenly abandon the discretion and judgment they’ve used for decades when applying the law to more routine cases, any more than prosecuting Mr. Trump for those events means that criminal prosecutions of former presidents will become routine.
It would be foolish to ignore the plain language of the statute to excuse the Capitol rioters based on feared abuses that live only in the imaginations of those seeking to avoid liability.
Even if the Supreme Court agrees that 1512(c) is limited to obstruction involving evidence impairment, the charges against Mr. Trump will probably survive. Prosecutors can argue that attempting to submit slates of phony electors and efforts to have the real ballots discarded constituted evidence-based obstruction. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson both raised that possibility during the argument, although without referring to Mr. Trump’s case.
But a ruling for Mr. Fischer would call into question the convictions, guilty pleas and prosecutions of scores of other Jan. 6 defendants. And it would provide an unjustified rallying cry for those who protest that the Justice Department has overreached when prosecuting Jan. 6 defendants.
Such a disruptive ruling is possible only if the court goes out of its way to disregard the statutory language and create ambiguity where none exists. If the Supreme Court stays true to its textualist principles, this is an easy case.
THE FALSE PROMISE — AND HIDDEN COSTS — OF SCHOOL VOUCHERS
Vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending. There's a sharp difference between what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the cost of reality sets in.
By Joshua M. Cowen, The Philadelphia Inquirer
If you’ve ever run a small business or talked to a business owner, you might have heard the phrase “under promise, over deliver” as a strategy for customer service.
Unfortunately, when it comes to school voucher plans like those being considered by Pennsylvania lawmakers this spring, what happens is the opposite of a sound investment: a lot of overpromising ahead of woeful under-delivery.
As an expert on school vouchers, I think about the idea of what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the real cost sets in. To hear voucher lobbyists tell it — usually working for billionaires like Betsy DeVos, or Pennsylvania’s own Jeff Yass — all that’s needed to move American education forward is a fully privatized market of school choice, where parents are customers and education is the product.
As I testified to Pennsylvania lawmakers last fall, however, vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending.
One promise that never holds up is the idea that states can afford to create voucher systems that underwrite private tuition for some children, while still keeping public school spending strong.
Other states that have passed or expanded voucher systems have rarely been able to sustain new investments in public schools. Even when those voucher bills also came with initial increases in public education funding. Six out of the last seven states to pass such bills have failed to keep up with just the national average in public school investment.
But for children and families — especially those who have been traditionally underserved by schools at different points in U.S. history — the cost of school vouchers goes beyond the price for taxpayers.
Although most voucher users in other states (about 70%) were, in fact, in private schools first, the academic results for the kids who transfer are disastrous. Statewide vouchers have led to some of the largest academic declines in the history of education research — drops in performance that were on par with how COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina affected student learning.
Although school vouchers have enjoyed fits and starts of bipartisan support from time to time, today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics. All 12 states that created or expanded some form of a voucher system in 2023 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Of those that passed voucher laws since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, only two (Arizona and New Hampshire) voted for Joe Biden that election year.
In states like Arkansas and Iowa, voucher laws either immediately followed or immediately preceded extreme new restrictions on reproductive care, a weakening of child labor laws, and other conservative policy priorities.
And this isn’t just about electoral politics. The right-wing origins of school vouchers have real day-to-day implications for who gets to use them and who is left out. We know from states like Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin that the latest voucher bills allow schools to discriminate against certain children if schools can claim they do so for religious reasons.
Today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics.
Who pays that particular price? Examples include students with disabilities and children and parents from LGBTQ families, who may be asked to leave or not even admitted at all. And that’s because when it comes to vouchers, it’s not really school choice at all. Families don’t get their choice of schools; instead, schools get their choice of which families to admit.
And the price tag for all of this usually comes in wildly over budget anyway. The big culprit for those cost overruns goes back to who actually gets a voucher. Because most voucher users were in private schools first— paid by the private sector before — voucher costs are actually new expenditures taxpayers have to make. In the worst-case scenario, Arizona, vouchers cost more than 1,000% beyond what their advocates first promised.
Despite claims some supporters make that vouchers are part of an efficient education market, the result is really the opposite of any strategy a successful business would recognize.
To put it plainly: The promises rarely pan out, and eventually, the check comes due.
Vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending. There's a sharp difference between what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the cost of reality sets in.
By Joshua M. Cowen, The Philadelphia Inquirer
If you’ve ever run a small business or talked to a business owner, you might have heard the phrase “under promise, over deliver” as a strategy for customer service.
Unfortunately, when it comes to school voucher plans like those being considered by Pennsylvania lawmakers this spring, what happens is the opposite of a sound investment: a lot of overpromising ahead of woeful under-delivery.
As an expert on school vouchers, I think about the idea of what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the real cost sets in. To hear voucher lobbyists tell it — usually working for billionaires like Betsy DeVos, or Pennsylvania’s own Jeff Yass — all that’s needed to move American education forward is a fully privatized market of school choice, where parents are customers and education is the product.
As I testified to Pennsylvania lawmakers last fall, however, vouchers are the education equivalent of predatory lending.
One promise that never holds up is the idea that states can afford to create voucher systems that underwrite private tuition for some children, while still keeping public school spending strong.
Other states that have passed or expanded voucher systems have rarely been able to sustain new investments in public schools. Even when those voucher bills also came with initial increases in public education funding. Six out of the last seven states to pass such bills have failed to keep up with just the national average in public school investment.
But for children and families — especially those who have been traditionally underserved by schools at different points in U.S. history — the cost of school vouchers goes beyond the price for taxpayers.
Although most voucher users in other states (about 70%) were, in fact, in private schools first, the academic results for the kids who transfer are disastrous. Statewide vouchers have led to some of the largest academic declines in the history of education research — drops in performance that were on par with how COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina affected student learning.
Although school vouchers have enjoyed fits and starts of bipartisan support from time to time, today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics. All 12 states that created or expanded some form of a voucher system in 2023 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Of those that passed voucher laws since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, only two (Arizona and New Hampshire) voted for Joe Biden that election year.
In states like Arkansas and Iowa, voucher laws either immediately followed or immediately preceded extreme new restrictions on reproductive care, a weakening of child labor laws, and other conservative policy priorities.
And this isn’t just about electoral politics. The right-wing origins of school vouchers have real day-to-day implications for who gets to use them and who is left out. We know from states like Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin that the latest voucher bills allow schools to discriminate against certain children if schools can claim they do so for religious reasons.
Today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics.
Who pays that particular price? Examples include students with disabilities and children and parents from LGBTQ families, who may be asked to leave or not even admitted at all. And that’s because when it comes to vouchers, it’s not really school choice at all. Families don’t get their choice of schools; instead, schools get their choice of which families to admit.
And the price tag for all of this usually comes in wildly over budget anyway. The big culprit for those cost overruns goes back to who actually gets a voucher. Because most voucher users were in private schools first— paid by the private sector before — voucher costs are actually new expenditures taxpayers have to make. In the worst-case scenario, Arizona, vouchers cost more than 1,000% beyond what their advocates first promised.
Despite claims some supporters make that vouchers are part of an efficient education market, the result is really the opposite of any strategy a successful business would recognize.
To put it plainly: The promises rarely pan out, and eventually, the check comes due.
‘TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS’ IS A SCAM THAT IGNORES DECADES OF EVIDENCE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Like climate change denial, the claimed economic benefits of tax cuts for the rich don’t hold up under scrutiny. When Democrats deride tax cuts for the wealthiest as a budget buster and a vehicle for allowing the rich to get richer, Republicans often reply: “But look at the growth and jobs!” Actually, we have seen a steady stream of evidence debunking this rationale.
The day after his State of the Union address, President Biden crowed about another 275,000 jobs added to the economy in the month of February. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink. Now, our economy is the envy of the world,” he said in a written statement. “We added 275,000 jobs last month — nearly 15 million since I took office.” He concluded, “Across the country, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. The days of trickle-down are over.”
Last July, NEC Director Lael Brainard laid out the overwhelming evidence that “trickle-down” economics — defined as “cutting taxes for big businesses and those at the top” — has been a bust.
“Economic inequality increased, many communities suffered from sustained disinvestment, and earnings growth for many Americans failed to keep pace with the cost of necessities like health care, housing, and education,” she said. “Investments in infrastructure and vital industries stagnated.”
This isn’t new evidence, either. A 2020 paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London examined “18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015,” CBS News reported. “The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.” It turns out that “per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found.”
But there was one significant difference: “The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.” Oops.
Well, what about the huge tax cuts passed by MAGA Republicans in 2017? Were those any different? “Mr. Trump’s tax cuts have lifted the fortunes of the ultra-rich,” the report found. “For the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class, the economists found.”
But economic growth made up for this handout, right?! Not so fast. Wages for average Americans did not keep up with the cost of living. Worse, “Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data,” as CBS News reported. And, before Biden came into office, income inequality worsened as the pandemic hurt the less-well-off more severely than it did the rich.
A 2022 update by Hope and Limberg reiterated, “Our findings on the effects of growth and unemployment provide evidence against supply side theories that suggest lower taxes on the rich will induce labor supply responses from high-income individuals (more hours of work, more effort, etc.) that boost economic activity.” Instead, they confirmed there is “strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment.”
Given that experience, Biden entered office determined to deploy targeted investments (e.g., infrastructure, chip manufacturing), tailored tax increases on rich individuals and corporations that had been paying no taxes, cost controls on items such as prescription drug prices, and expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Robust immigration and energy production further boosted growth. Biden also canceled billions in student loan debt, freeing up consumer spending. The result has been a record recovery from the pandemic and real wage growth adjusted for inflation.
The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, told me after the State of the Union: “There’s a solid, empirical body of research confirming this. Tax cuts for the rich just make them richer, exacerbating both the deficit and economic inequality.”
One type of tax credit has worked spectacularly well. “The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children. Research showed that child poverty fell immediately and substantially,” the Brookings Institution reported last year. “On an annual basis, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, child poverty fell to its lowest level on record in 2021: 5.2%.”
Biden now proposes a tax increase for billionaires. “There are 1,000 billionaires in America,” he told the country during the State of the Union. “You know what the average federal tax rate for these billionaires is? 8.2 percent!” He argued, “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse! That’s why I’ve proposed a minimum tax of 25 percent for billionaires. Just 25 percent.”
There is no evidence that doing this would impair the economic recovery Biden has presided over. It, however, would help pare down the deficit (something Republicans used to pretend to care about).
Sold as a prosperity booster, trickle-down tax cuts for the very rich do not increase prosperity, growth or employment for the average American. This sop to the rich does increase the deficit and income disparity. By contrast, restoring the child tax credit and enacting a billionaire’s tax would continue to narrow the gulf between the very rich and everyone else.
Trickle-down economics is a scam. Renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Like climate change denial, the claimed economic benefits of tax cuts for the rich don’t hold up under scrutiny. When Democrats deride tax cuts for the wealthiest as a budget buster and a vehicle for allowing the rich to get richer, Republicans often reply: “But look at the growth and jobs!” Actually, we have seen a steady stream of evidence debunking this rationale.
The day after his State of the Union address, President Biden crowed about another 275,000 jobs added to the economy in the month of February. “Three years ago, I inherited an economy on the brink. Now, our economy is the envy of the world,” he said in a written statement. “We added 275,000 jobs last month — nearly 15 million since I took office.” He concluded, “Across the country, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. The days of trickle-down are over.”
Last July, NEC Director Lael Brainard laid out the overwhelming evidence that “trickle-down” economics — defined as “cutting taxes for big businesses and those at the top” — has been a bust.
“Economic inequality increased, many communities suffered from sustained disinvestment, and earnings growth for many Americans failed to keep pace with the cost of necessities like health care, housing, and education,” she said. “Investments in infrastructure and vital industries stagnated.”
This isn’t new evidence, either. A 2020 paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London examined “18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015,” CBS News reported. “The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.” It turns out that “per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn’t, the study found.”
But there was one significant difference: “The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.” Oops.
Well, what about the huge tax cuts passed by MAGA Republicans in 2017? Were those any different? “Mr. Trump’s tax cuts have lifted the fortunes of the ultra-rich,” the report found. “For the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class, the economists found.”
But economic growth made up for this handout, right?! Not so fast. Wages for average Americans did not keep up with the cost of living. Worse, “Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data,” as CBS News reported. And, before Biden came into office, income inequality worsened as the pandemic hurt the less-well-off more severely than it did the rich.
A 2022 update by Hope and Limberg reiterated, “Our findings on the effects of growth and unemployment provide evidence against supply side theories that suggest lower taxes on the rich will induce labor supply responses from high-income individuals (more hours of work, more effort, etc.) that boost economic activity.” Instead, they confirmed there is “strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment.”
Given that experience, Biden entered office determined to deploy targeted investments (e.g., infrastructure, chip manufacturing), tailored tax increases on rich individuals and corporations that had been paying no taxes, cost controls on items such as prescription drug prices, and expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Robust immigration and energy production further boosted growth. Biden also canceled billions in student loan debt, freeing up consumer spending. The result has been a record recovery from the pandemic and real wage growth adjusted for inflation.
The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, told me after the State of the Union: “There’s a solid, empirical body of research confirming this. Tax cuts for the rich just make them richer, exacerbating both the deficit and economic inequality.”
One type of tax credit has worked spectacularly well. “The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children. Research showed that child poverty fell immediately and substantially,” the Brookings Institution reported last year. “On an annual basis, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, child poverty fell to its lowest level on record in 2021: 5.2%.”
Biden now proposes a tax increase for billionaires. “There are 1,000 billionaires in America,” he told the country during the State of the Union. “You know what the average federal tax rate for these billionaires is? 8.2 percent!” He argued, “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse! That’s why I’ve proposed a minimum tax of 25 percent for billionaires. Just 25 percent.”
There is no evidence that doing this would impair the economic recovery Biden has presided over. It, however, would help pare down the deficit (something Republicans used to pretend to care about).
Sold as a prosperity booster, trickle-down tax cuts for the very rich do not increase prosperity, growth or employment for the average American. This sop to the rich does increase the deficit and income disparity. By contrast, restoring the child tax credit and enacting a billionaire’s tax would continue to narrow the gulf between the very rich and everyone else.
Trickle-down economics is a scam. Renewing tax cuts for the rich that are due to expire at the end of 2025 would do about as much for you as a degree from Trump University.
CULTS
Cults (By Amy Morin, LCSW) are characterized by:
1-Absolute authoritarianism without accountability
2-Zero tolerance for criticism or questions
3-Lack of meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget
4-Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions
5-A belief that former followers are always wrong for leaving and there is never a legitimate reason for anyone else to leave
6-Abuse of members
7-Records, books, articles, or programs documenting the abuses of the leader or group
8-Followers feeling they are never able to be “good enough”
9-A belief that the leader is right at all times
10-A belief that the leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or giving validation
Cults are dangerous because they typically rely on deceptive and authoritarian practices to make members dependent on and obedient to the group.
The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities. To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader. Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller. “Q,” the online presence whose gnomic briefings—“Q drops”—form the basis of the QAnon mythology, is arguably a leader of sorts, but the army of “gurus” and “promoters” who decode, interpret, and embroider Q’s utterances have shown themselves perfectly capable of generating doctrine and inciting violence in the absence of Q’s directives. (Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate.)
A survey published in May by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifteen per cent of Americans subscribe to the central QAnon belief that the government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and that twenty per cent believe that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” Yet anxiety about the movement tends to be undercut by laughter at the presumed imbecility of its members. Some of the attorneys representing QAnon followers who took part in the invasion of the Capitol have even made this their chief line of defense; Albert Watkins, who represents Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested “Q Shaman,” recently told a reporter that his client and other defendants were “people with brain damage, they’re retarded.”
The Common Stages in the Life Cycle of a Cult By Psychology Today
1-The Big Idea. A leader or leaders propose a new transcendent idea that promises a panacea solution for alienated and vulnerable people. This big idea promises to solve all problems; to end loneliness, isolation, and a sense of personal failure. It makes vague promises of meaning and salvation. There is usually a charismatic leader or a single text with its own coded language that spreads the big idea.
2-Love-Bombing. Cult leaders and early devotees recruit from the wider population through love-bombing and promising a new start, a hope for a future of love, belonging, and salvation within a living community of people who all believe in the big idea. As a new recruit, you become one of the chosen to whom ‘the truth’ is revealed. You are loved and 'saved.'
3-A New Life. New recruits are inducted into a secret language of signs and symbols. They're encouraged to identify as victims of the world outside and are promised a rebirth, a new body or identity within this life, or an afterlife. Recruits are taught to see the world as black or white, good or evil, us or them; and this creates tight group unity which is enforced by rote learning of the cult’s slogans. These beliefs are often illogical as a test of ‘true belief.’ New recruits experience euphoria as part of a 'chosen' secretive group.
4-Growth. As new recruits move into greater commitment, the cult enters the ‘expansion phase’ and looks outwards. The new task is to recruit ever more people. Love-bombing and promising a new life are used on outsiders, and the young and needy are targeted. The cult expands rapidly with its promises of future rewards, be they spiritual, or political. Mantras and slogans replace all individual thought and offer collective 'one-ness.'
5-Rites of Passage. Allegiance is sworn through acts such as renouncing your own family, past life, and past name. New members are separated from all past support systems and become dependent on the cult. New members are tested by having to transform their identity, body, language, and even sexual behaviors. They must ‘don the robes’ and declare to the world that ‘I am no longer who I was, I am now part of group X.’
6-Isolation. The cult becomes too large to control and has to prevent influences from the outside world from weakening its power over members. The leaders ban acts of individual free will. The cult isolates its members from the world beyond, depicting the outside as corrupt, evil, and violent. This increases bonding as members see themselves as ‘threatened victims’. Language control and growing paranoia make questioning the cult impossible. Mantras and slogans silence doubts and dissent. Internal repression grows.
7-Hate Bonding. The cult reaches its size limit and problems arise from failures in its ‘plan for all.’ But the cult cannot admit errors. It starts to feed on hatred of the outside world. It evolves rituals of hatred, building a deeper ‘unity of the persecuted.’ One stratum of society is usually the target of all hatred and they might be given a coded name. Members are encouraged to share their hatred in ritualized forms.
8-Traitors. Afraid of the growing hate culture, some members question the leaders but they are thrown out or made to do penance. The contraction phase begins and leads to a clampdown on any freedoms within the cult. In the face of internal persecution, a senior member often leaves and becomes a ‘traitor.’ Gaslighting, peer pressure, and groupthink prevent others from leaving. A few are helped to leave the cult by family members or forced out by cult deprogrammers, but such acts only fuel the cult's conviction that it is under attack.
9-Witch Hunts. Internal trials within the cult weed out all potential traitors. Doubters are shamed into falsely accusing others. The remaining members are forced into committing acts of personal supplication that might be sexual, or involve body-marking, self-mutilation, or a pledge to transgressive acts. A common test of belonging involves committing small crimes against the hated world beyond. Once a member commits an illegal act, the cult has evidence it can use to blackmail that member into compliance. This is abusive trauma bonding.
10-Persecution Paranoia. As more people flee the cult, secrets are leaked to the outside world about the authoritarian rule of the leaders. External law forces investigate the cult. The cult’s paranoia grows. Increasingly paranoid, the cult weaponizes for a showdown against the world and sees violence as the necessary purifying force that will save itself from its scheming enemies. All who commit acts of violence are pardoned in advance by the leader or leaders. Many other cult members leave, and this increases paranoid fear of impending confrontation with external enemies.
11-Attack. Often a respected member of the cult is accused, tortured, or even killed and the ‘secret’ scapegoating becomes the new form of group cohesion. Cult members are forbidden to leave and terror is whipped up about an imminent attack from external enemies, imagined or real. Allegiance to the cult is now proven by 'striking back' against the outside world. After an attack, the collective fear of being destroyed by the external enemy takes over.
12-Final Conflict. Fearing destruction, the cult either attempts one final attack against the world or barricades itself up and enters into a state of siege. In the latter case, cult suicide pacts are common. The cult either destroys itself or lashes out against its often fantasized enemies. Either way, the cult collapses with violation of laws or loss of life.
Does any of this sound familiar with regards to the current political climate?
Cults (By Amy Morin, LCSW) are characterized by:
1-Absolute authoritarianism without accountability
2-Zero tolerance for criticism or questions
3-Lack of meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget
4-Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions
5-A belief that former followers are always wrong for leaving and there is never a legitimate reason for anyone else to leave
6-Abuse of members
7-Records, books, articles, or programs documenting the abuses of the leader or group
8-Followers feeling they are never able to be “good enough”
9-A belief that the leader is right at all times
10-A belief that the leader is the exclusive means of knowing “truth” or giving validation
Cults are dangerous because they typically rely on deceptive and authoritarian practices to make members dependent on and obedient to the group.
The silos of political groupthink created by social media have turned out to be ideal settings for the germination and dissemination of extremist ideas and alternative realities. To date, the most significant and frightening cultic phenomenon to arise from social media is QAnon. According to some observers, the QAnon movement does not qualify as a proper cult, because it lacks a single charismatic leader. Donald Trump is a hero of the movement, but not its controller. “Q,” the online presence whose gnomic briefings—“Q drops”—form the basis of the QAnon mythology, is arguably a leader of sorts, but the army of “gurus” and “promoters” who decode, interpret, and embroider Q’s utterances have shown themselves perfectly capable of generating doctrine and inciting violence in the absence of Q’s directives. (Q has not posted anything since December, but the prophecies and conspiracies have continued to proliferate.)
A survey published in May by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifteen per cent of Americans subscribe to the central QAnon belief that the government is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and that twenty per cent believe that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.” Yet anxiety about the movement tends to be undercut by laughter at the presumed imbecility of its members. Some of the attorneys representing QAnon followers who took part in the invasion of the Capitol have even made this their chief line of defense; Albert Watkins, who represents Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested “Q Shaman,” recently told a reporter that his client and other defendants were “people with brain damage, they’re retarded.”
The Common Stages in the Life Cycle of a Cult By Psychology Today
1-The Big Idea. A leader or leaders propose a new transcendent idea that promises a panacea solution for alienated and vulnerable people. This big idea promises to solve all problems; to end loneliness, isolation, and a sense of personal failure. It makes vague promises of meaning and salvation. There is usually a charismatic leader or a single text with its own coded language that spreads the big idea.
2-Love-Bombing. Cult leaders and early devotees recruit from the wider population through love-bombing and promising a new start, a hope for a future of love, belonging, and salvation within a living community of people who all believe in the big idea. As a new recruit, you become one of the chosen to whom ‘the truth’ is revealed. You are loved and 'saved.'
3-A New Life. New recruits are inducted into a secret language of signs and symbols. They're encouraged to identify as victims of the world outside and are promised a rebirth, a new body or identity within this life, or an afterlife. Recruits are taught to see the world as black or white, good or evil, us or them; and this creates tight group unity which is enforced by rote learning of the cult’s slogans. These beliefs are often illogical as a test of ‘true belief.’ New recruits experience euphoria as part of a 'chosen' secretive group.
4-Growth. As new recruits move into greater commitment, the cult enters the ‘expansion phase’ and looks outwards. The new task is to recruit ever more people. Love-bombing and promising a new life are used on outsiders, and the young and needy are targeted. The cult expands rapidly with its promises of future rewards, be they spiritual, or political. Mantras and slogans replace all individual thought and offer collective 'one-ness.'
5-Rites of Passage. Allegiance is sworn through acts such as renouncing your own family, past life, and past name. New members are separated from all past support systems and become dependent on the cult. New members are tested by having to transform their identity, body, language, and even sexual behaviors. They must ‘don the robes’ and declare to the world that ‘I am no longer who I was, I am now part of group X.’
6-Isolation. The cult becomes too large to control and has to prevent influences from the outside world from weakening its power over members. The leaders ban acts of individual free will. The cult isolates its members from the world beyond, depicting the outside as corrupt, evil, and violent. This increases bonding as members see themselves as ‘threatened victims’. Language control and growing paranoia make questioning the cult impossible. Mantras and slogans silence doubts and dissent. Internal repression grows.
7-Hate Bonding. The cult reaches its size limit and problems arise from failures in its ‘plan for all.’ But the cult cannot admit errors. It starts to feed on hatred of the outside world. It evolves rituals of hatred, building a deeper ‘unity of the persecuted.’ One stratum of society is usually the target of all hatred and they might be given a coded name. Members are encouraged to share their hatred in ritualized forms.
8-Traitors. Afraid of the growing hate culture, some members question the leaders but they are thrown out or made to do penance. The contraction phase begins and leads to a clampdown on any freedoms within the cult. In the face of internal persecution, a senior member often leaves and becomes a ‘traitor.’ Gaslighting, peer pressure, and groupthink prevent others from leaving. A few are helped to leave the cult by family members or forced out by cult deprogrammers, but such acts only fuel the cult's conviction that it is under attack.
9-Witch Hunts. Internal trials within the cult weed out all potential traitors. Doubters are shamed into falsely accusing others. The remaining members are forced into committing acts of personal supplication that might be sexual, or involve body-marking, self-mutilation, or a pledge to transgressive acts. A common test of belonging involves committing small crimes against the hated world beyond. Once a member commits an illegal act, the cult has evidence it can use to blackmail that member into compliance. This is abusive trauma bonding.
10-Persecution Paranoia. As more people flee the cult, secrets are leaked to the outside world about the authoritarian rule of the leaders. External law forces investigate the cult. The cult’s paranoia grows. Increasingly paranoid, the cult weaponizes for a showdown against the world and sees violence as the necessary purifying force that will save itself from its scheming enemies. All who commit acts of violence are pardoned in advance by the leader or leaders. Many other cult members leave, and this increases paranoid fear of impending confrontation with external enemies.
11-Attack. Often a respected member of the cult is accused, tortured, or even killed and the ‘secret’ scapegoating becomes the new form of group cohesion. Cult members are forbidden to leave and terror is whipped up about an imminent attack from external enemies, imagined or real. Allegiance to the cult is now proven by 'striking back' against the outside world. After an attack, the collective fear of being destroyed by the external enemy takes over.
12-Final Conflict. Fearing destruction, the cult either attempts one final attack against the world or barricades itself up and enters into a state of siege. In the latter case, cult suicide pacts are common. The cult either destroys itself or lashes out against its often fantasized enemies. Either way, the cult collapses with violation of laws or loss of life.
Does any of this sound familiar with regards to the current political climate?
THREE YEARS LATER, BEWARE DANGEROUS REVISIONISM OF JAN. 6
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The third anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob comes amid troubling indicators about public opinion on that event. A Post-University of Maryland poll published this week shows a sizable share of Americans accept lies about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed on Jan. 6, 2021. Only 62 percent say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, down from 69 percent two years ago, and far lower than after the contested 2000 election. One-third of U.S. adults say they believe there’s “solid evidence” of “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election. Regarding Jan. 6 itself, 28 percent say former president Donald Trump bears no responsibility, 21 percent say the people who stormed the Capitol were “mostly peaceful” and 25 percent say the FBI probably or definitely instigated the attack.
These are minority views, but that’s cold comfort. Disproportionate numbers of Republicans hold them, showing just how corrosive Mr. Trump’s repeated lies, amplified by a right-wing media echo chamber, have been. The devotion of the GOP base to this alternative history helps explain why Mr. Trump has avoided meaningful accountability, why he is still the front-runner, by far, for the Republican nomination — and how dangerous he could be back in power. Already, he promises “full pardons” and a government apology to many Jan. 6 rioters, plus “revenge” and “retribution” for unnamed others.
The truth must be told. Mr. Biden won the 2020 election, fair and square, and no credible evidence has emerged of widespread voter fraud. Mr. Trump, despite knowing that he lost, summoned supporters to Washington ahead of the certification of the election and told a crowd on the Ellipse that he’d go with them to the Capitol and that they needed to “fight like hell.” Mr. Trump relished watching on television as his supporters attacked the Capitol for 187 minutes and resisted pleas to stop them. As Vice President Mike Pence said later: “His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”
More than 140 police officers were injured there that day. So far, 1,240 people have been charged with federal crimes related to Jan. 6, including 452 who were charged with assaulting law enforcement officers. More than 700 have been sentenced after receiving due process, including the right to a jury trial. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a Republican appointed by Mr. Trump, has testified categorically and under oath that there’s nothing to the “ludicrous” conspiracy theories that his agency played any role in urging people into the Capitol.
The Supreme Court agreed last month to hear challenges to a law that has been used to charge 332 people in connection with Jan. 6, which makes it a crime to obstruct or impede an official proceeding. Defense lawyers say the government has used it overly broadly. Even if the justices agree, however, it would leave convictions on other matters intact.
It’s simple political realism to acknowledge that the latest polling suggests that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable have fallen short. In 2021, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him, and seven Senate Republicans voted to convict, for inciting the insurrection. But there weren’t enough votes to disqualify Mr. Trump from running again. In 2022, his favorability ratings fell amid the hearings of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, which resulted in a damning 814-page report. However, criminal indictments against Mr. Trump in 2023, as justified as any might be on the legal merits, have turned into a rallying point for his backers: The Post-UMD poll showed that 41 percent of Americans, and 77 percent of Republicans, say they believe the Justice Department is unfairly targeting Mr. Trump for political reasons. It is unclear how potential election-year trials might affect the broader electorate.
For now, a mere 46 percent of Americans said Jan. 6 should disqualify Mr. Trump from the presidency and 33 percent said his conduct that day is “not relevant.” In between, 17 percent say Mr. Trump’s actions “cast doubts on his fitness for the job but are not disqualifying.” That segment could decide the election. What they, and all voters, must understand is that, just like in 2020, the 2024 elections will be free and fair. Audit after audit has shown the U.S. election system is secure, and none of Mr. Trump’s 2020 legal challenges panned out. They also need to understand the real chance that he could win, legitimately, but that there is still time, and an effective way — via the ballot box — to prevent that.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The third anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob comes amid troubling indicators about public opinion on that event. A Post-University of Maryland poll published this week shows a sizable share of Americans accept lies about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed on Jan. 6, 2021. Only 62 percent say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, down from 69 percent two years ago, and far lower than after the contested 2000 election. One-third of U.S. adults say they believe there’s “solid evidence” of “widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 election. Regarding Jan. 6 itself, 28 percent say former president Donald Trump bears no responsibility, 21 percent say the people who stormed the Capitol were “mostly peaceful” and 25 percent say the FBI probably or definitely instigated the attack.
These are minority views, but that’s cold comfort. Disproportionate numbers of Republicans hold them, showing just how corrosive Mr. Trump’s repeated lies, amplified by a right-wing media echo chamber, have been. The devotion of the GOP base to this alternative history helps explain why Mr. Trump has avoided meaningful accountability, why he is still the front-runner, by far, for the Republican nomination — and how dangerous he could be back in power. Already, he promises “full pardons” and a government apology to many Jan. 6 rioters, plus “revenge” and “retribution” for unnamed others.
The truth must be told. Mr. Biden won the 2020 election, fair and square, and no credible evidence has emerged of widespread voter fraud. Mr. Trump, despite knowing that he lost, summoned supporters to Washington ahead of the certification of the election and told a crowd on the Ellipse that he’d go with them to the Capitol and that they needed to “fight like hell.” Mr. Trump relished watching on television as his supporters attacked the Capitol for 187 minutes and resisted pleas to stop them. As Vice President Mike Pence said later: “His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”
More than 140 police officers were injured there that day. So far, 1,240 people have been charged with federal crimes related to Jan. 6, including 452 who were charged with assaulting law enforcement officers. More than 700 have been sentenced after receiving due process, including the right to a jury trial. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a Republican appointed by Mr. Trump, has testified categorically and under oath that there’s nothing to the “ludicrous” conspiracy theories that his agency played any role in urging people into the Capitol.
The Supreme Court agreed last month to hear challenges to a law that has been used to charge 332 people in connection with Jan. 6, which makes it a crime to obstruct or impede an official proceeding. Defense lawyers say the government has used it overly broadly. Even if the justices agree, however, it would leave convictions on other matters intact.
It’s simple political realism to acknowledge that the latest polling suggests that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable have fallen short. In 2021, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him, and seven Senate Republicans voted to convict, for inciting the insurrection. But there weren’t enough votes to disqualify Mr. Trump from running again. In 2022, his favorability ratings fell amid the hearings of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, which resulted in a damning 814-page report. However, criminal indictments against Mr. Trump in 2023, as justified as any might be on the legal merits, have turned into a rallying point for his backers: The Post-UMD poll showed that 41 percent of Americans, and 77 percent of Republicans, say they believe the Justice Department is unfairly targeting Mr. Trump for political reasons. It is unclear how potential election-year trials might affect the broader electorate.
For now, a mere 46 percent of Americans said Jan. 6 should disqualify Mr. Trump from the presidency and 33 percent said his conduct that day is “not relevant.” In between, 17 percent say Mr. Trump’s actions “cast doubts on his fitness for the job but are not disqualifying.” That segment could decide the election. What they, and all voters, must understand is that, just like in 2020, the 2024 elections will be free and fair. Audit after audit has shown the U.S. election system is secure, and none of Mr. Trump’s 2020 legal challenges panned out. They also need to understand the real chance that he could win, legitimately, but that there is still time, and an effective way — via the ballot box — to prevent that.
FEAR OF MAGA SHOULD NOT SWAY THE SUPREME COURTBy David French, The New York Times
It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.
I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”
There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.
This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences" argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.
Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.
To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.
Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.
So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.
Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.
Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”
What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”
I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”
It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.
There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”
But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”
Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.
Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.
So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.
Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.
Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.
Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new.
It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.
I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”
There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.
This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences" argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.
Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.
To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.
Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.
So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.
Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.
Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”
What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”
I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”
It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.
There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”
But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”
Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.
Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.
So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.
Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.
Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.
Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new.
GOP IMMIGRATION DEMANDS WOULD DEGRADE, NOT STRENGTHEN, U.S. SECURITY
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
In the name of protecting national security, Republican lawmakers are demanding — and President Biden is reportedly considering — immigration measures that would chip away at our national security.
For months, GOP lawmakers have held hostage proposed military aid for Israel and Ukraine. There is bipartisan agreement that our allies need this funding and that it’s in the United States’ security interests to help them fend off terrorist and authoritarian forces themselves. But Republican leaders have determined that they will not release the money unless Biden agrees to sweeping, draconian changes to the U.S. immigration system.
What does safeguarding national security have to do with curbing immigration? For the most part, not much. But they are related in the sense that the measures Republicans want would undermine U.S. security.
Many of Republicans’ immigration demands involve gutting the asylum system, created after the atrocities of World War II to give persecuted people an organized process to apply for refuge. One measure, for instance, would essentially revive the Trump-era Title 42 order, which used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to expel migrants without the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Agreeing to these measures would violate Biden’s 2020 campaign promises to restore integrity and humanity to the asylum system — promises he has arguably already been reneging on. They would also likely violate our international treaty obligations, which means breaking commitments we made to allies around the world decades ago.
What’s more, they might incentivize more unlawful repeat border crossings and create more chaos at the border, as we saw when earlier versions of the auto-expulsion policy was in place.
Another GOP demand that has received much less attention would have even further-reaching consequences: eliminating executive authority to grant class-based “humanitarian parole,” which allows noncitizens to temporarily enter or stay in the United States legally.
Presidential parole authority, a key pillar of the U.S. immigration system, has been in place since the 1950s. Since then, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have used it to help populations whose swift arrival to a haven was in the United States’ moral and geopolitical interests.
Among the populations granted parole over the decades: Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro; Hungarians in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising; Vietnamese allies and orphans as U.S. troops withdrew from Saigon; Jews persecuted by the Soviet Union; Iranians after their country’s Islamic revolution; and, more recently, Ukrainians escaping Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war on their homeland, as well as Afghan allies evacuated as part of our withdrawal from America’s longest war.
Our ability to quickly respond to war, oppression and other humanitarian crises abroad is critical to our national security — especially when we need to evacuate allies who are endangered because they helped U.S. interests. Our global reputation matters: When we break our promises to protect those who have protected us, allies might be less willing to take the risk next time we ask for help.
Revoking presidential authority to make classes of people eligible for parole, as Republicans currently demand, also has the potential to worsen border security. Why? Because parole is an orderly, legal pathway to enter the United States. The easier it is to come here safely and legally, the less incentive there is to pay smugglers and sneak in illegally.
Indeed, Biden has deployed the parole system with exactly this in mind when creating programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. Citizens from these countries can be granted advanced permission to enter, live and work in the United States for up to two years — if they pass security and health screenings, secure a private “sponsor” in the United States, and demonstrate urgent humanitarian need (among other criteria).
The programs have been phenomenally successful. They have helped assure that more immigrants can financially support themselves or rely on social and family networks until they get on their feet. What’s more, they have resulted in enormous declines in unlawful border crossings of people from eligible countries. For example, the number of Venezuelans arrested for illegally crossing the border fell 66 percent between September 2022 (the month before the Venezuelan parole program began) and July 2023.
That progress has since stalled because arbitrary caps on the number of people who can be paroled have led to huge backlogs, which nudges desperate people back toward illegal forms of entry. But rather than expanding upon these innovative programs, Republicans have been trying to ban them — first through lawsuits and now through extortion in the Ukraine-Israel aid negotiations.
There are things Congress could do if it actually wanted to improve border security. For example, it could send more resources to the border and immigration courts to speed up asylum screenings and adjudications. Instead, lawmakers are fixated on measures that would increase chaos at the border, sacrifice our moral standing and degrade our ability to defend ourselves around the world.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
In the name of protecting national security, Republican lawmakers are demanding — and President Biden is reportedly considering — immigration measures that would chip away at our national security.
For months, GOP lawmakers have held hostage proposed military aid for Israel and Ukraine. There is bipartisan agreement that our allies need this funding and that it’s in the United States’ security interests to help them fend off terrorist and authoritarian forces themselves. But Republican leaders have determined that they will not release the money unless Biden agrees to sweeping, draconian changes to the U.S. immigration system.
What does safeguarding national security have to do with curbing immigration? For the most part, not much. But they are related in the sense that the measures Republicans want would undermine U.S. security.
Many of Republicans’ immigration demands involve gutting the asylum system, created after the atrocities of World War II to give persecuted people an organized process to apply for refuge. One measure, for instance, would essentially revive the Trump-era Title 42 order, which used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to expel migrants without the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Agreeing to these measures would violate Biden’s 2020 campaign promises to restore integrity and humanity to the asylum system — promises he has arguably already been reneging on. They would also likely violate our international treaty obligations, which means breaking commitments we made to allies around the world decades ago.
What’s more, they might incentivize more unlawful repeat border crossings and create more chaos at the border, as we saw when earlier versions of the auto-expulsion policy was in place.
Another GOP demand that has received much less attention would have even further-reaching consequences: eliminating executive authority to grant class-based “humanitarian parole,” which allows noncitizens to temporarily enter or stay in the United States legally.
Presidential parole authority, a key pillar of the U.S. immigration system, has been in place since the 1950s. Since then, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have used it to help populations whose swift arrival to a haven was in the United States’ moral and geopolitical interests.
Among the populations granted parole over the decades: Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro; Hungarians in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising; Vietnamese allies and orphans as U.S. troops withdrew from Saigon; Jews persecuted by the Soviet Union; Iranians after their country’s Islamic revolution; and, more recently, Ukrainians escaping Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war on their homeland, as well as Afghan allies evacuated as part of our withdrawal from America’s longest war.
Our ability to quickly respond to war, oppression and other humanitarian crises abroad is critical to our national security — especially when we need to evacuate allies who are endangered because they helped U.S. interests. Our global reputation matters: When we break our promises to protect those who have protected us, allies might be less willing to take the risk next time we ask for help.
Revoking presidential authority to make classes of people eligible for parole, as Republicans currently demand, also has the potential to worsen border security. Why? Because parole is an orderly, legal pathway to enter the United States. The easier it is to come here safely and legally, the less incentive there is to pay smugglers and sneak in illegally.
Indeed, Biden has deployed the parole system with exactly this in mind when creating programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. Citizens from these countries can be granted advanced permission to enter, live and work in the United States for up to two years — if they pass security and health screenings, secure a private “sponsor” in the United States, and demonstrate urgent humanitarian need (among other criteria).
The programs have been phenomenally successful. They have helped assure that more immigrants can financially support themselves or rely on social and family networks until they get on their feet. What’s more, they have resulted in enormous declines in unlawful border crossings of people from eligible countries. For example, the number of Venezuelans arrested for illegally crossing the border fell 66 percent between September 2022 (the month before the Venezuelan parole program began) and July 2023.
That progress has since stalled because arbitrary caps on the number of people who can be paroled have led to huge backlogs, which nudges desperate people back toward illegal forms of entry. But rather than expanding upon these innovative programs, Republicans have been trying to ban them — first through lawsuits and now through extortion in the Ukraine-Israel aid negotiations.
There are things Congress could do if it actually wanted to improve border security. For example, it could send more resources to the border and immigration courts to speed up asylum screenings and adjudications. Instead, lawmakers are fixated on measures that would increase chaos at the border, sacrifice our moral standing and degrade our ability to defend ourselves around the world.
SUPREME CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
The Irish expect the worst to happen at any moment. And they have what my colleague Dan Barry calls “a wry acceptance of mortality.”
Still, Ireland was shaken to its core in 2012 by the death of Savita Halappanavar, a beautiful, sparkling 31-year-old Indian immigrant, a dentist married to an Indian engineer. Savita was expecting her first child. She wore a new dress for the baby shower and prayed for the future. But that night she got sick. She went to a Galway hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would not survive.
Knowing her life was at stake, she begged the medical staff to remove the fetus. As Kitty Holland wrote in “Savita: The Tragedy That Shook a Nation,” a midwife explained to her, “It’s a Catholic thing. We don’t do it here.” Ireland had a long history of punishing women, sending them to religious asylums if they were pregnant out of wedlock or deemed “fallen.” Savita developed septic shock and died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.
That tragedy jolted the turbulent debate in Ireland about the right of women to control their bodies. Savita’s story was vividly evoked by women and men when I covered the 2018 referendum to revoke the Vatican-approved Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which made abortions illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. That draconian amendment had women selling their cars and going to loan sharks to get the money to fly to England for procedures. It stamped women with a Scarlet Letter and psychological trauma because they felt their country had turned its back on them.
I remember, as I reported on the vote, having a flash of gratitude that I lived in America and not Ireland. I thought to myself that I would hate living in such a benighted country shaped by religious fanatics.
But now I am. Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.
And we have our own fraught case of a 31-year-old begging for a termination: Kate Cox, a married Texas mother of two who was thrilled to be pregnant until she was told that her fetus had a deadly chromosomal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could also keep Cox from getting pregnant again.
“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” Cox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”
Cox, more than 20 weeks pregnant, had to leave Texas to have an abortion because the state’s boorish, mega-MAGA attorney general, Ken Paxton, gleefully threatened to prosecute “hospitals, doctors or anyone else” who helped her, even floating first-degree felony charges. The case has become so politically toxic that even the voluble Ted Cruz, who is running for re-election next year, has clammed up about it. The Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, playing school nurse, warned Republicans on the Hill to talk less about banning abortion and more about the benefits of contraception.
I’m sure even Donald Trump, who was once pro-choice but now panders to evangelicals, has qualms about criminalizing abortion. It’s a political loser and could cost him the election if women are supermobilized. He called Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” Once Trump bragged about appointing the conservative justices on the court who were pivotal in overturning Roe v. Wade. But that won’t be a great sales pitch in the general election.
It is outrageous that such an important right in America was stripped away by a handful of cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.
But the Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court — all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh — could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Soon, it’ll be mandating the rhythm method.
An explosive new Times article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak revealed that Justice Samuel Alito was even more underhanded than we knew as he plotted to engineer “a titanic shift in the law” by vitiating Roe. Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin.
The more we learn, the more infuriating it is that our lives and choices about our bodies are determined by conniving radicals. The Supreme Court is way, way out of order.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
The Irish expect the worst to happen at any moment. And they have what my colleague Dan Barry calls “a wry acceptance of mortality.”
Still, Ireland was shaken to its core in 2012 by the death of Savita Halappanavar, a beautiful, sparkling 31-year-old Indian immigrant, a dentist married to an Indian engineer. Savita was expecting her first child. She wore a new dress for the baby shower and prayed for the future. But that night she got sick. She went to a Galway hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would not survive.
Knowing her life was at stake, she begged the medical staff to remove the fetus. As Kitty Holland wrote in “Savita: The Tragedy That Shook a Nation,” a midwife explained to her, “It’s a Catholic thing. We don’t do it here.” Ireland had a long history of punishing women, sending them to religious asylums if they were pregnant out of wedlock or deemed “fallen.” Savita developed septic shock and died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.
That tragedy jolted the turbulent debate in Ireland about the right of women to control their bodies. Savita’s story was vividly evoked by women and men when I covered the 2018 referendum to revoke the Vatican-approved Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which made abortions illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. That draconian amendment had women selling their cars and going to loan sharks to get the money to fly to England for procedures. It stamped women with a Scarlet Letter and psychological trauma because they felt their country had turned its back on them.
I remember, as I reported on the vote, having a flash of gratitude that I lived in America and not Ireland. I thought to myself that I would hate living in such a benighted country shaped by religious fanatics.
But now I am. Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.
And we have our own fraught case of a 31-year-old begging for a termination: Kate Cox, a married Texas mother of two who was thrilled to be pregnant until she was told that her fetus had a deadly chromosomal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could also keep Cox from getting pregnant again.
“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” Cox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”
Cox, more than 20 weeks pregnant, had to leave Texas to have an abortion because the state’s boorish, mega-MAGA attorney general, Ken Paxton, gleefully threatened to prosecute “hospitals, doctors or anyone else” who helped her, even floating first-degree felony charges. The case has become so politically toxic that even the voluble Ted Cruz, who is running for re-election next year, has clammed up about it. The Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, playing school nurse, warned Republicans on the Hill to talk less about banning abortion and more about the benefits of contraception.
I’m sure even Donald Trump, who was once pro-choice but now panders to evangelicals, has qualms about criminalizing abortion. It’s a political loser and could cost him the election if women are supermobilized. He called Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” Once Trump bragged about appointing the conservative justices on the court who were pivotal in overturning Roe v. Wade. But that won’t be a great sales pitch in the general election.
It is outrageous that such an important right in America was stripped away by a handful of cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.
But the Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court — all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh — could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Soon, it’ll be mandating the rhythm method.
An explosive new Times article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak revealed that Justice Samuel Alito was even more underhanded than we knew as he plotted to engineer “a titanic shift in the law” by vitiating Roe. Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin.
The more we learn, the more infuriating it is that our lives and choices about our bodies are determined by conniving radicals. The Supreme Court is way, way out of order.
THE SUPREME COURT SHOULD NOT ALLOW TRUMP TO PLAY THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The essential moment in Jack Smith’s 2020 election obstruction case against Donald Trump might have arrived — and, oddly, the substance of the charges has nothing to do with it. The special counsel this week filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to speedily review the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, rather than allow an appeals court to do so first. The strategy is gutsy, but it might be necessary to get the case to trial before the general election — and that is a wholly legitimate goal for Mr. Trump’s prosecutor.
Mr. Smith has asked the justices to grant him what’s known as certiorari before judgment. This is an extraordinary request, but the special counsel is hardly summoning a legal theory out of thin air. The Supreme Court has embraced the procedure in many cases involving national crises, including in United States v. Nixon, when President Richard M. Nixon refused to turn over his infamous audiotapes. That’s because, as a long line of law recognizes, the public is as entitled to the fair administration of justice as anyone standing trial. Part of what makes this case extraordinary is Mr. Trump’s unique potential to force a halt to the prosecution. Even when defendants use delay as a courtroom tactic, they typically still have to face prosecutors at some point.
By ignoring that timing in a case with the peaceful transition of power at its heart, the courts would allow themselves to be manipulated by a politician using his status as a candidate to avoid accountability. The gambit to prevent District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan from meeting a March 4 trial date, by appealing her rejection of Mr. Trump’s immunity defense, is only the latest delay tactic by the Trump legal team. The former president’s allies and his lawyers appear to believe his surest route to escaping accountability is to win reelection before a jury manages to convict him, then instructing the Justice Department to drop its cases. The Supreme Court would show that the justice system won’t be tricked if, instead, the justices ensured the case is tried on the merits.
The merits, as it turns out, aren’t too difficult to assess. A D.C. Circuit panel has already decided that a president’s civil immunity for actions taken while in office is limited when those actions are taken not in the president’s role as president, but in his role as a reelection seeker — as when Mr. Trump gave his Jan. 6, 2021, speech urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. The argument that a president is free from criminal liability during his tenure, meanwhile, has next to nothing to support it in doctrine or in history. There’s a reason, after all, that Nixon required a pardon from Gerald Ford, and that Bill Clinton gave up his law license as part of a deal to avoid prosecution following his perjury scandal.
This makes sense: A president’s duties will never require him to break the law, much less to do so intentionally. What’s more, much of the conduct described in the indictment, such as pressuring electors to defect or urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” cannot be construed to be inside the scope of the executive’s official duties.
Mr. Trump also argues that charging him based on the same violations for which he was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate would constitute double jeopardy. Yet the Constitution’s Impeachment Judgments clause says that if a president is convicted by the Senate, he can still be tried in a court of law. Reading this backward to suggest that if a president isn’t convicted by the Senate, he can’t be tried in a court of law defies common sense. The Framers clearly designed impeachment to serve a distinct purpose from prosecution.
The Supreme Court should grant the special counsel the speedy hearing he has asked for, because of the public interest in a decision that is quick, carefully considered and, crucially, final. If it does not the justices should at least instruct lower courts to move briskly, after which they should promptly choose once and for all whether to review the case. This procedural matter will swallow up the substance of the case unless the courts decide not to let it.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
The essential moment in Jack Smith’s 2020 election obstruction case against Donald Trump might have arrived — and, oddly, the substance of the charges has nothing to do with it. The special counsel this week filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to speedily review the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, rather than allow an appeals court to do so first. The strategy is gutsy, but it might be necessary to get the case to trial before the general election — and that is a wholly legitimate goal for Mr. Trump’s prosecutor.
Mr. Smith has asked the justices to grant him what’s known as certiorari before judgment. This is an extraordinary request, but the special counsel is hardly summoning a legal theory out of thin air. The Supreme Court has embraced the procedure in many cases involving national crises, including in United States v. Nixon, when President Richard M. Nixon refused to turn over his infamous audiotapes. That’s because, as a long line of law recognizes, the public is as entitled to the fair administration of justice as anyone standing trial. Part of what makes this case extraordinary is Mr. Trump’s unique potential to force a halt to the prosecution. Even when defendants use delay as a courtroom tactic, they typically still have to face prosecutors at some point.
By ignoring that timing in a case with the peaceful transition of power at its heart, the courts would allow themselves to be manipulated by a politician using his status as a candidate to avoid accountability. The gambit to prevent District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan from meeting a March 4 trial date, by appealing her rejection of Mr. Trump’s immunity defense, is only the latest delay tactic by the Trump legal team. The former president’s allies and his lawyers appear to believe his surest route to escaping accountability is to win reelection before a jury manages to convict him, then instructing the Justice Department to drop its cases. The Supreme Court would show that the justice system won’t be tricked if, instead, the justices ensured the case is tried on the merits.
The merits, as it turns out, aren’t too difficult to assess. A D.C. Circuit panel has already decided that a president’s civil immunity for actions taken while in office is limited when those actions are taken not in the president’s role as president, but in his role as a reelection seeker — as when Mr. Trump gave his Jan. 6, 2021, speech urging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol. The argument that a president is free from criminal liability during his tenure, meanwhile, has next to nothing to support it in doctrine or in history. There’s a reason, after all, that Nixon required a pardon from Gerald Ford, and that Bill Clinton gave up his law license as part of a deal to avoid prosecution following his perjury scandal.
This makes sense: A president’s duties will never require him to break the law, much less to do so intentionally. What’s more, much of the conduct described in the indictment, such as pressuring electors to defect or urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” cannot be construed to be inside the scope of the executive’s official duties.
Mr. Trump also argues that charging him based on the same violations for which he was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate would constitute double jeopardy. Yet the Constitution’s Impeachment Judgments clause says that if a president is convicted by the Senate, he can still be tried in a court of law. Reading this backward to suggest that if a president isn’t convicted by the Senate, he can’t be tried in a court of law defies common sense. The Framers clearly designed impeachment to serve a distinct purpose from prosecution.
The Supreme Court should grant the special counsel the speedy hearing he has asked for, because of the public interest in a decision that is quick, carefully considered and, crucially, final. If it does not the justices should at least instruct lower courts to move briskly, after which they should promptly choose once and for all whether to review the case. This procedural matter will swallow up the substance of the case unless the courts decide not to let it.
THE PLOT TO UNDERMINE THE U.S. TAX CODE, USING THE SUPREME COURT
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
For decades, the American right has been trying to gut the U.S. tax system, especially provisions borne by the richest Americans. But lately the multi-front war on government financing has tried to enlist a new ally: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Some of the anti-tax movement’s splashiest advances are well-known. Most obviously: Several rounds of multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts, signed into law by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. They and their anti-tax allies assured the public that such overhauls would pay for themselves. Instead, the measures worsened the shortfall between what the government spends and what it brings in.
Meanwhile, Republicans have undermined the government’s ability to collect taxes that do remain on the books. They have done so by slashing funding for the Internal Revenue Service, thereby reducing enforcement capacity and audit rates, especially of corporations and the highest earners. Each year hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes that are legally owed go unpaid; cutting the budget of the IRS further would mean leaving even more money on the table. Yet the GOP-controlled House has made defunding the tax police a top priority this year.
Now enter Moore v. United States, which the Supreme Court heard last week.
If other battles in the war on taxes are about constraining the government’s ability to collect taxes, this case is about constraining Congress’s ability to write tax law in the first place — and has the potential to blow up huge swaths of the existing tax code and preempt future reforms.
The Moore case, argued and supported by conservative anti-tax groups, challenges a provision of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. You might wonder why this ideological contingent might object to Trump’s tax law since it generally wanted it to pass. The answer is it objects to the law’s one-time repatriation tax of corporate profits held abroad, part of the GOP’s transition to an arguably more generous corporate tax system.
The plaintiffs argue that this transition tax is unconstitutional, using a convoluted argument about whether they ever “realized” the income being taxed. The case is complicated, as tax cases usually are. The main thing to know is that it’s widely seen as a stalking horse to prevent a wealth tax, which some Democrats have proposed.
But, depending on how the justices rule, they could easily bulldoze much of the rest of the tax code, too. Even supporters and architects of the Trump tax law have voiced concerns about this.
“A lot of the tax code would be unconstitutional if that thing prevailed,” former House speaker Paul D. Ryan said at a Brookings Institution event that I moderated recently. “I’m not for a wealth tax, but I think if you use this as the argument to spike a wealth tax, you’re going to basically get rid of, I don’t know, a third of the tax code.”
During oral arguments, the justices seemed hesitant to upend the entire tax code. But the U.S. tax system is sufficiently complex and interconnected — and the justices sufficiently inexperienced with tax law (the high court rarely accepts such cases) — that they might not even realize which threads could unravel it. Tax experts have warned that the justices might think they’re crafting a narrow ruling but still inadvertently spawn litigation against other tax provisions or create opportunities for new tax shelters. (This has basically happened before.)
“I suspect the court will go out of its way to say they don’t mean to undermine existing taxes, or other measures created to avoid abusing the tax system,” Michael J. Graetz, a law professor and author of a forthcoming book about the anti-tax movement, told me in a phone interview. “But it’s hard to know how much damage the court might do without having an opinion in front of you.”
Indeed, other big-ticket tax cases are already waiting on the Moore decision. Some tax advisers have suggested to clients that they preemptively file refund claims for taxes they’d already paid — in some cases, for taxes beyond just the repatriation tax at issue before the court, such as taxes on income from partnerships or other pass-through entities.
Striking down the transition tax alone would cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. If other parts of the tax code fall too, the cost could be in the trillions.
And this isn’t the only litigation affecting the government’s ability to fund itself. Other recent rulings have constrained the IRS’s ability to issue “guidance” about, for example, disclosure of tax shelters. Another, broader case coming before the Supreme Court next month could upend the executive branch’s ability to write tax regulations.
All these efforts have two things in common: One is that they are designed to “starve the beast” — that is, reduce the revenue coming into Treasury’s coffers. The second is that the beneficiaries of resulting changes to tax law are disproportionately those with the deepest pockets.
In a few days, the country will notch the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The spirit of that foundational event persists — except that now anti-government types aren’t merely dumping a bit of tea; they’re working to dump virtually all the country’s tax money, too.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
For decades, the American right has been trying to gut the U.S. tax system, especially provisions borne by the richest Americans. But lately the multi-front war on government financing has tried to enlist a new ally: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Some of the anti-tax movement’s splashiest advances are well-known. Most obviously: Several rounds of multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts, signed into law by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. They and their anti-tax allies assured the public that such overhauls would pay for themselves. Instead, the measures worsened the shortfall between what the government spends and what it brings in.
Meanwhile, Republicans have undermined the government’s ability to collect taxes that do remain on the books. They have done so by slashing funding for the Internal Revenue Service, thereby reducing enforcement capacity and audit rates, especially of corporations and the highest earners. Each year hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes that are legally owed go unpaid; cutting the budget of the IRS further would mean leaving even more money on the table. Yet the GOP-controlled House has made defunding the tax police a top priority this year.
Now enter Moore v. United States, which the Supreme Court heard last week.
If other battles in the war on taxes are about constraining the government’s ability to collect taxes, this case is about constraining Congress’s ability to write tax law in the first place — and has the potential to blow up huge swaths of the existing tax code and preempt future reforms.
The Moore case, argued and supported by conservative anti-tax groups, challenges a provision of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. You might wonder why this ideological contingent might object to Trump’s tax law since it generally wanted it to pass. The answer is it objects to the law’s one-time repatriation tax of corporate profits held abroad, part of the GOP’s transition to an arguably more generous corporate tax system.
The plaintiffs argue that this transition tax is unconstitutional, using a convoluted argument about whether they ever “realized” the income being taxed. The case is complicated, as tax cases usually are. The main thing to know is that it’s widely seen as a stalking horse to prevent a wealth tax, which some Democrats have proposed.
But, depending on how the justices rule, they could easily bulldoze much of the rest of the tax code, too. Even supporters and architects of the Trump tax law have voiced concerns about this.
“A lot of the tax code would be unconstitutional if that thing prevailed,” former House speaker Paul D. Ryan said at a Brookings Institution event that I moderated recently. “I’m not for a wealth tax, but I think if you use this as the argument to spike a wealth tax, you’re going to basically get rid of, I don’t know, a third of the tax code.”
During oral arguments, the justices seemed hesitant to upend the entire tax code. But the U.S. tax system is sufficiently complex and interconnected — and the justices sufficiently inexperienced with tax law (the high court rarely accepts such cases) — that they might not even realize which threads could unravel it. Tax experts have warned that the justices might think they’re crafting a narrow ruling but still inadvertently spawn litigation against other tax provisions or create opportunities for new tax shelters. (This has basically happened before.)
“I suspect the court will go out of its way to say they don’t mean to undermine existing taxes, or other measures created to avoid abusing the tax system,” Michael J. Graetz, a law professor and author of a forthcoming book about the anti-tax movement, told me in a phone interview. “But it’s hard to know how much damage the court might do without having an opinion in front of you.”
Indeed, other big-ticket tax cases are already waiting on the Moore decision. Some tax advisers have suggested to clients that they preemptively file refund claims for taxes they’d already paid — in some cases, for taxes beyond just the repatriation tax at issue before the court, such as taxes on income from partnerships or other pass-through entities.
Striking down the transition tax alone would cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. If other parts of the tax code fall too, the cost could be in the trillions.
And this isn’t the only litigation affecting the government’s ability to fund itself. Other recent rulings have constrained the IRS’s ability to issue “guidance” about, for example, disclosure of tax shelters. Another, broader case coming before the Supreme Court next month could upend the executive branch’s ability to write tax regulations.
All these efforts have two things in common: One is that they are designed to “starve the beast” — that is, reduce the revenue coming into Treasury’s coffers. The second is that the beneficiaries of resulting changes to tax law are disproportionately those with the deepest pockets.
In a few days, the country will notch the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The spirit of that foundational event persists — except that now anti-government types aren’t merely dumping a bit of tea; they’re working to dump virtually all the country’s tax money, too.
A JUDGE SAYS TRUMP INCITED INSURRECTION. OTHER JUDGES HAVE COME CLOSE.
A Colorado judge is the first to rule specifically on incitement, but she is not the first to lay blame at Trump’s feet for Jan. 6
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
The effort to get Donald Trump removed from the 2024 ballot over Jan. 6 has thus far failed to achieve its stated objective. But late Friday, it did notch a major victory: A judge ruled that while the former president can’t be disqualified, he did incite an insurrection.
A relatively low-level state court judge in Colorado issued the ruling, but it’s still a remarkable historic document.
And it has been a long time coming.
Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s ruling said that Trump’s conduct met the standard for disqualification under the 14th Amendment — that he “engaged in insurrection” — but that the amendment doesn’t apply to the president.
Wallace walked through the evidence for the first component of her finding in detail over 102 pages. She focused on the timeline of Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021 — which she said showed that Trump desired this outcome. And she documented his history of promoting and legitimizing political violence — which she said helps prove he incited the riot.
“The Court concludes that Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” Wallace wrote.
She added that Trump’s “inaction during the violence and his later endorsement of the violence corroborates the evidence that his intent was to incite violence on January 6, 2021 based on his conduct leading up to and on January 6, 2021.”
Among her other key findings:
Wallace is the first judge to rule that Trump incited the insurrection. (Trump was impeached by the House for incitement but later acquitted by the Senate, despite historic numbers of Republicans voting against him.)
Wallace is hardly the first judge to lay blame at Trump’s feet, however. Indeed, many judges have gestured in this general direction, including some Republican-appointed ones. They just weren’t tasked with deciding the incitement question, specifically.
The other big ruling on this front came last year from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter. He ruled in March 2022 in a case involving Trump lawyer John Eastman that Trump probably broke the law. Carter’s ruling said it was “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
While Carter was focused more broadly on Trump’s efforts to obstruct Congress’s actions that day, he called the plot “a coup in search of a legal theory.” He said it “spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government” and “led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers.”
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, in a case involving Trump’s Jan. 6 civil liability, likened Trump’s speech on the Ellipse before the Jan. 6 riot to “telling an excited mob that corn-dealers starve the poor in front of the corn-dealer’s home.” He said that Trump’s speech “can reasonably be viewed as a call for collective action.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a criminal case against a Jan. 6 defendant, noted that the “steady drumbeat that inspired” the defendant hadn’t gone away, including via the “near-daily fulminations of the former President.” In another case, she cited the “incendiary statements at the rally … which absolutely, quite clearly and deliberately, stoked the flames of fear and discontent and explicitly encouraged those at the rally to go to the Capitol and fight” to stop the certification.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that Jan. 6 involved events “spurred by then President Trump and a number of his prominent allies who bear much responsibility for what occurred on that day.”
And perhaps most strikingly, Republican-appointed U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled in another Jan. 6 case that while Trump’s comments were facially just about protesting, “one might conclude that the context implies that he was urging protestors to do something more — perhaps to enter the Capitol building and stop the certification.”
A Colorado judge has now concluded Trump intended just that.
And while his dual Jan. 6 indictments don’t deal specifically with the incitement question, we’ll soon learn how much fault other courts lay directly at his feet.
A Colorado judge is the first to rule specifically on incitement, but she is not the first to lay blame at Trump’s feet for Jan. 6
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
The effort to get Donald Trump removed from the 2024 ballot over Jan. 6 has thus far failed to achieve its stated objective. But late Friday, it did notch a major victory: A judge ruled that while the former president can’t be disqualified, he did incite an insurrection.
A relatively low-level state court judge in Colorado issued the ruling, but it’s still a remarkable historic document.
And it has been a long time coming.
Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace’s ruling said that Trump’s conduct met the standard for disqualification under the 14th Amendment — that he “engaged in insurrection” — but that the amendment doesn’t apply to the president.
Wallace walked through the evidence for the first component of her finding in detail over 102 pages. She focused on the timeline of Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021 — which she said showed that Trump desired this outcome. And she documented his history of promoting and legitimizing political violence — which she said helps prove he incited the riot.
“The Court concludes that Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” Wallace wrote.
She added that Trump’s “inaction during the violence and his later endorsement of the violence corroborates the evidence that his intent was to incite violence on January 6, 2021 based on his conduct leading up to and on January 6, 2021.”
Among her other key findings:
- “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same. He responded to growing threats of violence and intimidation in the lead-up to the certification by amplifying his false claims of election fraud.”
- “He convened a large crowd on the date of the certification in Washington, D.C., focused them on the certification process, told them their country was being stolen from them, called for strength and action, and directed them to the Capitol where the certification was about to take place.”
- “[T]he Court has found that Trump was aware that his supporters were willing to engage in political violence and that they would respond to his calls for them to do so.”
- She ruled that Trump’s inaction during the riot didn’t itself constitute engaging in insurrection, but that it was evidence “that he intended for the crowd to engage in violence when he sent them to the Capitol ‘to fight like hell.’”
- She wrote that Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet on Jan. 6 attacking Vice President Mike Pence, an hour after he had been informed of unrest at the Capitol according to a White House employee’s testimony, “caused further violence at the Capitol.”
- She said Trump’s comments after the fact show he “endorsed and intended the actions of the mob on January 6, 2021.”
Wallace is the first judge to rule that Trump incited the insurrection. (Trump was impeached by the House for incitement but later acquitted by the Senate, despite historic numbers of Republicans voting against him.)
Wallace is hardly the first judge to lay blame at Trump’s feet, however. Indeed, many judges have gestured in this general direction, including some Republican-appointed ones. They just weren’t tasked with deciding the incitement question, specifically.
The other big ruling on this front came last year from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter. He ruled in March 2022 in a case involving Trump lawyer John Eastman that Trump probably broke the law. Carter’s ruling said it was “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
While Carter was focused more broadly on Trump’s efforts to obstruct Congress’s actions that day, he called the plot “a coup in search of a legal theory.” He said it “spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government” and “led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers.”
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, in a case involving Trump’s Jan. 6 civil liability, likened Trump’s speech on the Ellipse before the Jan. 6 riot to “telling an excited mob that corn-dealers starve the poor in front of the corn-dealer’s home.” He said that Trump’s speech “can reasonably be viewed as a call for collective action.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a criminal case against a Jan. 6 defendant, noted that the “steady drumbeat that inspired” the defendant hadn’t gone away, including via the “near-daily fulminations of the former President.” In another case, she cited the “incendiary statements at the rally … which absolutely, quite clearly and deliberately, stoked the flames of fear and discontent and explicitly encouraged those at the rally to go to the Capitol and fight” to stop the certification.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that Jan. 6 involved events “spurred by then President Trump and a number of his prominent allies who bear much responsibility for what occurred on that day.”
And perhaps most strikingly, Republican-appointed U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled in another Jan. 6 case that while Trump’s comments were facially just about protesting, “one might conclude that the context implies that he was urging protestors to do something more — perhaps to enter the Capitol building and stop the certification.”
A Colorado judge has now concluded Trump intended just that.
And while his dual Jan. 6 indictments don’t deal specifically with the incitement question, we’ll soon learn how much fault other courts lay directly at his feet.
WHAT HOUSE REPUBLICANS WANT TO DO TO PUBLIC EDUCATION FUNDING
By Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Here’s what key House Republicans are proposing to do with federal public education funding for fiscal year 2024: slash it, especially programs aimed to help students who live in poverty, English language learners and immigrants and young children. They also want to make sure that not a dime is spent on any lesson connected to critical race theory or to support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives created by President Biden.
The priorities for 2024 education funding were spelled out in HR 5894, the biggest domestic funding bill for the departments of labor, education and health and human services. It was approved this week by a House committee and sent to the full House for consideration, but a planned vote this week was postponed when right-wing Republicans refused to consider more legislation because they were angry that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) passed a bill with Democratic votes to keep the government open.
House Democrats — and possibly some moderate Republicans — will balk at some of the deep education cuts proposed in the legislation, as will the Democratic-led Senate. But the education priorities in the bill show where the Republican leadership stands on federal funding for public education and what they might do if they win control of Congress and the White House in 2024.
The Republican legislation would (among other things):
President Biden has proposed a 2024 budget that seeks to increase Education Department spending by nearly 14 percent ($10.8 billion) and boost Title 1 spending.
Democrats blasted the legislation — which also makes cuts in the departments of labor, health and human services and other related agencies — saying that it “decimates support for children in K-12 elementary schools and early-childhood education and “abandons college students and low-income workers trying to improve their lives through higher education or job training.” A coalition of 54 education, civil rights, immigration, and other advocacy organizations wrote a letter to oppose the bill, saying if it were passed as written and became law it would “devastate America’s education system at a time when students are struggling to recover from the covid pandemic to the detriment of students, educators, families, and the country as a whole.”
The Republican bill also says no federal funds it appropriates can be used to “carry out any program, project, or activity” that “promotes or advances” critical race theory, which is a college level scholarly tool set for examining systemic racism in the United States. Republicans have made it the focus of what is called the new “culture wars,” passing laws in some states restricting how teachers can talk about race and racism.
The bill also bars any of its appropriated funding to “implement, administer, apply, enforce, or carry out” executive orders that President Biden has signed to further racial equity. It references three executive orders signed by Biden.
His Jan. 20, 2021, order called for the federal government to adopt a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected.” A June 25, 2021 executive order to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal workforce, and a Feb. 16 executive order called for extending the reach of the first two orders, in part by requiring department and agency heads to create equity teams that coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.
The Republican bill also seeks to:
For the first time since 2012, it keeps level the maximum Pell Grant, funding provided to millions of students from low-income families to help them pay for college at a time of rising tuition costs, and fails to increase funding to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the primary federal program to help students with disabilities, even though Congress pays for far less of the cost than it had promised when it became law.
By Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post
Here’s what key House Republicans are proposing to do with federal public education funding for fiscal year 2024: slash it, especially programs aimed to help students who live in poverty, English language learners and immigrants and young children. They also want to make sure that not a dime is spent on any lesson connected to critical race theory or to support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives created by President Biden.
The priorities for 2024 education funding were spelled out in HR 5894, the biggest domestic funding bill for the departments of labor, education and health and human services. It was approved this week by a House committee and sent to the full House for consideration, but a planned vote this week was postponed when right-wing Republicans refused to consider more legislation because they were angry that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) passed a bill with Democratic votes to keep the government open.
House Democrats — and possibly some moderate Republicans — will balk at some of the deep education cuts proposed in the legislation, as will the Democratic-led Senate. But the education priorities in the bill show where the Republican leadership stands on federal funding for public education and what they might do if they win control of Congress and the White House in 2024.
The Republican legislation would (among other things):
- Cut Education Department funding 28 percent cut ($22.5 billion)
- Cut by 80 percent ($14.7 billion) for Title I, a program which is intended to support schools with high percentages of students who live in poverty and which is at the heart of the federal K-12 education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act. Critics said this cut, if enacted, could lead to the loss of 220,000 teachers from classrooms serving low-income students.
- Eliminate funding ($2.2 billion) for state grants that support programs that improve teacher and principal quality.
- Eliminate funding ($1.2 billion) for Federal Work Study, which provides part-time jobs for students with financial need so they can earn money to help them pay for college
- Eliminate funding ($890 million) for a program that supports 5 million English language learners
President Biden has proposed a 2024 budget that seeks to increase Education Department spending by nearly 14 percent ($10.8 billion) and boost Title 1 spending.
Democrats blasted the legislation — which also makes cuts in the departments of labor, health and human services and other related agencies — saying that it “decimates support for children in K-12 elementary schools and early-childhood education and “abandons college students and low-income workers trying to improve their lives through higher education or job training.” A coalition of 54 education, civil rights, immigration, and other advocacy organizations wrote a letter to oppose the bill, saying if it were passed as written and became law it would “devastate America’s education system at a time when students are struggling to recover from the covid pandemic to the detriment of students, educators, families, and the country as a whole.”
The Republican bill also says no federal funds it appropriates can be used to “carry out any program, project, or activity” that “promotes or advances” critical race theory, which is a college level scholarly tool set for examining systemic racism in the United States. Republicans have made it the focus of what is called the new “culture wars,” passing laws in some states restricting how teachers can talk about race and racism.
The bill also bars any of its appropriated funding to “implement, administer, apply, enforce, or carry out” executive orders that President Biden has signed to further racial equity. It references three executive orders signed by Biden.
His Jan. 20, 2021, order called for the federal government to adopt a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected.” A June 25, 2021 executive order to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal workforce, and a Feb. 16 executive order called for extending the reach of the first two orders, in part by requiring department and agency heads to create equity teams that coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.
The Republican bill also seeks to:
- Eliminate funding ($139 million) for magnet schools
- Eliminate funding ($87 million) in social and emotional learning grants
- Eliminate funding ($75 million) for a program that provides campus-based child care for low-income parents in secondary education
- Cut $50 million from a program that supports full-service community schools, which provide wraparound services for students and their families
- Eliminate funding ($50 million) for research and development infrastructure grants that go to historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities and minority serving institutions
- Cut $35 million from the Office for Civil Rights
For the first time since 2012, it keeps level the maximum Pell Grant, funding provided to millions of students from low-income families to help them pay for college at a time of rising tuition costs, and fails to increase funding to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the primary federal program to help students with disabilities, even though Congress pays for far less of the cost than it had promised when it became law.
WHY IS TRUMP TALKING JUST LIKE HITLER?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Trump isn’t just blatantly copying Hitler’s fascist language, but stealing his ideas, too
Fascism doesn’t occur naturally in human nature. Somebody had to invent it, and no one played a greater role than Benito Mussolini, an Italian World War I veteran who saw that a new kind of politics could arise from the charred ashes and bitter resentments of men traumatized by a conflict that had just killed 20 million. A vain and violent man, Il Duce taught Donald Trump how to strut on stage, posed shirtless generations before Vladimir Putin, and clung to power after 1922′s March on Rome by whipping up hate against leftists he described as vermin.
Adolf Hitler picked up the ball from his 1920s hero Mussolini and ran with it — taking antisemitism to new lows by comparing Jews to filthy animals and parasites, years before his Nazi regime killed 6 million of them. After seizing power in 1933, the German Führer told a Czech minister that “vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year, there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” His gutter language was adopted by the Third Reich’s writers and editorial cartoonists who often depicted Jews as rodents, targets for elimination.
Maybe Trump was paying his own warped tribute to Hitler — the ultimate disgruntled war vet — when he chose Veterans Day to visit Claremont, N.H., and deliver an address that sounded just like a page ripped from a book of the German dictator’s speeches that his first wife Ivana famously claimed the future 45th president of the United States kept by his bedside.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” said Trump, only days after a flurry of one-year-before-the-2024-election polls showed his campaign for another term moving ahead of President Joe Biden. He told voters in the key primary state that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.” He repeated the “vermin” bit on his Truth Social website, lest anyone missed it.
Trump’s “vermin” rant — and its seemingly deliberate echo of the 20th century’s worst tyrants — will be remembered as something of a turning point. Although the embarrassingly timid New York Times nearly whiffed (”Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech In a Very Different Direction” was the initial headline from editors terrified of calling fascism by its name), by Monday multiple media outlets were expressing an appropriate level of horror over remarks by the GOP’s all-but-certain nominee, and what they mean for American democracy.
Still, I think the media is missing something about Trump and his campaign as it grinds inexorably toward Milwaukee and maybe 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What may be forever known as “the vermin speech” was not the only time that Trump, aided by his past and future propaganda ministers like Stephen Miller, have plagiarized Hitler in ways that cannot be accidental.
As Trump did on Saturday, Hitler famously rallied his Nazi Party supporters to take on “the enemy within.” In a recent campaign stop, the ex-president repeated a line hailing “One people, one family, one glorious nation” — a fairly blatant lift from the German autocrat’s invocation of “One people, one realm, one leader.” The GOP frontrunner, in an escalation of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, also said not long ago that migrants to the southern border “are poisoning the blood of our country,” a deafening echo of Hitler’s riffs on “blood poisoning” in Mein Kampf. (A Trump spokesman called it “a normal phrase that’s used in everyday life.”)
“I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don’t know how to say this more clearly: We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism,” Brian Klaas, political scientist at University College London and writer, said Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, noting the rise in fascist rhetoric can’t be considered a coincidence.
It’s not. To the contrary, the intentionality here is stunning. Most of us in “It Can’t Happen Here” America not only believe that our exceptionalism will magically and forever protect us from dictatorship, but also that anyone who tries to implement fascism will take a stealth approach, hoping to sneak his diabolical plan past a wise, democracy-loving electorate. But Trump is being deliberate. He desires not just to make himself a dictator, but to brag and mock us while he’s doing it.
How else to explain that not only is Trump talking like Hitler and Mussolini, but he has overt plans to act like them after Jan. 20, 2025. The latest example was reported in the same edition of the Times as the Veterans Day speech: a scheme to round up thousands if not millions of undocumented immigrants from coast to coast and place them in concentration camps, awaiting mass deportation. While Trump’s worst ideas in his first term were often thwarted by more responsible public servants, the 2.0 model has a plan to install thousands of loyalists throughout the government — including a Justice Department where Trump seeks prosecution of anyone who wronged him.
Is this plot to nuke the American Experiment really leading in the polls? It might be. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently pointed to data that 38% of Americans think “that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction.” Millions more — from CEOs wondering if dictatorship is better for the bottom line to Times editors afraid they might melt at the word “fascism” — can’t or won’t speak up. There are also millions of us determined to stop Trump’s tyranny, or die trying — but we have a lot of work to do.
For now, Team Trump is rubbing it in our face. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Monday that people comparing his boss’s rhetoric to Hitler and Mussolini “are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” (He later clarified he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence” — as if that’s better.)
From somewhere intolerably warm, a bare-chested Il Duce surely crossed his arms, looked up, and smiled.
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Trump isn’t just blatantly copying Hitler’s fascist language, but stealing his ideas, too
Fascism doesn’t occur naturally in human nature. Somebody had to invent it, and no one played a greater role than Benito Mussolini, an Italian World War I veteran who saw that a new kind of politics could arise from the charred ashes and bitter resentments of men traumatized by a conflict that had just killed 20 million. A vain and violent man, Il Duce taught Donald Trump how to strut on stage, posed shirtless generations before Vladimir Putin, and clung to power after 1922′s March on Rome by whipping up hate against leftists he described as vermin.
Adolf Hitler picked up the ball from his 1920s hero Mussolini and ran with it — taking antisemitism to new lows by comparing Jews to filthy animals and parasites, years before his Nazi regime killed 6 million of them. After seizing power in 1933, the German Führer told a Czech minister that “vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year, there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” His gutter language was adopted by the Third Reich’s writers and editorial cartoonists who often depicted Jews as rodents, targets for elimination.
Maybe Trump was paying his own warped tribute to Hitler — the ultimate disgruntled war vet — when he chose Veterans Day to visit Claremont, N.H., and deliver an address that sounded just like a page ripped from a book of the German dictator’s speeches that his first wife Ivana famously claimed the future 45th president of the United States kept by his bedside.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” said Trump, only days after a flurry of one-year-before-the-2024-election polls showed his campaign for another term moving ahead of President Joe Biden. He told voters in the key primary state that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.” He repeated the “vermin” bit on his Truth Social website, lest anyone missed it.
Trump’s “vermin” rant — and its seemingly deliberate echo of the 20th century’s worst tyrants — will be remembered as something of a turning point. Although the embarrassingly timid New York Times nearly whiffed (”Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech In a Very Different Direction” was the initial headline from editors terrified of calling fascism by its name), by Monday multiple media outlets were expressing an appropriate level of horror over remarks by the GOP’s all-but-certain nominee, and what they mean for American democracy.
Still, I think the media is missing something about Trump and his campaign as it grinds inexorably toward Milwaukee and maybe 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What may be forever known as “the vermin speech” was not the only time that Trump, aided by his past and future propaganda ministers like Stephen Miller, have plagiarized Hitler in ways that cannot be accidental.
As Trump did on Saturday, Hitler famously rallied his Nazi Party supporters to take on “the enemy within.” In a recent campaign stop, the ex-president repeated a line hailing “One people, one family, one glorious nation” — a fairly blatant lift from the German autocrat’s invocation of “One people, one realm, one leader.” The GOP frontrunner, in an escalation of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, also said not long ago that migrants to the southern border “are poisoning the blood of our country,” a deafening echo of Hitler’s riffs on “blood poisoning” in Mein Kampf. (A Trump spokesman called it “a normal phrase that’s used in everyday life.”)
“I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don’t know how to say this more clearly: We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism,” Brian Klaas, political scientist at University College London and writer, said Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, noting the rise in fascist rhetoric can’t be considered a coincidence.
It’s not. To the contrary, the intentionality here is stunning. Most of us in “It Can’t Happen Here” America not only believe that our exceptionalism will magically and forever protect us from dictatorship, but also that anyone who tries to implement fascism will take a stealth approach, hoping to sneak his diabolical plan past a wise, democracy-loving electorate. But Trump is being deliberate. He desires not just to make himself a dictator, but to brag and mock us while he’s doing it.
How else to explain that not only is Trump talking like Hitler and Mussolini, but he has overt plans to act like them after Jan. 20, 2025. The latest example was reported in the same edition of the Times as the Veterans Day speech: a scheme to round up thousands if not millions of undocumented immigrants from coast to coast and place them in concentration camps, awaiting mass deportation. While Trump’s worst ideas in his first term were often thwarted by more responsible public servants, the 2.0 model has a plan to install thousands of loyalists throughout the government — including a Justice Department where Trump seeks prosecution of anyone who wronged him.
Is this plot to nuke the American Experiment really leading in the polls? It might be. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently pointed to data that 38% of Americans think “that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction.” Millions more — from CEOs wondering if dictatorship is better for the bottom line to Times editors afraid they might melt at the word “fascism” — can’t or won’t speak up. There are also millions of us determined to stop Trump’s tyranny, or die trying — but we have a lot of work to do.
For now, Team Trump is rubbing it in our face. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Monday that people comparing his boss’s rhetoric to Hitler and Mussolini “are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” (He later clarified he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence” — as if that’s better.)
From somewhere intolerably warm, a bare-chested Il Duce surely crossed his arms, looked up, and smiled.
THE SUPREME COURT’S ETHICS CODE AMOUNTS TO ‘YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME’
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
It’s better to have a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices than not to have one. That’s the most that can be said for the document the justices issued Monday — belated, grudging and inadequate to the task of restoring the court’s tattered reputation.
For the most part, the code would not have prevented, nor would it punish or otherwise address, the episodes that have so alarmed the public. Not Justice Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of, and failure to disclose, luxury vacations and travel from Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow. Not his failure to recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases despite his wife’s involvement in challenging the election results. Not Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s undisclosed travel to an Alaskan fishing trip on the private jet of a hedge fund tycoon with business before the court.
I could go on, but you get the point. It’s difficult, maybe even impossible, to legislate good judgment or prevent the culture of ingrained entitlement that these episodes expose. No code of conduct can substitute for common sense and a basic understanding of how unseemly these episodes appear to a public that believes justices shouldn’t profit from their lofty positions or scoop up goodies not available to ordinary mortals.
But no code of conduct is meaningful without a mechanism for enforcement and accountability that is completely absent from the new document. Lacking that, there is every reason to believe that this behavior will persist, that spotty and reluctant compliance with ethics and disclosure rules will continue, and that the court’s reputation will suffer accordingly.
The new document bristles with the court’s resentment at the position in which it finds itself — and it casts the blame on a misinformed public, not the justices themselves. “The absence of a Code,” it notes, “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”
There are a few nuggets of improvement buried within the document’s 14 pages. For instance, Thomas’s defenders justified his acceptance of tuition payments from Crow for his grandnephew — whom he was raising “as a son” — on the hyper-legalistic grounds that federal ethics rules did not cover this relationship and it was therefore not a “reportable gift.” The new code addresses that insupportable deficiency, providing that “a ‘member of the Justice’s family’ means any relative of a Justice by blood, adoption, or marriage, or any person treated by a Justice as a member of the Justice’s family.” This is good.
The code’s split-the-difference treatment of justices’ involvement in fundraising events for “law-related or other nonprofit organizations” is more questionable. It affirmatively permits justices to participate in such activities, clearing the way for episodes such as Thomas’s attendance at donor events for the conservative Koch network. This remains unwise and unnecessary.
At the same time, the code provides that justices “should not knowingly be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program of such event. In general, an event is a ‘fundraising event’ if proceeds from the event exceed its costs or if donations are solicited in connection with the event.” If taken seriously, that would seem to bar justices from speaking, as several have, at the annual Federalist Society dinner. If so, good on that, too.
The biggest omission is the glaring absence of accountability. This is a “you’re not the boss of me” code, up to each individual justice to self-administer — an approach that would be more tolerable had some justices not already proved themselves to be tone-deaf and negligent, or worse, in complying with the rules.
The court needs to safeguard its independence, so it is, admittedly, tricky to figure out how to craft an enforcement mechanism. But there are smart ways to set up a system that protects the judiciary without sacrificing accountability. One smart approach would be to establish a panel of judges, perhaps retired jurists, who could examine ethics complaints and issues of compliance. Another, as former Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine has urged, would be an inspector general who could do the same.
But a code without oversight is mere window-dressing. First-year law students learn the word “precatory” — meaning “expressing a hope or wish.” For example, my will may express my desire that my children cooperate in the disposition of my assets. It is merely precatory, not binding. That is where the justices would like to leave their ethics code, as a hope or wish that they all behave appropriately. Experience teaches the inadequacy of that aspiration.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
It’s better to have a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices than not to have one. That’s the most that can be said for the document the justices issued Monday — belated, grudging and inadequate to the task of restoring the court’s tattered reputation.
For the most part, the code would not have prevented, nor would it punish or otherwise address, the episodes that have so alarmed the public. Not Justice Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of, and failure to disclose, luxury vacations and travel from Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow. Not his failure to recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases despite his wife’s involvement in challenging the election results. Not Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s undisclosed travel to an Alaskan fishing trip on the private jet of a hedge fund tycoon with business before the court.
I could go on, but you get the point. It’s difficult, maybe even impossible, to legislate good judgment or prevent the culture of ingrained entitlement that these episodes expose. No code of conduct can substitute for common sense and a basic understanding of how unseemly these episodes appear to a public that believes justices shouldn’t profit from their lofty positions or scoop up goodies not available to ordinary mortals.
But no code of conduct is meaningful without a mechanism for enforcement and accountability that is completely absent from the new document. Lacking that, there is every reason to believe that this behavior will persist, that spotty and reluctant compliance with ethics and disclosure rules will continue, and that the court’s reputation will suffer accordingly.
The new document bristles with the court’s resentment at the position in which it finds itself — and it casts the blame on a misinformed public, not the justices themselves. “The absence of a Code,” it notes, “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.”
There are a few nuggets of improvement buried within the document’s 14 pages. For instance, Thomas’s defenders justified his acceptance of tuition payments from Crow for his grandnephew — whom he was raising “as a son” — on the hyper-legalistic grounds that federal ethics rules did not cover this relationship and it was therefore not a “reportable gift.” The new code addresses that insupportable deficiency, providing that “a ‘member of the Justice’s family’ means any relative of a Justice by blood, adoption, or marriage, or any person treated by a Justice as a member of the Justice’s family.” This is good.
The code’s split-the-difference treatment of justices’ involvement in fundraising events for “law-related or other nonprofit organizations” is more questionable. It affirmatively permits justices to participate in such activities, clearing the way for episodes such as Thomas’s attendance at donor events for the conservative Koch network. This remains unwise and unnecessary.
At the same time, the code provides that justices “should not knowingly be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program of such event. In general, an event is a ‘fundraising event’ if proceeds from the event exceed its costs or if donations are solicited in connection with the event.” If taken seriously, that would seem to bar justices from speaking, as several have, at the annual Federalist Society dinner. If so, good on that, too.
The biggest omission is the glaring absence of accountability. This is a “you’re not the boss of me” code, up to each individual justice to self-administer — an approach that would be more tolerable had some justices not already proved themselves to be tone-deaf and negligent, or worse, in complying with the rules.
The court needs to safeguard its independence, so it is, admittedly, tricky to figure out how to craft an enforcement mechanism. But there are smart ways to set up a system that protects the judiciary without sacrificing accountability. One smart approach would be to establish a panel of judges, perhaps retired jurists, who could examine ethics complaints and issues of compliance. Another, as former Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine has urged, would be an inspector general who could do the same.
But a code without oversight is mere window-dressing. First-year law students learn the word “precatory” — meaning “expressing a hope or wish.” For example, my will may express my desire that my children cooperate in the disposition of my assets. It is merely precatory, not binding. That is where the justices would like to leave their ethics code, as a hope or wish that they all behave appropriately. Experience teaches the inadequacy of that aspiration.
PA. NEEDS TO DO MORE TO DEFEND PUBLIC HEALTH FROM SHALE GAS
Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas.
by Alison L. Steele, For The Inquirer Alison L. Steele is executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit organization that has worked to defend public health in the face of oil and gas development for more than 10 years.
Earlier this year, the University of Pittsburgh released the results from three studies focusing on the health impacts on people who live near shale gas operations — sometimes called fracking — in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The results of these studies showed that Pennsylvania must do more to defend the health of residents, not just in areas of heavy industrial activity, but all across the commonwealth.
The University of Pittsburgh studies reinforce the scientific consensus that shale gas development is unsafe, especially for vulnerable populations like children, the elderly, pregnant individuals, and those with existing health conditions. According to our team’s latest count, more than two dozen studies now show a link between shale gas and health impacts on residents living close by. Additional research reinforces that shale gas correlates with poor health outcomes for people living near this heavy industry.
Approximately 1.5 million Pennsylvanians reside within a half mile of oil and gas wells, compressors, and processors. Health impacts from living near shale gas development include a higher risk of asthma and other respiratory illnesses, heart disease and heart attacks, birth defects and preterm deliveries, mental health issues, and cancer.
Shale gas poses other serious health impacts across the globe. Methane, the primary component of shale gas, is responsible for at least 25% of the climate warming we are experiencing today. Climate change has serious health consequences through increases in destructive storms, heat waves, floods, fires, and insect-borne diseases.
To date, Pennsylvania’s governing bodies have failed to respond in a meaningful way to the health harms associated with shale gas development. Given the findings of these new studies and others, Pennsylvania leaders must take swift action to protect the health of our neighbors. Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas. They should also commit to supporting, at a minimum, the recommendations put forth by the 43rd statewide grand jury on the shale gas industry.
The Environmental Health Project recommends expanding protective buffers around shale gas facilities in Pennsylvania from the currently required 500 feet to at least 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) from small facilities, and 2 kilometers (about 1.25 miles) from large facilities, schools, nursing homes, and other structures accommodating vulnerable populations. The industry should not be allowed exemptions or waivers from these distances for any reason. There is no setback distance that has been established as “safe” for nearby communities.
Prior to permitting new infrastructure, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection should analyze aggregate emissions — all sources of air pollution in a given area — to accurately assess existing air quality concerns and to limit shale gas development in areas that are already burdened with pollution.
Additionally, the legislature must fully fund agencies like the Department of Health and the Department of Environmental Protection so that they can do their job of preserving Pennsylvania’s resources and protecting the health of residents.
Further, shale gas operators must be held accountable for leaking toxic pollution that harms residents and hastens climate change. Operators must be compelled to publicly disclose all chemicals used in drilling and hydraulic fracturing before they are used on-site, as recommended in the grand jury report. Pennsylvania must also close hazardous waste loopholes and require safer transport of the contaminated waste created from fracking sites.
Finally, we must focus our full attention on a “just” transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energies. A just transition means a world where workers are trained in the growing and well-paying renewable energy sector while pollution is minimized in existing industry. By doing so, all Pennsylvanians will breathe healthier air, drink purer water, and eat food grown in cleaner soil. Hospital visits and outpatient procedures related to impacts from shale gas development will decline, saving health-care costs in the long run.
These actions must begin today if we are to have any hope of saving lives and reducing health impacts from shale gas development across Pennsylvania.
Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas.
by Alison L. Steele, For The Inquirer Alison L. Steele is executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit organization that has worked to defend public health in the face of oil and gas development for more than 10 years.
Earlier this year, the University of Pittsburgh released the results from three studies focusing on the health impacts on people who live near shale gas operations — sometimes called fracking — in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The results of these studies showed that Pennsylvania must do more to defend the health of residents, not just in areas of heavy industrial activity, but all across the commonwealth.
The University of Pittsburgh studies reinforce the scientific consensus that shale gas development is unsafe, especially for vulnerable populations like children, the elderly, pregnant individuals, and those with existing health conditions. According to our team’s latest count, more than two dozen studies now show a link between shale gas and health impacts on residents living close by. Additional research reinforces that shale gas correlates with poor health outcomes for people living near this heavy industry.
Approximately 1.5 million Pennsylvanians reside within a half mile of oil and gas wells, compressors, and processors. Health impacts from living near shale gas development include a higher risk of asthma and other respiratory illnesses, heart disease and heart attacks, birth defects and preterm deliveries, mental health issues, and cancer.
Shale gas poses other serious health impacts across the globe. Methane, the primary component of shale gas, is responsible for at least 25% of the climate warming we are experiencing today. Climate change has serious health consequences through increases in destructive storms, heat waves, floods, fires, and insect-borne diseases.
To date, Pennsylvania’s governing bodies have failed to respond in a meaningful way to the health harms associated with shale gas development. Given the findings of these new studies and others, Pennsylvania leaders must take swift action to protect the health of our neighbors. Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection, and members of the General Assembly must publicly acknowledge the health harms associated with shale gas. They should also commit to supporting, at a minimum, the recommendations put forth by the 43rd statewide grand jury on the shale gas industry.
The Environmental Health Project recommends expanding protective buffers around shale gas facilities in Pennsylvania from the currently required 500 feet to at least 1 kilometer (about 0.6 miles) from small facilities, and 2 kilometers (about 1.25 miles) from large facilities, schools, nursing homes, and other structures accommodating vulnerable populations. The industry should not be allowed exemptions or waivers from these distances for any reason. There is no setback distance that has been established as “safe” for nearby communities.
Prior to permitting new infrastructure, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection should analyze aggregate emissions — all sources of air pollution in a given area — to accurately assess existing air quality concerns and to limit shale gas development in areas that are already burdened with pollution.
Additionally, the legislature must fully fund agencies like the Department of Health and the Department of Environmental Protection so that they can do their job of preserving Pennsylvania’s resources and protecting the health of residents.
Further, shale gas operators must be held accountable for leaking toxic pollution that harms residents and hastens climate change. Operators must be compelled to publicly disclose all chemicals used in drilling and hydraulic fracturing before they are used on-site, as recommended in the grand jury report. Pennsylvania must also close hazardous waste loopholes and require safer transport of the contaminated waste created from fracking sites.
Finally, we must focus our full attention on a “just” transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energies. A just transition means a world where workers are trained in the growing and well-paying renewable energy sector while pollution is minimized in existing industry. By doing so, all Pennsylvanians will breathe healthier air, drink purer water, and eat food grown in cleaner soil. Hospital visits and outpatient procedures related to impacts from shale gas development will decline, saving health-care costs in the long run.
These actions must begin today if we are to have any hope of saving lives and reducing health impacts from shale gas development across Pennsylvania.
PUTIN IS HELPING HAMAS TO HURT THE WEST
By Josh Rogin, The Washington Post
When Russian President Vladimir Putin finally called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, he said Russia was trying “to help normalize the situation” in the Gaza Strip, according to the Kremlin. But Moscow has little interest in helping Israel. Russia is on the side of Hamas and its patron, Iran — in part to undermine the United States and its allies.
The timing of the attack could not have been better for Putin, who coincidentally was celebrating his birthday on Oct. 7, when hundreds of Hamas terrorists entered Israel and slaughtered more the 1,300 civilians. Russia’s main foreign policy goal right now is to distract the world from its ongoing invasion and atrocities in Ukraine. Specifically, Moscow is pushing for an end to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, which is hanging by a thin thread in Congress. The crisis in Israel aids these efforts. Moscow’s interest is in stoking it, not solving it.
While there is no clear evidence that Russian leaders knew about the Hamas attacks in advance, the Kremlin is working hard to take advantage. Russia has stepped up its support for Hamas diplomatically and in the propaganda war; it’s also seizing the opportunity to ramp up its violence in Ukraine while the world is distracted. On Oct. 8, senior Hamas official Ali Baraka praised Russia’s assistance in an interview with Russia Today, a state-controlled media outlet.
“There are countries that support us politically. Even Russia sympathizes with us,” he said. “Russia is happy that America is getting embroiled in the Palestinian war. It eases the pressure on the Russians in Ukraine. One war eases the pressure in another war. So, we’re not alone on the battlefield.”
Russia’s true level of actual military support to Hamas is hard to pin down, but there are several telltale signs. Baraka said Hamas possessed Russian licenses to produce the Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition its terrorists used in the assault. Ukrainian officials have claimed that Russia’s mercenary firm Wagner helped train Hamas soldiers. Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorist groups reportedly launder illicit funds through a Moscow-based crypto exchange.
Reports of direct Russian military support for Hamas remain unconfirmed, U.S. officials told me. But the military collaboration between Russia and Iran in Ukraine also seems to have benefited Hamas. Iranian and Russian cooperation on armed drones has flourished during the Ukraine war. Now, Hamas is using similar drones against Israeli targets in new ways.
More overtly, Moscow has turned its massive propaganda and foreign influence operation into a pro-Hamas, anti-Western disinformation machine. Even before the war, Russian media was pushing the notion that U.S. arms for Ukraine have somehow ended up in the hands of terrorists plotting against Israel. After the attack, Pro-Russia videos of murky origins circulated that accused Ukraine of arming Hamas, disguised as fake BBC reports.
Russian officials and propaganda outlets have unanimously blamed the United States for the current violence in Israel, and pointed to Washington’s attention on Ukraine to explain the U.S. government’s supposed neglect of rising Middle East tensions.
“These Kremlin narratives target Western audiences to drive a wedge in military support for Ukraine, seek to demoralize Ukrainian society by claiming Ukraine will lose international support, and intend to reassure Russian domestic audiences that the international society will ignore Ukraine’s war effort,” stated a report by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Of course, the relationship between Russia and Hamas is not new. Putin first invited Hamas leaders to Moscow in 2006, and Hamas delegations have been visiting Moscow ever since. Russia has never declared Hamas to be a terrorist organization, and has long taken a pro-Palestinian stance diplomatically.
But the new war breaks the recent trend of cordial, even businesslike relations between Russia and Israel. Israel had shied away from overtly helping Ukraine because it needed Russia’s acquiescence to strike targets inside Syria. Now, Russia seems fully committed to helping Hamas and Iran, especially in the diplomatic arena.
On Oct. 13, Russia put forth a draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council that calls for an immediate cease-fire and condemns all acts of terrorism — but does not mention Hamas. Russia’s U.N. ambassador gave a speech Saturday blaming the United States for the “looming war” in the Middle East and condemning Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians.
“I think that many people will agree with me that this is a vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East,” Putin said.
Putin’s focus of blame on the United States, rather than the terrorists, shows his hand. His priority is not solving the crisis, but rather tying it to his greater war against the West. It is crucial to recognize that Russia, Iran and Hamas are all working together against the United States, Europe, Ukraine and Israel.
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech to NATO last week, “the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine.”
President Biden will soon request new emergency funding for both Israel and Ukraine. Congress must approve both parts of the package — and quickly. If the United States abandons Ukraine by cutting off aid, Putin’s strategy will have succeeded.
By Josh Rogin, The Washington Post
When Russian President Vladimir Putin finally called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, he said Russia was trying “to help normalize the situation” in the Gaza Strip, according to the Kremlin. But Moscow has little interest in helping Israel. Russia is on the side of Hamas and its patron, Iran — in part to undermine the United States and its allies.
The timing of the attack could not have been better for Putin, who coincidentally was celebrating his birthday on Oct. 7, when hundreds of Hamas terrorists entered Israel and slaughtered more the 1,300 civilians. Russia’s main foreign policy goal right now is to distract the world from its ongoing invasion and atrocities in Ukraine. Specifically, Moscow is pushing for an end to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, which is hanging by a thin thread in Congress. The crisis in Israel aids these efforts. Moscow’s interest is in stoking it, not solving it.
While there is no clear evidence that Russian leaders knew about the Hamas attacks in advance, the Kremlin is working hard to take advantage. Russia has stepped up its support for Hamas diplomatically and in the propaganda war; it’s also seizing the opportunity to ramp up its violence in Ukraine while the world is distracted. On Oct. 8, senior Hamas official Ali Baraka praised Russia’s assistance in an interview with Russia Today, a state-controlled media outlet.
“There are countries that support us politically. Even Russia sympathizes with us,” he said. “Russia is happy that America is getting embroiled in the Palestinian war. It eases the pressure on the Russians in Ukraine. One war eases the pressure in another war. So, we’re not alone on the battlefield.”
Russia’s true level of actual military support to Hamas is hard to pin down, but there are several telltale signs. Baraka said Hamas possessed Russian licenses to produce the Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition its terrorists used in the assault. Ukrainian officials have claimed that Russia’s mercenary firm Wagner helped train Hamas soldiers. Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorist groups reportedly launder illicit funds through a Moscow-based crypto exchange.
Reports of direct Russian military support for Hamas remain unconfirmed, U.S. officials told me. But the military collaboration between Russia and Iran in Ukraine also seems to have benefited Hamas. Iranian and Russian cooperation on armed drones has flourished during the Ukraine war. Now, Hamas is using similar drones against Israeli targets in new ways.
More overtly, Moscow has turned its massive propaganda and foreign influence operation into a pro-Hamas, anti-Western disinformation machine. Even before the war, Russian media was pushing the notion that U.S. arms for Ukraine have somehow ended up in the hands of terrorists plotting against Israel. After the attack, Pro-Russia videos of murky origins circulated that accused Ukraine of arming Hamas, disguised as fake BBC reports.
Russian officials and propaganda outlets have unanimously blamed the United States for the current violence in Israel, and pointed to Washington’s attention on Ukraine to explain the U.S. government’s supposed neglect of rising Middle East tensions.
“These Kremlin narratives target Western audiences to drive a wedge in military support for Ukraine, seek to demoralize Ukrainian society by claiming Ukraine will lose international support, and intend to reassure Russian domestic audiences that the international society will ignore Ukraine’s war effort,” stated a report by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Of course, the relationship between Russia and Hamas is not new. Putin first invited Hamas leaders to Moscow in 2006, and Hamas delegations have been visiting Moscow ever since. Russia has never declared Hamas to be a terrorist organization, and has long taken a pro-Palestinian stance diplomatically.
But the new war breaks the recent trend of cordial, even businesslike relations between Russia and Israel. Israel had shied away from overtly helping Ukraine because it needed Russia’s acquiescence to strike targets inside Syria. Now, Russia seems fully committed to helping Hamas and Iran, especially in the diplomatic arena.
On Oct. 13, Russia put forth a draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council that calls for an immediate cease-fire and condemns all acts of terrorism — but does not mention Hamas. Russia’s U.N. ambassador gave a speech Saturday blaming the United States for the “looming war” in the Middle East and condemning Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians.
“I think that many people will agree with me that this is a vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East,” Putin said.
Putin’s focus of blame on the United States, rather than the terrorists, shows his hand. His priority is not solving the crisis, but rather tying it to his greater war against the West. It is crucial to recognize that Russia, Iran and Hamas are all working together against the United States, Europe, Ukraine and Israel.
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech to NATO last week, “the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine.”
President Biden will soon request new emergency funding for both Israel and Ukraine. Congress must approve both parts of the package — and quickly. If the United States abandons Ukraine by cutting off aid, Putin’s strategy will have succeeded.
WHY MAGA WANTS TO BETRAY UKRAINE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
So the federal government wasn’t shut down over the weekend, although we may have to go through this whole drama again in six weeks. Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, ended up doing the obvious: bringing a funding bill to the floor that could pass only with Democratic votes, because the hard-liners in his own party wouldn’t agree to anything feasible. And the bill didn’t include any of the spending cuts Republicans have been demanding, except for one big, bad thing: a cutoff of aid to Ukraine.
Democrats appear to have agreed to this bill because they expect to get a separate vote on Ukraine aid; President Biden has indicated that he believes he has a deal with McCarthy to that effect. I hope they’re right.
But why did things turn out this way? Michael Strain of the right-leaning (but mostly not MAGA) American Enterprise Institute has called the fiscal confrontation the “‘Seinfeld’ shutdown” — that is, a shutdown about nothing. That’s a good line, but if we’re going to do popular culture references, I think it might be better to call it the “Network” shutdown, as in people shouting “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Nothing short of a coup can satisfy this inchoate rage. But McCarthy evidently thought he could reduce the backlash against his deal with Democrats by betraying, or at least pretending to betray, Ukraine. That’s clearly something MAGA wants. But why?
Whatever anti-Ukraine voices like Elon Musk may pretend, it’s not about the money.
Right-wing hard-liners, both in Congress and outside, claim to be upset about the amount we’re spending supporting Ukraine. But if they really cared about the financial burden of aid, they’d make the minimal effort required to get the numbers right. No, aid to Ukraine isn’t undermining the future of Social Security or making it impossible to secure our border or consuming 40 percent of America’s G.D.P.
How much are we actually spending supporting Ukraine? In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, U.S. aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are currently running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending (and less than 0.3 percent of G.D.P.). The military portion of that spending is equal to less than 5 percent of America’s defense budget.
Incidentally, the United States is by no means bearing the burden of aiding Ukraine alone. In the past, Donald Trump and others have complained that European nations aren’t spending enough on their own defense. But when it comes to Ukraine, European countries and institutions collectively have made substantially larger aid commitments than we have. Notably, most of Europe, including France, Germany and Britain, has promised aid that is higher as a percentage of G.D.P. than the U.S. commitment.
But back to the costs of aiding Ukraine: Given how small a budget item that aid is, claims that aid to Ukraine somehow makes it impossible to do other necessary things, such as securing the border, are nonsense. MAGA types aren’t known for getting their numbers right or, for that matter, caring whether they get their numbers right, but I doubt that even they really believe that the monetary costs of helping Ukraine are insupportable.
And the benefits of aiding a beleaguered democracy are huge. Remember, before the war, Russia was widely viewed as a major military power, which a majority of Americans saw as a critical threat (and whose nonwoke military some Republicans exalted). That power has now been humbled.
Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance to Russian aggression has also put other autocratic regimes that might have been tempted to engage in wars of conquest on notice that democracies aren’t that easy to overrun. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Russia’s failures in Ukraine have surely reduced the chances that China will invade Taiwan.
Finally, what even Republicans used to call the free world has clearly been strengthened. NATO has risen to the occasion, confounding the cynics, and is adding members. Western weapons have proved their effectiveness.
Those are big payoffs for outlays that are a small fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let’s not forget that Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying. Why, then, do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?
The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.
So pay no attention to all those complaints about how much we’re spending in Ukraine. They aren’t justified by the actual cost of aid, and the people claiming to be worried about the cost don’t really care about the money. What they are, basically, is enemies of democracy, both abroad and at home.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
So the federal government wasn’t shut down over the weekend, although we may have to go through this whole drama again in six weeks. Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, ended up doing the obvious: bringing a funding bill to the floor that could pass only with Democratic votes, because the hard-liners in his own party wouldn’t agree to anything feasible. And the bill didn’t include any of the spending cuts Republicans have been demanding, except for one big, bad thing: a cutoff of aid to Ukraine.
Democrats appear to have agreed to this bill because they expect to get a separate vote on Ukraine aid; President Biden has indicated that he believes he has a deal with McCarthy to that effect. I hope they’re right.
But why did things turn out this way? Michael Strain of the right-leaning (but mostly not MAGA) American Enterprise Institute has called the fiscal confrontation the “‘Seinfeld’ shutdown” — that is, a shutdown about nothing. That’s a good line, but if we’re going to do popular culture references, I think it might be better to call it the “Network” shutdown, as in people shouting “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Nothing short of a coup can satisfy this inchoate rage. But McCarthy evidently thought he could reduce the backlash against his deal with Democrats by betraying, or at least pretending to betray, Ukraine. That’s clearly something MAGA wants. But why?
Whatever anti-Ukraine voices like Elon Musk may pretend, it’s not about the money.
Right-wing hard-liners, both in Congress and outside, claim to be upset about the amount we’re spending supporting Ukraine. But if they really cared about the financial burden of aid, they’d make the minimal effort required to get the numbers right. No, aid to Ukraine isn’t undermining the future of Social Security or making it impossible to secure our border or consuming 40 percent of America’s G.D.P.
How much are we actually spending supporting Ukraine? In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, U.S. aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are currently running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending (and less than 0.3 percent of G.D.P.). The military portion of that spending is equal to less than 5 percent of America’s defense budget.
Incidentally, the United States is by no means bearing the burden of aiding Ukraine alone. In the past, Donald Trump and others have complained that European nations aren’t spending enough on their own defense. But when it comes to Ukraine, European countries and institutions collectively have made substantially larger aid commitments than we have. Notably, most of Europe, including France, Germany and Britain, has promised aid that is higher as a percentage of G.D.P. than the U.S. commitment.
But back to the costs of aiding Ukraine: Given how small a budget item that aid is, claims that aid to Ukraine somehow makes it impossible to do other necessary things, such as securing the border, are nonsense. MAGA types aren’t known for getting their numbers right or, for that matter, caring whether they get their numbers right, but I doubt that even they really believe that the monetary costs of helping Ukraine are insupportable.
And the benefits of aiding a beleaguered democracy are huge. Remember, before the war, Russia was widely viewed as a major military power, which a majority of Americans saw as a critical threat (and whose nonwoke military some Republicans exalted). That power has now been humbled.
Ukraine’s unexpectedly successful resistance to Russian aggression has also put other autocratic regimes that might have been tempted to engage in wars of conquest on notice that democracies aren’t that easy to overrun. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Russia’s failures in Ukraine have surely reduced the chances that China will invade Taiwan.
Finally, what even Republicans used to call the free world has clearly been strengthened. NATO has risen to the occasion, confounding the cynics, and is adding members. Western weapons have proved their effectiveness.
Those are big payoffs for outlays that are a small fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let’s not forget that Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying. Why, then, do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?
The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.
So pay no attention to all those complaints about how much we’re spending in Ukraine. They aren’t justified by the actual cost of aid, and the people claiming to be worried about the cost don’t really care about the money. What they are, basically, is enemies of democracy, both abroad and at home.
JOHN KELLY’S FULL-THROATED CONFIRMATION OF TRUMP’S UGLIEST COMMENTS, PARSED
Kelly finally went on the record to make clear that, yes, Trump did say those things about veterans and wounded soldiers
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
Among the many controversies Donald Trump has courted during his time in politics, perhaps none engender the kinds of emotions as his comments — and reported comments — denigrating veterans and the war-wounded. But some of the most serious reports about what he’s said have gone largely unconfirmed by key players.
That changed in a major way on Monday.
Former Trump White House chief of staff John F. Kelly delivered a blistering statement to CNN’s Jake Tapper that, for the first time, served to confirm years-old comments attributed to Trump and for which Kelly was present.
Kelly, like many former top Trump administration officials, has criticized Trump somewhat in the past, but his new statement takes things to another level and fills out the picture of some of Trump’s ugliest alleged comments.
Let’s take Kelly’s statement from CNN, piece by piece.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, calling Trump a “person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’”
Kelly’s reference to “being tortured as POWs” is an obvious reference to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose war-hero status Trump publicly cast doubt upon during the 2016 campaign, saying: “I like people that weren’t captured.”
But “suckers” and “there is nothing in it for them” — in quotation marks — refer to Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2020 Atlantic piece. It quoted Trump using the former word to refer to the 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood in France during World War I. It also quoted him saying something similar to the latter while standing next to the grave of Kelly’s own son, who was killed in Afghanistan.
Kelly was described in the story as being present for each remark, but he declined to comment at the time. A close Kelly ally and former top White House aide later said that he — the ally, not Kelly — hadn’t personally heard Trump use the word “suckers” and suggested the reporting had “conflated” certain events. But here is Kelly himself confirming Trump said these things.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded Monday night: “John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of staff.”
“A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
The first part refers to a 2022 book from Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker which quoted Trump saying — again, in the presence of Kelly — that he didn’t want “any wounded guys” in his big Independence Day parade.
The second refers to Trump’s public comments during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, attacking a Gold Star family that had been critical of him.
(Kelly, notably, later defended Trump after a Democratic congresswoman cited insensitive comments allegedly made to a Gold Star family during a private phone call. But Kelly also seemed to confirm the nature of Trump’s comments on the call.)
The part about “losers” and not wanting to visit gravesites is again confirming of the 2020 Atlantic piece, in which Trump allegedly said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
The White House at the time flatly denied this. Trump himself added: “To think that I would make statements negative to our military and fallen heroes when nobody has done what I’ve done” for the military was “a total lie. … It’s a disgrace.”
A man who was present for these key events now effectively says that it not only happened, but that it happened over and over again.
(Another recent story from Goldberg described Trump telling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, in 2019, that “no one wants to see that, the wounded” after a severely injured Army captain sang “God Bless America” at an event. Trump allegedly told Milley not to have the man appear in public again. Trump has denied the remarks.)
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women.”
This is where the statement starts going beyond veterans and mere confirmation of things already reported. Kelly suggests Trump doesn’t just denigrate veterans, but also holds very different views than he portrays publicly about these issues and groups — and perhaps denigrates them, too.
It’s the kind of comment that seems to invite further elaboration.
“A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action.”
Again, the subtext here is striking. This refers to Trump’s recent comments accusing Milley of treason. Trump added that Milley’s actions were “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Kelly’s comment that Trump was saying this “in expectation that someone will take action” sure sounds like he is accusing Trump of attempting to incite violence against now-retired Milley.
“A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
Kelly has criticized Trump before, but his starkest comments have often been reported secondhand. You can now add him to the list of former top aides warning in some very strong terms about another Trump term — and effectively labeling Trump a clear and present danger.
Kelly finally went on the record to make clear that, yes, Trump did say those things about veterans and wounded soldiers
By Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
Among the many controversies Donald Trump has courted during his time in politics, perhaps none engender the kinds of emotions as his comments — and reported comments — denigrating veterans and the war-wounded. But some of the most serious reports about what he’s said have gone largely unconfirmed by key players.
That changed in a major way on Monday.
Former Trump White House chief of staff John F. Kelly delivered a blistering statement to CNN’s Jake Tapper that, for the first time, served to confirm years-old comments attributed to Trump and for which Kelly was present.
Kelly, like many former top Trump administration officials, has criticized Trump somewhat in the past, but his new statement takes things to another level and fills out the picture of some of Trump’s ugliest alleged comments.
Let’s take Kelly’s statement from CNN, piece by piece.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, calling Trump a “person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’”
Kelly’s reference to “being tortured as POWs” is an obvious reference to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose war-hero status Trump publicly cast doubt upon during the 2016 campaign, saying: “I like people that weren’t captured.”
But “suckers” and “there is nothing in it for them” — in quotation marks — refer to Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2020 Atlantic piece. It quoted Trump using the former word to refer to the 1,800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood in France during World War I. It also quoted him saying something similar to the latter while standing next to the grave of Kelly’s own son, who was killed in Afghanistan.
Kelly was described in the story as being present for each remark, but he declined to comment at the time. A close Kelly ally and former top White House aide later said that he — the ally, not Kelly — hadn’t personally heard Trump use the word “suckers” and suggested the reporting had “conflated” certain events. But here is Kelly himself confirming Trump said these things.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded Monday night: “John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of staff.”
“A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
The first part refers to a 2022 book from Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker which quoted Trump saying — again, in the presence of Kelly — that he didn’t want “any wounded guys” in his big Independence Day parade.
The second refers to Trump’s public comments during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, attacking a Gold Star family that had been critical of him.
(Kelly, notably, later defended Trump after a Democratic congresswoman cited insensitive comments allegedly made to a Gold Star family during a private phone call. But Kelly also seemed to confirm the nature of Trump’s comments on the call.)
The part about “losers” and not wanting to visit gravesites is again confirming of the 2020 Atlantic piece, in which Trump allegedly said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
The White House at the time flatly denied this. Trump himself added: “To think that I would make statements negative to our military and fallen heroes when nobody has done what I’ve done” for the military was “a total lie. … It’s a disgrace.”
A man who was present for these key events now effectively says that it not only happened, but that it happened over and over again.
(Another recent story from Goldberg described Trump telling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, in 2019, that “no one wants to see that, the wounded” after a severely injured Army captain sang “God Bless America” at an event. Trump allegedly told Milley not to have the man appear in public again. Trump has denied the remarks.)
“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women.”
This is where the statement starts going beyond veterans and mere confirmation of things already reported. Kelly suggests Trump doesn’t just denigrate veterans, but also holds very different views than he portrays publicly about these issues and groups — and perhaps denigrates them, too.
It’s the kind of comment that seems to invite further elaboration.
“A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action.”
Again, the subtext here is striking. This refers to Trump’s recent comments accusing Milley of treason. Trump added that Milley’s actions were “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
Kelly’s comment that Trump was saying this “in expectation that someone will take action” sure sounds like he is accusing Trump of attempting to incite violence against now-retired Milley.
“A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”
Kelly has criticized Trump before, but his starkest comments have often been reported secondhand. You can now add him to the list of former top aides warning in some very strong terms about another Trump term — and effectively labeling Trump a clear and present danger.
UAW STRIKE IS EXPOSING THE FRAUD THAT GOP IS THE PARTY OF THE WORKING CLASS
Republicans have been crowing that they're now the party of the working class, so why do they oppose higher pay for workers?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Republicans woke up on Nov. 4, 2020 looking for the silver lining behind a cloudy election. Sure, the GOP’s leader, Donald Trump, was on his way to losing the White House, but he’d racked up a surprising 74 million votes, and Republicans had won some key House races. The reason, party leaders crowed, was a surge in support from the working class — mainly white folks, but more Latino blue-collar voters and even some African Americans.
“We are a working-class party now,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley had tweeted on Election Night. “That’s our future.”
Hawley’s political lack-of-soul-mate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, laid it on much thicker that winter when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School who’s married to an investment banker and had just returned from Cancun, while his working-class constituents were freezing in a massive power outage. Yet Cruz declared that the GOP will be “the party of steel workers and construction workers and pipeline workers and taxi cab drivers and cops and firefighters and waiters and waitresses and the men and women with calluses on their hands who are working for this country.”
He left out auto workers. Maybe that was foreshadowing.
Last week, United Auto Workers members at three Midwestern factories walked out on strike, as the vanguard of a historic effort by their 145,000-member union to win higher pay, enhanced retirement and overtime, and a shorter work week from the Big Three automakers — Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — that are posting billions in profits. The UAW strike is a proxy war for whether the working class in America can be saved — by reversing decades of income inequality that soared as union membership plunged.
It feels like a moment for the epic labor song written in the depths of the Great Depression by an organizer for the United Mine Workers in Kentucky’s bloody Harlan County, “Which Side Are You On?” If you are a Republican running to get elected president in 2024, you are not on the side of America’s auto workers. It turns out that the best and brightest of the new “party of the working class” just can’t quit their love affair with billionaire CEOs.
“We’re all going to suffer from this,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, told (who else?) Fox News when asked about the UAW strike. Haley occasionally tries to position herself as a more compassionate conservative in the crowded GOP primary field, but she holds no compassion for union workers. She bragged in the interview that she is a “union buster,” and that she brought jobs to the Palmetto State without what she sees as the scourge of organized labor.
Yet Haley didn’t go as far as her fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott, whotold a campaign event in Iowa: “Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely.”
It’s also a simple concept that’s illegal under U.S. labor law — employers can’t fire a union member for striking — but facts weren’t as important for Scott as espousing what even his fellow conservative, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, called “zombie Reaganism,” the perfect term for an idea that is not just brain-dead but increasingly past its expiration date.
One poll showed that 75% of Americans are supporting the UAW strikers over management, which suggests that even a lot of Republicans support the picketers. More broadly, a Gallup Poll this summer found that 67% of the public are supportive of unions, consolidating a trend that began when the economic crisis of 2008-09 dramatized how far the pendulum of inequality had swung toward corporations and billionaires, and away from the U.S. worker.
Unreal. Tim Scott (@votetimscott) said companies should "absolutely" fire workers who strike for better wages and safer working conditions pic.twitter.com/GpdmVkdmIe — American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) September 19, 2023
“When looking at these strikes that have been happening recently, it becomes very clear where their loyalties lie and their priorities lie,” Ken Jacobs, who chairs the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told me about the modern GOP. “Some Republican commentators have argued that Republicans should find a way to be more a party of the working class, but when you dig down into their proposals, they are still anti-union or anti-working people.”
You could argue the current state of affairs began on May 8, 1970, the date of the notorious Hard Hat Riot, when union workers attacked a rally of anti-Vietnam War protesters in lower Manhattan. The GOP‘s Richard Nixon seized the moment, inviting New York union leaders to the White House to herald a new strategy of playing on the resentments of the college-educated New Left to peel away blue-collar votes. The plan worked, at least among a white working-class that became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and full-throated Republicans when Fox News arrived to amp up a culture war.
So is the GOP the party of the working class? Yes, and no. In the 2022 midterms, Republicans captured a record 55% of “non-college voters” — a not totally accurate proxy for the blue-collar electorate — by continuing to pull in two-thirds of whites without a diploma, and gaining votes from non-college-educated Latinos. But Democrats are increasing votes in specifically union households — 55% in 2022 balloting.
No wonder the GOP is aggressively putting the union movement down.
South Carolina, the home state of both Haley and Scott, is instructive. It may indeed be — as Haley boasted to Fox News — the most anti-labor state in America, with just 1.7% of workers carrying a union card. It’s not a coincidence that a survey this year by the business network CNBC ranked South Carolina the fourth-worst state for workers, writing: “South Carolina is an unhealthy state, both at home and on the job. The state has the nation’s fifth-highest rate of occupational deaths and it finishes in the top 10 for frequent physical and mental distress overall. Legal protections for workers are limited ... ”
Gee, if only there was some kind of organization that could fight for safer factories and warehouses, a less stressful workplace, and codified employee protections, not to mention increasing paychecks (since South Carolina also is the 10th-worst state for poverty). The problem for the GOP is that more and more voters see what’s happening here.
This is not 1970, or 1984. Culture warring begins to lose its impact when blue-collar workers realize how far they’ve fallen behind over a half-century, or connect GOP policies with the fact that CEOs now make nearly 400 times as much as their workers.
The epitome of the labor conundrum for the Republican Party is the man much more likely than a Haley or Scott to be its 2024 nominee: Donald Trump. The 45th president may be a corrupt autocratic narcissist, but his political instincts aren’t quite as dumb as the South Carolina brigade. He’s threatened to visit a UAW picket line in Michigan while his distant rivals are debating next week in California. But even Trump can’t help but get drawn back into anti-unionism, having made remarks critical of the UAW just days earlier.
The reality is that Trump had four years in the Oval Office to prove that Republicans are the party of the working class, and he whiffed, badly. His administration specifically weakened the right to organize in the workplace and made it easier for companies to fight unions. POTUS 45 also signed a tax cut enriching billionaires and corporations, sent to him by a GOP Congress that refused to raise the minimum wage. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that as a developer, he’d built his landmark Trump Tower with non-union, undocumented workers.
Look, labor issues are politically complicated. Just ask President Joe Biden, whose sentiments — both personally and politically — are clearly pro-union, and yet is hampered by the fact he also wants a short strike and needs to negotiate with both sides. GOP candidates have no such burden and can say whatever they want, and what most want to say is that “the party of the working class” despises unions — the only people out there fighting for the working class to have a better life.
I hope that Trump does try and walk the picket line in Detroit next week, because it may not be the lovefest that he fantasizes about from his castle at Mar-a-Lago. The longer that the UAW’s fight for a fair deal goes on, the more that those Americans with calluses on their hands are realizing that the frauds of the Republican Party are not on their side.
Republicans have been crowing that they're now the party of the working class, so why do they oppose higher pay for workers?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Republicans woke up on Nov. 4, 2020 looking for the silver lining behind a cloudy election. Sure, the GOP’s leader, Donald Trump, was on his way to losing the White House, but he’d racked up a surprising 74 million votes, and Republicans had won some key House races. The reason, party leaders crowed, was a surge in support from the working class — mainly white folks, but more Latino blue-collar voters and even some African Americans.
“We are a working-class party now,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley had tweeted on Election Night. “That’s our future.”
Hawley’s political lack-of-soul-mate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, laid it on much thicker that winter when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School who’s married to an investment banker and had just returned from Cancun, while his working-class constituents were freezing in a massive power outage. Yet Cruz declared that the GOP will be “the party of steel workers and construction workers and pipeline workers and taxi cab drivers and cops and firefighters and waiters and waitresses and the men and women with calluses on their hands who are working for this country.”
He left out auto workers. Maybe that was foreshadowing.
Last week, United Auto Workers members at three Midwestern factories walked out on strike, as the vanguard of a historic effort by their 145,000-member union to win higher pay, enhanced retirement and overtime, and a shorter work week from the Big Three automakers — Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — that are posting billions in profits. The UAW strike is a proxy war for whether the working class in America can be saved — by reversing decades of income inequality that soared as union membership plunged.
It feels like a moment for the epic labor song written in the depths of the Great Depression by an organizer for the United Mine Workers in Kentucky’s bloody Harlan County, “Which Side Are You On?” If you are a Republican running to get elected president in 2024, you are not on the side of America’s auto workers. It turns out that the best and brightest of the new “party of the working class” just can’t quit their love affair with billionaire CEOs.
“We’re all going to suffer from this,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, told (who else?) Fox News when asked about the UAW strike. Haley occasionally tries to position herself as a more compassionate conservative in the crowded GOP primary field, but she holds no compassion for union workers. She bragged in the interview that she is a “union buster,” and that she brought jobs to the Palmetto State without what she sees as the scourge of organized labor.
Yet Haley didn’t go as far as her fellow South Carolinian, Sen. Tim Scott, who
It’s also a simple concept that’s illegal under U.S. labor law — employers can’t fire a union member for striking — but facts weren’t as important for Scott as espousing what even his fellow conservative, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, called “zombie Reaganism,” the perfect term for an idea that is not just brain-dead but increasingly past its expiration date.
One poll showed that 75% of Americans are supporting the UAW strikers over management, which suggests that even a lot of Republicans support the picketers. More broadly, a Gallup Poll this summer found that 67% of the public are supportive of unions, consolidating a trend that began when the economic crisis of 2008-09 dramatized how far the pendulum of inequality had swung toward corporations and billionaires, and away from the U.S. worker.
Unreal. Tim Scott (@votetimscott) said companies should "absolutely" fire workers who strike for better wages and safer working conditions pic.twitter.com/GpdmVkdmIe — American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) September 19, 2023
“When looking at these strikes that have been happening recently, it becomes very clear where their loyalties lie and their priorities lie,” Ken Jacobs, who chairs the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told me about the modern GOP. “Some Republican commentators have argued that Republicans should find a way to be more a party of the working class, but when you dig down into their proposals, they are still anti-union or anti-working people.”
You could argue the current state of affairs began on May 8, 1970, the date of the notorious Hard Hat Riot, when union workers attacked a rally of anti-Vietnam War protesters in lower Manhattan. The GOP‘s Richard Nixon seized the moment, inviting New York union leaders to the White House to herald a new strategy of playing on the resentments of the college-educated New Left to peel away blue-collar votes. The plan worked, at least among a white working-class that became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and full-throated Republicans when Fox News arrived to amp up a culture war.
So is the GOP the party of the working class? Yes, and no. In the 2022 midterms, Republicans captured a record 55% of “non-college voters” — a not totally accurate proxy for the blue-collar electorate — by continuing to pull in two-thirds of whites without a diploma, and gaining votes from non-college-educated Latinos. But Democrats are increasing votes in specifically union households — 55% in 2022 balloting.
No wonder the GOP is aggressively putting the union movement down.
South Carolina, the home state of both Haley and Scott, is instructive. It may indeed be — as Haley boasted to Fox News — the most anti-labor state in America, with just 1.7% of workers carrying a union card. It’s not a coincidence that a survey this year by the business network CNBC ranked South Carolina the fourth-worst state for workers, writing: “South Carolina is an unhealthy state, both at home and on the job. The state has the nation’s fifth-highest rate of occupational deaths and it finishes in the top 10 for frequent physical and mental distress overall. Legal protections for workers are limited ... ”
Gee, if only there was some kind of organization that could fight for safer factories and warehouses, a less stressful workplace, and codified employee protections, not to mention increasing paychecks (since South Carolina also is the 10th-worst state for poverty). The problem for the GOP is that more and more voters see what’s happening here.
This is not 1970, or 1984. Culture warring begins to lose its impact when blue-collar workers realize how far they’ve fallen behind over a half-century, or connect GOP policies with the fact that CEOs now make nearly 400 times as much as their workers.
The epitome of the labor conundrum for the Republican Party is the man much more likely than a Haley or Scott to be its 2024 nominee: Donald Trump. The 45th president may be a corrupt autocratic narcissist, but his political instincts aren’t quite as dumb as the South Carolina brigade. He’s threatened to visit a UAW picket line in Michigan while his distant rivals are debating next week in California. But even Trump can’t help but get drawn back into anti-unionism, having made remarks critical of the UAW just days earlier.
The reality is that Trump had four years in the Oval Office to prove that Republicans are the party of the working class, and he whiffed, badly. His administration specifically weakened the right to organize in the workplace and made it easier for companies to fight unions. POTUS 45 also signed a tax cut enriching billionaires and corporations, sent to him by a GOP Congress that refused to raise the minimum wage. Perhaps that’s not surprising, considering that as a developer, he’d built his landmark Trump Tower with non-union, undocumented workers.
Look, labor issues are politically complicated. Just ask President Joe Biden, whose sentiments — both personally and politically — are clearly pro-union, and yet is hampered by the fact he also wants a short strike and needs to negotiate with both sides. GOP candidates have no such burden and can say whatever they want, and what most want to say is that “the party of the working class” despises unions — the only people out there fighting for the working class to have a better life.
I hope that Trump does try and walk the picket line in Detroit next week, because it may not be the lovefest that he fantasizes about from his castle at Mar-a-Lago. The longer that the UAW’s fight for a fair deal goes on, the more that those Americans with calluses on their hands are realizing that the frauds of the Republican Party are not on their side.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS DEVOLVED INTO A RACKET
By Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”
This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.
Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.
The G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.
The broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.
The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.
Trump unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.
The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to erosion of collective party principle, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.
Without a commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene. These responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.
As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.
By Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”
This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.
Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.
The G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.
The broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.
The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.
Trump unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.
The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to erosion of collective party principle, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.
Without a commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene. These responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.
As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.
CONGRESS MUST ACT TO AVERT THE LOOMING CHILDCARE CRISIS
At the end of the month, roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era grants that subsidized childcare will expire, likely driving many parents out of the workforce.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Without federal action, three million children in America could abruptly lose access to childcare at the end of the month, a development that could push many parents — including, experts say, a disproportionate number of women — out of the workforce.
Roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era stabilization grants — which have ensured financial access to childcare for families — will lapse on Sept. 30, leaving families with no guarantee of continued care.
President Joe Biden and Congress must act to avert this catastrophe. More than just that, however, the country needs to find a more comprehensive path to supporting mothers, children, and families. In the childcare world, costs are too high and pay is too low. American parents do not get the support other developed countries treat as routine.
The United States is one of only six countries that does not offer any form of national paid leave. (Fourteen states — including New Jersey and Delaware, but not Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia have enacted paid leave programs.) By contrast, just over the U.S. border, parents in Canada receive a year of paid leave.
Meanwhile, surveys have found that one in four American working mothers returns to their job within two weeks of giving birth. Most American fathers fail to take their full allotted time off, often due to social or career pressures. The majority of working dads take fewer than 10 days away from the workplace, exacerbating the pressure on moms to fill the gap.
Expanding family leave in the U.S. so it gets closer to international standards isn’t just the right thing to do for families and babies, it would also help reduce the overall cost of childcare.
This is a particular concern for infants, who are placed in day-care centers at very early ages when their parents are forced to return to work. Per federal government recommendations, a group of eight 4-year-olds can be supervised by just one adult, while one adult should only care for two or three infants at a time. Infants also require smaller groups than older children, meaning care for infants also requires more space and more staff members, factors that also drive up pricing.
The Center for American Progress found that providing infant care costs $1,230 per month. Providing high-quality infant care, with adequate wages and sick time for workers, would cost over $2,200 each month.
But the typical American worker earns about $4,400 each month. This means that infant care will never be affordable to working-class families absent a significant subsidy.
Allowing parents to take longer leave would reduce how many newborns need care centers, bringing down the cost of childcare for all children. This would benefit all families, including those who choose not to take their entire leave.
While they’re fixing childcare, Congress must also act to restore the enhanced child tax credit. The expiration of this benefit led to a surge in child poverty, which jumped from 5% to 12%.
Given how many states have criminalized abortion in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, failing to offer new parents this modest support seems especially egregious. Evidence is mounting that direct cash assistance is more useful than subsidies, as families know best how to weigh their own needs.
While no one has ever claimed that parenting is easy, the federal government should strive to make it slightly less onerous. That starts with averting the incoming childcare crisis.
At the end of the month, roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era grants that subsidized childcare will expire, likely driving many parents out of the workforce.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Without federal action, three million children in America could abruptly lose access to childcare at the end of the month, a development that could push many parents — including, experts say, a disproportionate number of women — out of the workforce.
Roughly $37 billion in pandemic-era stabilization grants — which have ensured financial access to childcare for families — will lapse on Sept. 30, leaving families with no guarantee of continued care.
President Joe Biden and Congress must act to avert this catastrophe. More than just that, however, the country needs to find a more comprehensive path to supporting mothers, children, and families. In the childcare world, costs are too high and pay is too low. American parents do not get the support other developed countries treat as routine.
The United States is one of only six countries that does not offer any form of national paid leave. (Fourteen states — including New Jersey and Delaware, but not Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia have enacted paid leave programs.) By contrast, just over the U.S. border, parents in Canada receive a year of paid leave.
Meanwhile, surveys have found that one in four American working mothers returns to their job within two weeks of giving birth. Most American fathers fail to take their full allotted time off, often due to social or career pressures. The majority of working dads take fewer than 10 days away from the workplace, exacerbating the pressure on moms to fill the gap.
Expanding family leave in the U.S. so it gets closer to international standards isn’t just the right thing to do for families and babies, it would also help reduce the overall cost of childcare.
This is a particular concern for infants, who are placed in day-care centers at very early ages when their parents are forced to return to work. Per federal government recommendations, a group of eight 4-year-olds can be supervised by just one adult, while one adult should only care for two or three infants at a time. Infants also require smaller groups than older children, meaning care for infants also requires more space and more staff members, factors that also drive up pricing.
The Center for American Progress found that providing infant care costs $1,230 per month. Providing high-quality infant care, with adequate wages and sick time for workers, would cost over $2,200 each month.
But the typical American worker earns about $4,400 each month. This means that infant care will never be affordable to working-class families absent a significant subsidy.
Allowing parents to take longer leave would reduce how many newborns need care centers, bringing down the cost of childcare for all children. This would benefit all families, including those who choose not to take their entire leave.
While they’re fixing childcare, Congress must also act to restore the enhanced child tax credit. The expiration of this benefit led to a surge in child poverty, which jumped from 5% to 12%.
Given how many states have criminalized abortion in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, failing to offer new parents this modest support seems especially egregious. Evidence is mounting that direct cash assistance is more useful than subsidies, as families know best how to weigh their own needs.
While no one has ever claimed that parenting is easy, the federal government should strive to make it slightly less onerous. That starts with averting the incoming childcare crisis.
WHY REPUBLICANS PLAY DIRTY
They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists and the authors of “How Democracies Die.”
The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.
The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.
Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.
Constitutional hardball has accelerated under the Trump administration. President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to divert public money toward a border wall — openly flouting Congress, which voted against building a wall — is a clear example. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, manufactured by an earlier act of hardball, may uphold the constitutionality of the president’s autocratic behavior.
Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions function only when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win by any means necessary, politics often descends into institutional warfare. Governments in Hungary and Turkey have used court packing and other “legal” maneuvers to lock in power and ensure that subsequent abuse is ruled “constitutional.” And when one party engages in constitutional hardball, its rivals often feel compelled to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion, triggering an escalating conflict that is difficult to undo. As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy.
Why is the Republican Party playing dirty? Republican leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy. They are driven by fear.
Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.
But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.
Take German conservatives before World War I. They were haunted by the prospect of extending equal voting rights to the working class. They viewed equal (male) suffrage as a menace not only to their own electoral prospects but also to the survival of the aristocratic order. One Conservative leader called full and equal suffrage an “attack on the laws of civilization.” So German conservatives played dirty, engaging in rampant election manipulation and outright repression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the United States, Southern Democrats reacted in a similar manner to the Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of African-Americans. Mandated by the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, black suffrage not only imperiled Southern Democrats’ political dominance but also challenged longstanding patterns of white supremacy. Since African-Americans represented a majority or near majority in many of the post-Confederate states, Southern Democrats viewed their enfranchisement as an existential threat. So they, too, played dirty.
Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 post-Confederate states passed laws establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements and other measures aimed at stripping African-Americans of their voting rights — and locking in Democratic Party dominance. In Tennessee, where the 1889 Dortch Law would disenfranchise illiterate black voters, one newspaper editorialized, “Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” These measures, building on a monstrous campaign of anti-black violence, did precisely what they were intended to do: Black turnout in the South fell to 2 percent in 1912 from 61 percent in 1880. Unwilling to lose, Southern Democrats stripped the right to vote from millions of people, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in the South.
Republicans appear to be in the grip of a similar panic today. Their medium-term electoral prospects are dim. For one, they remain an overwhelmingly white Christian party in an increasingly diverse society. As a share of the American electorate, white Christians declined from 73 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2012 and may be below 50 percent by 2024. Republicans also face a generational challenge: Younger voters are deserting them. In 2018, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrats by more than 2 to 1, and 30-somethings voted nearly 60 percent for Democrats.
Demography is not destiny, but as California Republicans have discovered, it often punishes parties that fail to adapt to changing societies. The growing diversity of the American electorate is making it harder for the Republican Party to win national majorities. Republicans have won the popular vote in presidential elections just once in the last 30 years. Donald Trump captured this Republican pessimism well when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2016, “I think this is the last election the Republicans have a chance of winning because you are going to have people flowing across the border.”
“If we don’t win this election,” Mr. Trump added, “you’ll never see another Republican.”
The problem runs deeper than electoral math, however. Much of the Republican base views defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are losing more than an electoral majority; their once-dominant status in American society is eroding. Half a century ago, white Protestant men occupied nearly all our country’s high-status positions: They made up nearly all the elected officials, business leaders and media figures. Those days are over, but the loss of a group’s social status can feel deeply threatening. Many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. Slogans like “take our country back” and “make America great again” reflect this sense of peril.
So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality. Most reminiscent of the Jim Crow South are Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field. Since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have adopted new laws making it more difficult to register or vote. Republican state and local governments have closed polling places in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, purged voter rolls and created new obstacles to registration and voting.
In Georgia, a 2017 “exact match law” allowed authorities to throw out voter registration forms whose information did not “exactly match” existing records. Brian Kemp, who was simultaneously Georgia’s secretary of state and the 2018 Republican candidate for governor, tried to use the law to invalidate tens of thousands of registration forms, many of which were from African-Americans. In Tennessee, Republicans recently passed chilling legislation allowing criminal charges to be levied against voter registration groups that submit incomplete forms or miss deadlines. And in Texas this year, Republicans attempted to purge the voter rolls of nearly 100,000 Latinos.
The Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question in the census to facilitate gerrymandering schemes that would, in the words of one party strategist, be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” fits the broader pattern. Although these abuses are certainly less egregious than those committed by post-bellum Southern Democrats, the underlying logic is similar: Parties representing fearful, declining majorities turn, in desperation, to minority rule.
The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse. A stunning 90 percent of House Republicans are white men, even though white men are a third of the electorate. Only when Republicans can compete seriously for younger, urban and nonwhite voters will their fear of losing — and of a multiracial America — subside.
Such a transformation is less far-fetched than it may appear right now; indeed, the Republican National Committee recommended it in 2013. But parties only change when their strategies bring costly defeat. So Republicans must fail — badly — at the polls.
American democracy faces a Catch-22: Republicans won’t abandon their white identity bunker strategy until they lose, but at the same time that strategy has made them so averse to losing they are willing to bend the rules to avoid this fate. There is no easy exit. Republican leaders must either stand up to their base and broaden their appeal or they must suffer an electoral thrashing so severe that they are compelled to do so.
Liberal democracy has historically required at least two competing parties committed to playing the democratic game, including one that typically represents conservative interests. But the commitment of America’s conservative party to this system is wavering, threatening our political system as a whole. Until Republicans learn to compete fairly in a diverse society, our democratic institutions will be imperiled.
They fear that if they stick to the rules, they will lose everything. Their behavior is a threat to democratic stability.
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists and the authors of “How Democracies Die.”
The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.
The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.
Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.
Constitutional hardball has accelerated under the Trump administration. President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to divert public money toward a border wall — openly flouting Congress, which voted against building a wall — is a clear example. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, manufactured by an earlier act of hardball, may uphold the constitutionality of the president’s autocratic behavior.
Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions function only when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win by any means necessary, politics often descends into institutional warfare. Governments in Hungary and Turkey have used court packing and other “legal” maneuvers to lock in power and ensure that subsequent abuse is ruled “constitutional.” And when one party engages in constitutional hardball, its rivals often feel compelled to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion, triggering an escalating conflict that is difficult to undo. As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy.
Why is the Republican Party playing dirty? Republican leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy. They are driven by fear.
Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.
But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.
Take German conservatives before World War I. They were haunted by the prospect of extending equal voting rights to the working class. They viewed equal (male) suffrage as a menace not only to their own electoral prospects but also to the survival of the aristocratic order. One Conservative leader called full and equal suffrage an “attack on the laws of civilization.” So German conservatives played dirty, engaging in rampant election manipulation and outright repression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the United States, Southern Democrats reacted in a similar manner to the Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of African-Americans. Mandated by the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, black suffrage not only imperiled Southern Democrats’ political dominance but also challenged longstanding patterns of white supremacy. Since African-Americans represented a majority or near majority in many of the post-Confederate states, Southern Democrats viewed their enfranchisement as an existential threat. So they, too, played dirty.
Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 post-Confederate states passed laws establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements and other measures aimed at stripping African-Americans of their voting rights — and locking in Democratic Party dominance. In Tennessee, where the 1889 Dortch Law would disenfranchise illiterate black voters, one newspaper editorialized, “Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” These measures, building on a monstrous campaign of anti-black violence, did precisely what they were intended to do: Black turnout in the South fell to 2 percent in 1912 from 61 percent in 1880. Unwilling to lose, Southern Democrats stripped the right to vote from millions of people, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in the South.
Republicans appear to be in the grip of a similar panic today. Their medium-term electoral prospects are dim. For one, they remain an overwhelmingly white Christian party in an increasingly diverse society. As a share of the American electorate, white Christians declined from 73 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2012 and may be below 50 percent by 2024. Republicans also face a generational challenge: Younger voters are deserting them. In 2018, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrats by more than 2 to 1, and 30-somethings voted nearly 60 percent for Democrats.
Demography is not destiny, but as California Republicans have discovered, it often punishes parties that fail to adapt to changing societies. The growing diversity of the American electorate is making it harder for the Republican Party to win national majorities. Republicans have won the popular vote in presidential elections just once in the last 30 years. Donald Trump captured this Republican pessimism well when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2016, “I think this is the last election the Republicans have a chance of winning because you are going to have people flowing across the border.”
“If we don’t win this election,” Mr. Trump added, “you’ll never see another Republican.”
The problem runs deeper than electoral math, however. Much of the Republican base views defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are losing more than an electoral majority; their once-dominant status in American society is eroding. Half a century ago, white Protestant men occupied nearly all our country’s high-status positions: They made up nearly all the elected officials, business leaders and media figures. Those days are over, but the loss of a group’s social status can feel deeply threatening. Many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. Slogans like “take our country back” and “make America great again” reflect this sense of peril.
So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality. Most reminiscent of the Jim Crow South are Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field. Since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have adopted new laws making it more difficult to register or vote. Republican state and local governments have closed polling places in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, purged voter rolls and created new obstacles to registration and voting.
In Georgia, a 2017 “exact match law” allowed authorities to throw out voter registration forms whose information did not “exactly match” existing records. Brian Kemp, who was simultaneously Georgia’s secretary of state and the 2018 Republican candidate for governor, tried to use the law to invalidate tens of thousands of registration forms, many of which were from African-Americans. In Tennessee, Republicans recently passed chilling legislation allowing criminal charges to be levied against voter registration groups that submit incomplete forms or miss deadlines. And in Texas this year, Republicans attempted to purge the voter rolls of nearly 100,000 Latinos.
The Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question in the census to facilitate gerrymandering schemes that would, in the words of one party strategist, be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” fits the broader pattern. Although these abuses are certainly less egregious than those committed by post-bellum Southern Democrats, the underlying logic is similar: Parties representing fearful, declining majorities turn, in desperation, to minority rule.
The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse. A stunning 90 percent of House Republicans are white men, even though white men are a third of the electorate. Only when Republicans can compete seriously for younger, urban and nonwhite voters will their fear of losing — and of a multiracial America — subside.
Such a transformation is less far-fetched than it may appear right now; indeed, the Republican National Committee recommended it in 2013. But parties only change when their strategies bring costly defeat. So Republicans must fail — badly — at the polls.
American democracy faces a Catch-22: Republicans won’t abandon their white identity bunker strategy until they lose, but at the same time that strategy has made them so averse to losing they are willing to bend the rules to avoid this fate. There is no easy exit. Republican leaders must either stand up to their base and broaden their appeal or they must suffer an electoral thrashing so severe that they are compelled to do so.
Liberal democracy has historically required at least two competing parties committed to playing the democratic game, including one that typically represents conservative interests. But the commitment of America’s conservative party to this system is wavering, threatening our political system as a whole. Until Republicans learn to compete fairly in a diverse society, our democratic institutions will be imperiled.
FRACKING IS MAKING PENNSYLVANIANS SICK. LAWMAKERS MUST ACT.
Studies have repeatedly found the negative health impacts of fracking. Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators have ensured the fallout continues. by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
(Note: The Republican legislators who voted for HB2154, which watered down laws protecting residents from fracking’s hazardous chemicals, include Clint Owlett.)
You didn’t need to be a geologist or any other kind of expert to know from the start that hydraulic fracking was fraught with a host of health and safety questions in Pennsylvania.
Just consider what goes into using the controversial process. Up to 6 million gallons of water treated with toxic chemicals and sand are used to blast through a rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale to extract natural gas. Since the state embraced fracking in 2008, more than 13,000 such wells have been drilled thousands of feet underground.
The gas industry has long claimed fracking is safe but refused to disclose precisely which toxic chemicals are used in the process. It was a risky gambit of trust with no verification.
So, it’s been no surprise that study after study has found one health problem after another. Three recent reports by the state government and the University of Pittsburgh found increased incidences of childhood cancer, asthma and low birth weight among those living within 10 miles of natural gas wells.
The studies bolster past research that raised red flags about fracking soon after then-Gov. Ed Rendell unleashed a gas drilling gold rush in 2008 by opening 2.2 million acres of state forests to Big Oil and touting the jobs and revenue that would pour into state coffers.
Within a year, a series of water-contamination problems, including methane leaks, affecting drinking water in seven counties were linked to gas drilling in Pennsylvania.
In 2010, an HBO documentary titled Gasland detailed the health and environmental dangers from fracking, including the alarming image of a woman in the small town of Dimock, Pa. — about an hour’s drive north of Scranton — lighting tap water from her faucet on fire because it contained so much methane.
Despite the health concerns, Pennsylvania lawmakers looked the other way as the gas industry spent more than $60 million on lobbying and campaign contributions over a seven-year stretch. The flow of money kept lawmakers from imposing a severance tax on gas drilling, making Pennsylvania the only state without such a tax.
Harrisburg’s embrace of fracking is a shameful study in contrast to what happened when lobbyists came knocking in New York. In 2010, the New York State Assembly approved a temporary moratorium on fracking. Four years later, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that banned fracking because of health concerns. State lawmakers in Albany codified the ban in 2020.
What did New York know that Pennsylvania lawmakers either didn’t or willfully ignored?
Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators ensured that the fallout from fracking continues to impact Pennsylvanians. A 2015 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that pregnant women living near fracking wells experienced more premature births and high-risk pregnancies.
A 2016 study, also by Johns Hopkins, found that people living near active gas wells were up to four times likelier to have asthma attacks. A 2020 study tied air pollution from fracking to deaths in Pennsylvania.
And what about the unnamed toxic chemicals used in the fracking process?
In 2021, it was disclosed that the Environmental Protection Agency long ago approved the use of so-called forever chemicals in fracking, which have been linked to a variety of cancers as well as asthma, low birth weight, and other health problems.
And what became of the residents in Dimock who could light their water on fire?
After long denying responsibility, Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc. pleaded no contest last year to criminal charges of drilling faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies. Coterra agreed to pay more than $16 million to build a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
That plea deal was the result of criminal charges filed in 2020 against Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro. But in a shameless and irresponsible twist, the day after announcing the deal, the state Department of Environmental Protection lifted a 12-year ban and agreed to allow Coterra to resume drilling in Dimock.
At the time, Shapiro said the gas driller “damaged our environment, harming our water supplies and endangering Pennsylvanians.” The same could be said of the lawmakers and environmental officials who continue to enable the fracking industry.
Now that Shapiro is the governor of Pennsylvania, he must protect residents from the fracking industry.
Studies have repeatedly found the negative health impacts of fracking. Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators have ensured the fallout continues. by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
(Note: The Republican legislators who voted for HB2154, which watered down laws protecting residents from fracking’s hazardous chemicals, include Clint Owlett.)
You didn’t need to be a geologist or any other kind of expert to know from the start that hydraulic fracking was fraught with a host of health and safety questions in Pennsylvania.
Just consider what goes into using the controversial process. Up to 6 million gallons of water treated with toxic chemicals and sand are used to blast through a rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale to extract natural gas. Since the state embraced fracking in 2008, more than 13,000 such wells have been drilled thousands of feet underground.
The gas industry has long claimed fracking is safe but refused to disclose precisely which toxic chemicals are used in the process. It was a risky gambit of trust with no verification.
So, it’s been no surprise that study after study has found one health problem after another. Three recent reports by the state government and the University of Pittsburgh found increased incidences of childhood cancer, asthma and low birth weight among those living within 10 miles of natural gas wells.
The studies bolster past research that raised red flags about fracking soon after then-Gov. Ed Rendell unleashed a gas drilling gold rush in 2008 by opening 2.2 million acres of state forests to Big Oil and touting the jobs and revenue that would pour into state coffers.
Within a year, a series of water-contamination problems, including methane leaks, affecting drinking water in seven counties were linked to gas drilling in Pennsylvania.
In 2010, an HBO documentary titled Gasland detailed the health and environmental dangers from fracking, including the alarming image of a woman in the small town of Dimock, Pa. — about an hour’s drive north of Scranton — lighting tap water from her faucet on fire because it contained so much methane.
Despite the health concerns, Pennsylvania lawmakers looked the other way as the gas industry spent more than $60 million on lobbying and campaign contributions over a seven-year stretch. The flow of money kept lawmakers from imposing a severance tax on gas drilling, making Pennsylvania the only state without such a tax.
Harrisburg’s embrace of fracking is a shameful study in contrast to what happened when lobbyists came knocking in New York. In 2010, the New York State Assembly approved a temporary moratorium on fracking. Four years later, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that banned fracking because of health concerns. State lawmakers in Albany codified the ban in 2020.
What did New York know that Pennsylvania lawmakers either didn’t or willfully ignored?
Instead of safeguarding their constituents, legislators ensured that the fallout from fracking continues to impact Pennsylvanians. A 2015 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that pregnant women living near fracking wells experienced more premature births and high-risk pregnancies.
A 2016 study, also by Johns Hopkins, found that people living near active gas wells were up to four times likelier to have asthma attacks. A 2020 study tied air pollution from fracking to deaths in Pennsylvania.
And what about the unnamed toxic chemicals used in the fracking process?
In 2021, it was disclosed that the Environmental Protection Agency long ago approved the use of so-called forever chemicals in fracking, which have been linked to a variety of cancers as well as asthma, low birth weight, and other health problems.
And what became of the residents in Dimock who could light their water on fire?
After long denying responsibility, Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc. pleaded no contest last year to criminal charges of drilling faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies. Coterra agreed to pay more than $16 million to build a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
That plea deal was the result of criminal charges filed in 2020 against Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro. But in a shameless and irresponsible twist, the day after announcing the deal, the state Department of Environmental Protection lifted a 12-year ban and agreed to allow Coterra to resume drilling in Dimock.
At the time, Shapiro said the gas driller “damaged our environment, harming our water supplies and endangering Pennsylvanians.” The same could be said of the lawmakers and environmental officials who continue to enable the fracking industry.
Now that Shapiro is the governor of Pennsylvania, he must protect residents from the fracking industry.
DOES ANYONE CARE ABOUT THE STUDY LINKING PA. FRACKING TO CANCER IN KIDS?
An overdue Pa. study showed alarming links between fracking and lymphoma in kids, increased asthma. Why the tepid response?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Janice Blanock has been demanding answers for nearly a decade. It was late 2013 when her 16-year-old son Luke was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma — a form of bone cancer that is supposed to be quite rare but which eventually struck three other families in their small rural school district in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The first three years after Luke’s diagnoses were a blur. He married his high school sweetheart — shown nationally on the television program Inside Edition — shortly before he died in August 2016. Since then, Blanock and some of her neighbors have relentlessly pressed government officials, including a confrontation with then-Gov. Tom Wolf for information on what seems to be a cancer cluster, and whether it was caused by 1,800 active natural-gas fracking sites in Washington County, Pa.
This month, Blanock and other activists learned the results of major health studies that the Wolf administration agreed to pay for right after that 2019 confrontation. They discovered that the research into whether fracking — unconventional drilling for natural gas trapped in the shale under rural Pennsylvania — is sickening people who live nearby managed to be both inadequate and alarming at the same time.
Blanock was in the audience as researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, told a packed hearing in Washington County that the sample of Ewing’s sarcoma cases like Luke Blanock’s was considered too small to establish a definitive link to gas drilling.
SAD NEWS: Canonsburg teen, Luke Blanock, loses battle with terminal cancer #LukeStrong https://t.co/tvG3SQuZAI pic.twitter.com/BQiaMFUrU7— WPXI (@WPXI) August 8, 2016
But other findings by the Pitt researchers confirmed some of the worst health fears for people who live near the fracking pads that have sprouted like mushrooms across rural Pennsylvania in the first 15 years of the 21st century, and made the state a leading U.S. producer of natural gas.
“For childhood cancer, we found that children living close to active wells, or near many wells, had a higher risk for developing a cancer called lymphoma,” James Fabisiak, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, told the meeting.
The researchers also found that natural-gas wells in the production mode — there are thousands of such sites across the state — increase the risk for neighbors of lower birth-weight babies, and for asthma attacks by a factor of four or five times. One expert with Physicians for Social Responsibility called that last finding a “bombshell.”
A bombshell that landed with a thud in Harrisburg and apparently failed to detonate.
The Shapiro administration sent a deputy health commissioner, Kristen Rodack, to the meeting, where she reportedly told the emotional room — including several parents who’d lost a child to cancer — that “I’ll apologize on behalf of the department for not listening as well in the past.” But the state response — to this research that it paid for — lacked any of the sense of urgency you’d expect when a cancer risk is connected to children.
Children who lived closer to natural gas wells in heavily drilled Pennsylvania were more likely to develop a relatively rare form of cancer, and nearby residents of all ages had an increased chance of severe asthma reactions, researchers say. https://t.co/sSfJ6FpOJN— The Associated Press (@AP) August 15, 2023
The Department of Health said the “bombshell” study will lead to ... more studies. It also announced a number of small-bore responses like updating its website for nearby-fracking residents to submit complaints, offering more “air quality awareness” education for Pennsylvania schoolkids, and better training for doctors and nurses in recognizing and dealing with environmental exposures.
Seriously? It almost feels like a scenario where a raging wildfire is fast approaching a mountain town, and the government response is to show kids some “Smokey the Bear” videos and give local doctors a refresher course on burn treatment — rather than evacuating the residents to safety.
“We don’t need more studies — we need action,” Blanock told me Thursday by phone from her home in Cecil, Pa., even as she noted that state leaders continue to seem more concerned about saving oil and gas jobs. “We rely on the Department of Health and the DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] to protect us as citizens, but they just keep passing the buck. I’m disappointed.”
Pennsylvania’s addiction to the supposed economic promise of natural gas fracking — and the good-paying blue-collar jobs that never seem to quite add up — apparently makes more radical steps unthinkable. Even when the thought is to get our own children out of harm’s way.
Long-time anti-fracking and climate activist Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition — a frequent thorn in the side of Democratic governors Wolf and now Josh Shapiro — told me that Shapiro’s “only official statement that day [the study was released] announced that Pennsylvania is open for business, referring to increased money for subsidies like the one that gave fossil fuel giant Shell $10 million to build its ethane cracker plant in Beaver County. The level of tone-deafness is astonishing.”
This week, I pressed Shapiro’s office about the governor’s sense of urgency around the link between fracking and cancer. His spokesman, Will Simons, said that Shapiro first signaled a tough-on-polluters approach in 2020 when, as attorney general, he led a grand jury probe critical of both the industry and of lax state regulation — which he plans to toughen now that he’s governor. But the Democratic chief executive believes it’s still possible to regulate the industry while reaping the benefit of energy jobs.
“Governor Shapiro believes we must reject the false choice between projecting jobs and protecting our planet,” Simons said in an email. “The Governor is working to do both — and that’s why his Administration is working to embrace the Commonwealth’s role as an energy leader, create good-paying jobs, take meaningful action to address climate change, and fulfill our constitutional obligation to protect Pennsylvanians’ clean air and pure water.”
Here’s three problems with Shapiro’s so-called “false choice.”
First, evidence is mounting that the economic benefits of fracking were seriously overhyped. Just last week, the Ohio River Valley Institute issued a new report finding that the Appalachian counties that produce 90% of our region’s natural gas from fracking have actually underperformed economically since the beginning of the boom period — losing 10,000 jobs and 47,000 residents.
Second, the Shapiro administration’s balancing act between jobs and the clear-cut health risks from fracking ought to also account for the role that fossil fuels are playing in the worsening climate crisis, which has triggered a long hot summer of deadly wildfires, heat waves and floods. The new governor has said (infrequently) that greenhouse-gas pollution is a problem, but his lukewarm approach around climate change — including a task force that meets in secret and hasn’t disclosed all its members — has befuddled some of his environmentalist supporters.
Third, the new state-funded Pitt study is far from the first indication that fracking is not healthy for children and other living things. In 2021, Environmental Health Network did extensive bloodwork on five families who living close to natural-gas sites and found that biomarkers for hazardous and possibly carcinogenic chemicals, linked to the fracking process, were extremely high. In 2022, a Yale School of Public Health study found that children born near fracking sites in Pennsylvania had double the risk of developing leukemia later in childhood.
“These studies are not a shock for those of us who have been watching the science and seeing the real life impacts,” Laura Dagley, with Physicians for Social Responsibility in Pennsylvania, told me. She added: “The only response I have heard from the state is the need for more education and more studies. Even though I support this, it is not enough.”
No, it’s not. On one hand, activists like Blanock and the retired journalist who broke the Ewing’s sarcoma story for a Pittsburgh newspaper have argued that the four-year Pitt study could have done a lot more to establish a connection between fracking and other types of pediatric cancer — failing, for example, to closely evaluate the impact of types of radium that are produced by gas drilling and have been linked to bone cancers for roughly a century.
But it’s reasonable to also question how much more information is needed at this point. “These kids are our future,” Blanock said, noting that increasingly the gas that’s fracked in Pennsylvania is used to make single-use plastic products. “If you care more about that ... ” Her voice trailed off.
Activists like Blanock and Feridun would back a moratorium on fracking — something that Pennsylvania’s last two Democratic governors would never put on the table, even with these damning studies. As a fallback, Dagley of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Blanock both say Pennsylvania should implement all the recommendations of the 2020 grand jury led by Shapiro — including expanding the new-drill zone around schools or other facilities from 500 to 2,500 feet, full disclosure of fracking chemicals, closing the revolving door of state regulators into industry jobs, and more.
That would certainly be better than doing nothing. A story that we tell ourselves to live in America is that absolutely nothing is more important in our society than protecting the life of a child. The sad reality is such a long way away from that.
An overdue Pa. study showed alarming links between fracking and lymphoma in kids, increased asthma. Why the tepid response?
by Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Janice Blanock has been demanding answers for nearly a decade. It was late 2013 when her 16-year-old son Luke was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma — a form of bone cancer that is supposed to be quite rare but which eventually struck three other families in their small rural school district in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The first three years after Luke’s diagnoses were a blur. He married his high school sweetheart — shown nationally on the television program Inside Edition — shortly before he died in August 2016. Since then, Blanock and some of her neighbors have relentlessly pressed government officials, including a confrontation with then-Gov. Tom Wolf for information on what seems to be a cancer cluster, and whether it was caused by 1,800 active natural-gas fracking sites in Washington County, Pa.
This month, Blanock and other activists learned the results of major health studies that the Wolf administration agreed to pay for right after that 2019 confrontation. They discovered that the research into whether fracking — unconventional drilling for natural gas trapped in the shale under rural Pennsylvania — is sickening people who live nearby managed to be both inadequate and alarming at the same time.
Blanock was in the audience as researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, told a packed hearing in Washington County that the sample of Ewing’s sarcoma cases like Luke Blanock’s was considered too small to establish a definitive link to gas drilling.
SAD NEWS: Canonsburg teen, Luke Blanock, loses battle with terminal cancer #LukeStrong https://t.co/tvG3SQuZAI pic.twitter.com/BQiaMFUrU7— WPXI (@WPXI) August 8, 2016
But other findings by the Pitt researchers confirmed some of the worst health fears for people who live near the fracking pads that have sprouted like mushrooms across rural Pennsylvania in the first 15 years of the 21st century, and made the state a leading U.S. producer of natural gas.
“For childhood cancer, we found that children living close to active wells, or near many wells, had a higher risk for developing a cancer called lymphoma,” James Fabisiak, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, told the meeting.
The researchers also found that natural-gas wells in the production mode — there are thousands of such sites across the state — increase the risk for neighbors of lower birth-weight babies, and for asthma attacks by a factor of four or five times. One expert with Physicians for Social Responsibility called that last finding a “bombshell.”
A bombshell that landed with a thud in Harrisburg and apparently failed to detonate.
The Shapiro administration sent a deputy health commissioner, Kristen Rodack, to the meeting, where she reportedly told the emotional room — including several parents who’d lost a child to cancer — that “I’ll apologize on behalf of the department for not listening as well in the past.” But the state response — to this research that it paid for — lacked any of the sense of urgency you’d expect when a cancer risk is connected to children.
Children who lived closer to natural gas wells in heavily drilled Pennsylvania were more likely to develop a relatively rare form of cancer, and nearby residents of all ages had an increased chance of severe asthma reactions, researchers say. https://t.co/sSfJ6FpOJN— The Associated Press (@AP) August 15, 2023
The Department of Health said the “bombshell” study will lead to ... more studies. It also announced a number of small-bore responses like updating its website for nearby-fracking residents to submit complaints, offering more “air quality awareness” education for Pennsylvania schoolkids, and better training for doctors and nurses in recognizing and dealing with environmental exposures.
Seriously? It almost feels like a scenario where a raging wildfire is fast approaching a mountain town, and the government response is to show kids some “Smokey the Bear” videos and give local doctors a refresher course on burn treatment — rather than evacuating the residents to safety.
“We don’t need more studies — we need action,” Blanock told me Thursday by phone from her home in Cecil, Pa., even as she noted that state leaders continue to seem more concerned about saving oil and gas jobs. “We rely on the Department of Health and the DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] to protect us as citizens, but they just keep passing the buck. I’m disappointed.”
Pennsylvania’s addiction to the supposed economic promise of natural gas fracking — and the good-paying blue-collar jobs that never seem to quite add up — apparently makes more radical steps unthinkable. Even when the thought is to get our own children out of harm’s way.
Long-time anti-fracking and climate activist Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition — a frequent thorn in the side of Democratic governors Wolf and now Josh Shapiro — told me that Shapiro’s “only official statement that day [the study was released] announced that Pennsylvania is open for business, referring to increased money for subsidies like the one that gave fossil fuel giant Shell $10 million to build its ethane cracker plant in Beaver County. The level of tone-deafness is astonishing.”
This week, I pressed Shapiro’s office about the governor’s sense of urgency around the link between fracking and cancer. His spokesman, Will Simons, said that Shapiro first signaled a tough-on-polluters approach in 2020 when, as attorney general, he led a grand jury probe critical of both the industry and of lax state regulation — which he plans to toughen now that he’s governor. But the Democratic chief executive believes it’s still possible to regulate the industry while reaping the benefit of energy jobs.
“Governor Shapiro believes we must reject the false choice between projecting jobs and protecting our planet,” Simons said in an email. “The Governor is working to do both — and that’s why his Administration is working to embrace the Commonwealth’s role as an energy leader, create good-paying jobs, take meaningful action to address climate change, and fulfill our constitutional obligation to protect Pennsylvanians’ clean air and pure water.”
Here’s three problems with Shapiro’s so-called “false choice.”
First, evidence is mounting that the economic benefits of fracking were seriously overhyped. Just last week, the Ohio River Valley Institute issued a new report finding that the Appalachian counties that produce 90% of our region’s natural gas from fracking have actually underperformed economically since the beginning of the boom period — losing 10,000 jobs and 47,000 residents.
Second, the Shapiro administration’s balancing act between jobs and the clear-cut health risks from fracking ought to also account for the role that fossil fuels are playing in the worsening climate crisis, which has triggered a long hot summer of deadly wildfires, heat waves and floods. The new governor has said (infrequently) that greenhouse-gas pollution is a problem, but his lukewarm approach around climate change — including a task force that meets in secret and hasn’t disclosed all its members — has befuddled some of his environmentalist supporters.
Third, the new state-funded Pitt study is far from the first indication that fracking is not healthy for children and other living things. In 2021, Environmental Health Network did extensive bloodwork on five families who living close to natural-gas sites and found that biomarkers for hazardous and possibly carcinogenic chemicals, linked to the fracking process, were extremely high. In 2022, a Yale School of Public Health study found that children born near fracking sites in Pennsylvania had double the risk of developing leukemia later in childhood.
“These studies are not a shock for those of us who have been watching the science and seeing the real life impacts,” Laura Dagley, with Physicians for Social Responsibility in Pennsylvania, told me. She added: “The only response I have heard from the state is the need for more education and more studies. Even though I support this, it is not enough.”
No, it’s not. On one hand, activists like Blanock and the retired journalist who broke the Ewing’s sarcoma story for a Pittsburgh newspaper have argued that the four-year Pitt study could have done a lot more to establish a connection between fracking and other types of pediatric cancer — failing, for example, to closely evaluate the impact of types of radium that are produced by gas drilling and have been linked to bone cancers for roughly a century.
But it’s reasonable to also question how much more information is needed at this point. “These kids are our future,” Blanock said, noting that increasingly the gas that’s fracked in Pennsylvania is used to make single-use plastic products. “If you care more about that ... ” Her voice trailed off.
Activists like Blanock and Feridun would back a moratorium on fracking — something that Pennsylvania’s last two Democratic governors would never put on the table, even with these damning studies. As a fallback, Dagley of Physicians for Social Responsibility and Blanock both say Pennsylvania should implement all the recommendations of the 2020 grand jury led by Shapiro — including expanding the new-drill zone around schools or other facilities from 500 to 2,500 feet, full disclosure of fracking chemicals, closing the revolving door of state regulators into industry jobs, and more.
That would certainly be better than doing nothing. A story that we tell ourselves to live in America is that absolutely nothing is more important in our society than protecting the life of a child. The sad reality is such a long way away from that.
TRUMP CHARGED IN GEORGIA 2020 ELECTION PROBE, HIS FOURTH INDICTMENT
By Holly Bailey and Amy Gardner, The Washington Post
ATLANTA — Former president Donald Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an indictment made public late Monday night.
Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.
The historic indictment, the fourth to implicate the former president, follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D). The probe was launched after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state.
Willis’s investigation quickly expanded to other alleged efforts by Trump or his supporters, including trying to thwart the electoral college process, harassing election workers, spreading false information about the voting process in Georgia and compromising election equipment in a rural county.
Fulton County, Ga. prosecutor Fani Willis presented her case against former president Donald Trump and 18 others. Here's what to expect from this indictment. (Video: Peter Stevenson, JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
Trump has long decried the Georgia investigation as a “political witch hunt,” defending his calls to Raffensperger and others as “perfect.” Ahead of Monday’s indictment, Trump’s Georgia-based legal team had filed legal challenges seeking to disqualify Willis and block the investigation. In a statement, the attorneys -- Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little – condemned the charges, calling the day’s events “shocking and absurd” and accusing Willis of building her case on “witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests.”
“We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been,” the statement said.
A total of 41 charges are brought against 19 defendants in the 98-page indictment. Not all face the same counts, but all have been charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Willis said she has given those charged until Aug. 25 to surrender.
“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment states.
Among those charged are Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election; Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Jeffrey Clark, who was a mid-level Justice Department official; and several Trump advisers, including attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.
Also indicted were two Georgia-based lawyers advocating on Trump’s behalf, Ray S. Smith III and Robert Cheeley; a senior campaign adviser, Mike Roman, who helped plan the elector meeting; and three prominent Georgia Republicans who served as electors: former GOP chairman David Shafer, former GOP finance chairman Shawn Still and Cathy Latham of Coffee County.
Several lesser-known players who participated in efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in Georgia were also indicted, including three people accused of harassing Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman. They are Stephen Cliffgard Lee, Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti. The latter is a former publicist for R. Kelly and an associate of Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
A final group of individuals charged in the indictment allegedly participated in an effort to steal election equipment data in rural Coffee County, Ga. In addition to Latham, the former county GOP chair, they are former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton and Georgia businessman Scott Hall.
Trump was indicted in Washington this month in a separate Justice Department probe into his various attempts to keep his grip on power during the chaotic aftermath of his 2020 defeat. Some aspects of that four-count federal case, led by special counsel Jack Smith, overlap with Willis’s sprawling probe, which accuses Trump and his associates of a broad criminal enterprise to reverse Biden’s election victory in Georgia.
But the Fulton County indictment, issued by a grand jury and made public Monday night, is far more encompassing and detailed than Smith’s ongoing federal investigation. Willis declined to say if she has had contact with Smith, who so far has only charged Trump in his elections-related probe. The federal indictment also listed six unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators, five of whom have been identified by The Washington Post and other news organizations as Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Chesebro and Powell.
Prosecutors brought charges around five subject areas: false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County; calls Trump made to state officials, including Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers; and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger enterprise to undermine the election.
Willis had signaled for months that she planned to use Georgia’s expansive anti-racketeering statutes, which allow prosecutors not only to charge in-state wrongdoing but to use activities in other states to prove criminal intent in Georgia. The statute is broader than federal law in terms of how prosecutors can define a criminal enterprise or conspiracy.
The indictment alleges that the enterprise “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state [and] acts involving theft and perjury.” The indictment takes an expansive view of the behaviors it alleges were acts “in furtherance of the conspiracy” -- including, as an example, at least a dozen instances of Trump’s tweets alleging fraud and other claims. Such details from the indictment quickly drew criticism as potential violations of the defendants’ free speech protections.
In January 2022, Willis requested that an unusual special-purpose grand jury be convened to continue the probe, citing the reluctance of witnesses who would not speak to prosecutors without a subpoena. The investigative body of 23 jurors and three alternates picked from a pool of residents from Atlanta and its suburbs was given full subpoena power for documents and the ability to call witnesses — though it could not issue indictments, only recommendations in the case.
Over roughly eight months, the panel heard from 75 witnesses, including key Trump advisers such as Giuliani, Meadows and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who waged a failed legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his subpoena before ultimately testifying.
The panel also heard from Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who were on the other end of aggressive lobbying efforts by Trump and his associates to overturn Trump’s loss in the state.
In January, the special grand jury concluded its work and issued a final report on its investigation, which was largely kept under seal by the judge who oversaw the panel.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney cited “due process” concerns for “potential future defendants” as Willis considered charges in the case. But in February, McBurney released a five-page excerpt of the report, including a section in which the panel concluded that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony and recommended that charges be filed.
The panel’s forewoman later confirmed that the special grand jury had recommended multiple indictments, though she declined to say of whom.
Trump’s attorneys later sought to disqualify Willis and her office from the case — citing Willis’s public comments about the investigation — and quash the final report and any evidence gathered by the special-purpose grand jury. The motions were rejected by McBurney and the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled that Trump had no legal standing to stop an investigation before charges were filed.
In the spring, amid security concerns, Willis took the unusual step of telling law enforcement that she planned to announce her charging decision in August. Because the special grand jury could not issue indictments, prosecutors presented their case to a regular grand jury sworn in last month, which began hearing the case Monday.
Trump’s attorneys are likely to immediately seek to have the case thrown out, reviving their complaints about Willis and the use of a special grand jury.
Trump has intensified his attacks on Willis and other prosecutors examining his activities, describing them as “vicious, horrible people” and “mentally sick.” He has referred to Willis, who is Black, as the “racist DA from Atlanta.” His 2024 campaign included her in a recent video attacking prosecutors investigating Trump. Willis has generally declined to respond directly to Trump’s attacks, but in a rare exception, she said in an email last week sent to the entire district attorney’s office that Trump’s ad contained “derogatory and false information about me,” and ordered her employees to ignore it.
“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in coming days, weeks or months,” Willis wrote in the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any. This is business, it will never be personal.”
Still, Willis has repeatedly raised concerns about security as her investigation has progressed, citing Trump’s “alarming” rhetoric and the racist threats she and her staff have received. Willis is often accompanied by armed guards at public appearances, and security at her office and her residence was increased even more in recent days ahead of the expected charging announcement, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive security matters.
By Holly Bailey and Amy Gardner, The Washington Post
ATLANTA — Former president Donald Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an indictment made public late Monday night.
Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.
The historic indictment, the fourth to implicate the former president, follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D). The probe was launched after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state.
Willis’s investigation quickly expanded to other alleged efforts by Trump or his supporters, including trying to thwart the electoral college process, harassing election workers, spreading false information about the voting process in Georgia and compromising election equipment in a rural county.
Fulton County, Ga. prosecutor Fani Willis presented her case against former president Donald Trump and 18 others. Here's what to expect from this indictment. (Video: Peter Stevenson, JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
Trump has long decried the Georgia investigation as a “political witch hunt,” defending his calls to Raffensperger and others as “perfect.” Ahead of Monday’s indictment, Trump’s Georgia-based legal team had filed legal challenges seeking to disqualify Willis and block the investigation. In a statement, the attorneys -- Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little – condemned the charges, calling the day’s events “shocking and absurd” and accusing Willis of building her case on “witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests.”
“We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been,” the statement said.
A total of 41 charges are brought against 19 defendants in the 98-page indictment. Not all face the same counts, but all have been charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Willis said she has given those charged until Aug. 25 to surrender.
“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment states.
Among those charged are Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election; Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Jeffrey Clark, who was a mid-level Justice Department official; and several Trump advisers, including attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.
Also indicted were two Georgia-based lawyers advocating on Trump’s behalf, Ray S. Smith III and Robert Cheeley; a senior campaign adviser, Mike Roman, who helped plan the elector meeting; and three prominent Georgia Republicans who served as electors: former GOP chairman David Shafer, former GOP finance chairman Shawn Still and Cathy Latham of Coffee County.
Several lesser-known players who participated in efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in Georgia were also indicted, including three people accused of harassing Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman. They are Stephen Cliffgard Lee, Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti. The latter is a former publicist for R. Kelly and an associate of Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
A final group of individuals charged in the indictment allegedly participated in an effort to steal election equipment data in rural Coffee County, Ga. In addition to Latham, the former county GOP chair, they are former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton and Georgia businessman Scott Hall.
Trump was indicted in Washington this month in a separate Justice Department probe into his various attempts to keep his grip on power during the chaotic aftermath of his 2020 defeat. Some aspects of that four-count federal case, led by special counsel Jack Smith, overlap with Willis’s sprawling probe, which accuses Trump and his associates of a broad criminal enterprise to reverse Biden’s election victory in Georgia.
But the Fulton County indictment, issued by a grand jury and made public Monday night, is far more encompassing and detailed than Smith’s ongoing federal investigation. Willis declined to say if she has had contact with Smith, who so far has only charged Trump in his elections-related probe. The federal indictment also listed six unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators, five of whom have been identified by The Washington Post and other news organizations as Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Chesebro and Powell.
Prosecutors brought charges around five subject areas: false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County; calls Trump made to state officials, including Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers; and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger enterprise to undermine the election.
Willis had signaled for months that she planned to use Georgia’s expansive anti-racketeering statutes, which allow prosecutors not only to charge in-state wrongdoing but to use activities in other states to prove criminal intent in Georgia. The statute is broader than federal law in terms of how prosecutors can define a criminal enterprise or conspiracy.
The indictment alleges that the enterprise “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state [and] acts involving theft and perjury.” The indictment takes an expansive view of the behaviors it alleges were acts “in furtherance of the conspiracy” -- including, as an example, at least a dozen instances of Trump’s tweets alleging fraud and other claims. Such details from the indictment quickly drew criticism as potential violations of the defendants’ free speech protections.
In January 2022, Willis requested that an unusual special-purpose grand jury be convened to continue the probe, citing the reluctance of witnesses who would not speak to prosecutors without a subpoena. The investigative body of 23 jurors and three alternates picked from a pool of residents from Atlanta and its suburbs was given full subpoena power for documents and the ability to call witnesses — though it could not issue indictments, only recommendations in the case.
Over roughly eight months, the panel heard from 75 witnesses, including key Trump advisers such as Giuliani, Meadows and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who waged a failed legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his subpoena before ultimately testifying.
The panel also heard from Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who were on the other end of aggressive lobbying efforts by Trump and his associates to overturn Trump’s loss in the state.
In January, the special grand jury concluded its work and issued a final report on its investigation, which was largely kept under seal by the judge who oversaw the panel.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney cited “due process” concerns for “potential future defendants” as Willis considered charges in the case. But in February, McBurney released a five-page excerpt of the report, including a section in which the panel concluded that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony and recommended that charges be filed.
The panel’s forewoman later confirmed that the special grand jury had recommended multiple indictments, though she declined to say of whom.
Trump’s attorneys later sought to disqualify Willis and her office from the case — citing Willis’s public comments about the investigation — and quash the final report and any evidence gathered by the special-purpose grand jury. The motions were rejected by McBurney and the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled that Trump had no legal standing to stop an investigation before charges were filed.
In the spring, amid security concerns, Willis took the unusual step of telling law enforcement that she planned to announce her charging decision in August. Because the special grand jury could not issue indictments, prosecutors presented their case to a regular grand jury sworn in last month, which began hearing the case Monday.
Trump’s attorneys are likely to immediately seek to have the case thrown out, reviving their complaints about Willis and the use of a special grand jury.
Trump has intensified his attacks on Willis and other prosecutors examining his activities, describing them as “vicious, horrible people” and “mentally sick.” He has referred to Willis, who is Black, as the “racist DA from Atlanta.” His 2024 campaign included her in a recent video attacking prosecutors investigating Trump. Willis has generally declined to respond directly to Trump’s attacks, but in a rare exception, she said in an email last week sent to the entire district attorney’s office that Trump’s ad contained “derogatory and false information about me,” and ordered her employees to ignore it.
“You may not comment in any way on the ad or any of the negativity that may be expressed against me, your colleagues, this office in coming days, weeks or months,” Willis wrote in the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “We have no personal feelings against those we investigate or prosecute and we should not express any. This is business, it will never be personal.”
Still, Willis has repeatedly raised concerns about security as her investigation has progressed, citing Trump’s “alarming” rhetoric and the racist threats she and her staff have received. Willis is often accompanied by armed guards at public appearances, and security at her office and her residence was increased even more in recent days ahead of the expected charging announcement, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive security matters.
CLIMATE CHANGE CAME FOR MAUI. THE REST OF US ARE NEXT.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Climate change, as scientists have long anticipated, is making the weather more extreme and unpredictable. This summer, we’re being taught the tragic lesson that we all need to prepare for “unlikely” disasters as well as familiar ones, and to look for risk in new places.
The deadly wildfires on Maui are the most horrifying example. One culprit in the death and devastation in the historic, now-gutted Hawaiian town of Lahaina: The surrounding hillsides were covered with nonnative, invasive grasses — originally planted on the island by humans — which burned explosively.
Those grasses were so dry and flammable because the island, especially the area around Lahaina, is experiencing a “flash drought.” In late May, none of the island was unusually dry, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Today, the whole island is either abnormally dry or experiencing moderate to severe drought. Scientists have warned that flash droughts will occur more frequently because of climate change.
The Maui fires were greatly intensified by high winds, caused by the combination of a strong high-pressure system to the north of the island and the powerful Hurricane Dora to the south. Those atmospheric forces worked together like an eggbeater, whipping winds with gusts of up to 80 miles per hour. Climate change has been predicted to intensify both high-pressure heat domes and tropical cyclones such as Dora.
Any of these things in isolation — the drought, the winds from the high-pressure system, the passing hurricane — could have created a problem for Maui. Happening all at once, they created what climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the originators of the “hockey stick” temperature graph depicting global warming and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, called “a ‘compound’ climate catastrophe.”
One lesson we must learn from Maui is that combinations of circumstances that we think of as unlikely might no longer be unlikely at all. And bad luck won’t be confined to small islands far away.
By now, there’s ample evidence of the danger and force of extreme heat alone. Globally, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this past June was the hottest one recorded on the planet — and July wasthe hottest month since record keeping began 174 years ago, with average temperatures worldwide being 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average.
The city of Phoenix saw a record 31 consecutive days with high temperatures at or above 110 degrees; the string was finally broken by a day when the high was only 108. Punishing heat domes parked over much of the southern half of the country for much of the summer. Extreme heat and drought also plagued parts of Europe, North Africa and western China.
Maui is just the latest place to ignite. Canada is in the midst of its worst fire season in history, during which infernos generated smoke that choked cities in the United States. Thousands of tourists and residents had to be evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes in July because of raging wildfires.
And rain might bring additional suffering instead of relief. In China, extreme heat was followed by two typhoons that made landfall, bringing the heaviest rainfall in Beijing in 140 years and causing floods that killed at least 62 people.
Here in the D.C. area, we have had two episodes of violent thunderstorms accompanied by anomalously strong winds featuring sharp, sudden downdrafts that ripped away roofs and downed power lines. At my house, we lost a couple of big sweet gum branches, which fell harmlessly into the yard. A few blocks away, a big oak tree crashed into a house.
What most of us haven’t adequately internalized yet is that this is how it’s going to be. We have changed the climate, which has changed the weather. We need to stop making things worse, which means switching from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. And we need to face the new reality we have forged.
The insurance industry is already making an adjustment that we all soon will feel. A report last week by the reinsurance giant Swiss Re calculated that severe thunderstorms in the United States accounted for 68 percent of insured natural catastrophe losses worldwide in the first half of this year. Reinsurance companies will pass along those costs to the primary insurers who cover your home and your car. Primary insurers will eventually pass along those costs to you — though imagine facing the random violence of extreme weather without insurance at all.
As individuals and as communities, we need to think more about worst-case scenarios and actively plan for them. Climate change is personal. Act accordingly.
By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Climate change, as scientists have long anticipated, is making the weather more extreme and unpredictable. This summer, we’re being taught the tragic lesson that we all need to prepare for “unlikely” disasters as well as familiar ones, and to look for risk in new places.
The deadly wildfires on Maui are the most horrifying example. One culprit in the death and devastation in the historic, now-gutted Hawaiian town of Lahaina: The surrounding hillsides were covered with nonnative, invasive grasses — originally planted on the island by humans — which burned explosively.
Those grasses were so dry and flammable because the island, especially the area around Lahaina, is experiencing a “flash drought.” In late May, none of the island was unusually dry, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Today, the whole island is either abnormally dry or experiencing moderate to severe drought. Scientists have warned that flash droughts will occur more frequently because of climate change.
The Maui fires were greatly intensified by high winds, caused by the combination of a strong high-pressure system to the north of the island and the powerful Hurricane Dora to the south. Those atmospheric forces worked together like an eggbeater, whipping winds with gusts of up to 80 miles per hour. Climate change has been predicted to intensify both high-pressure heat domes and tropical cyclones such as Dora.
Any of these things in isolation — the drought, the winds from the high-pressure system, the passing hurricane — could have created a problem for Maui. Happening all at once, they created what climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the originators of the “hockey stick” temperature graph depicting global warming and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, called “a ‘compound’ climate catastrophe.”
One lesson we must learn from Maui is that combinations of circumstances that we think of as unlikely might no longer be unlikely at all. And bad luck won’t be confined to small islands far away.
By now, there’s ample evidence of the danger and force of extreme heat alone. Globally, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this past June was the hottest one recorded on the planet — and July was
The city of Phoenix saw a record 31 consecutive days with high temperatures at or above 110 degrees; the string was finally broken by a day when the high was only 108. Punishing heat domes parked over much of the southern half of the country for much of the summer. Extreme heat and drought also plagued parts of Europe, North Africa and western China.
Maui is just the latest place to ignite. Canada is in the midst of its worst fire season in history, during which infernos generated smoke that choked cities in the United States. Thousands of tourists and residents had to be evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes in July because of raging wildfires.
And rain might bring additional suffering instead of relief. In China, extreme heat was followed by two typhoons that made landfall, bringing the heaviest rainfall in Beijing in 140 years and causing floods that killed at least 62 people.
Here in the D.C. area, we have had two episodes of violent thunderstorms accompanied by anomalously strong winds featuring sharp, sudden downdrafts that ripped away roofs and downed power lines. At my house, we lost a couple of big sweet gum branches, which fell harmlessly into the yard. A few blocks away, a big oak tree crashed into a house.
What most of us haven’t adequately internalized yet is that this is how it’s going to be. We have changed the climate, which has changed the weather. We need to stop making things worse, which means switching from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. And we need to face the new reality we have forged.
The insurance industry is already making an adjustment that we all soon will feel. A report last week by the reinsurance giant Swiss Re calculated that severe thunderstorms in the United States accounted for 68 percent of insured natural catastrophe losses worldwide in the first half of this year. Reinsurance companies will pass along those costs to the primary insurers who cover your home and your car. Primary insurers will eventually pass along those costs to you — though imagine facing the random violence of extreme weather without insurance at all.
As individuals and as communities, we need to think more about worst-case scenarios and actively plan for them. Climate change is personal. Act accordingly.
TWO MONTHS IN GEORGIA: HOW TRUMP TRIED TO OVERTURN THE VOTE
The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election.
By Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, The New York Times
When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.
“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.
Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”
Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.
Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.
It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.
Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.
There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.
They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.
And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.
The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinized lesser-known players like a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Kanye West.
As soon as Monday, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Ms. Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.
If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centers on nine critical weeks from Election Day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Mr. Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.
Unleashing ‘Hate and Fury’
It did not take long for the gloves to come off.
During the Nov. 5 visit by Donald Trump Jr., the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.
But according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Mr. Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. disputed that characterization, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.)
Four days later, the two senators called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Ms. Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”
Four other battleground states had also flipped to Mr. Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.
By the end of November, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 29. And on Dec. 1: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”
But these efforts were not gaining traction. Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp were not bending. And on Dec. 1, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
A Show for Lawmakers
It was time to turn up the volume.
Mr. Giuliani was on the road, traveling to Phoenix and Lansing, Mich., to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Mr. Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.
Even though Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Mr. Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the State Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.
He repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.
Mr. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.
He accused two workers, a Black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.
Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.
John Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”
That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered.”
But a review of the data he was using found that Mr. Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.
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The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.
The President Calling
In the meantime, Mr. Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Mr. Biden’s win.
He called Governor Kemp on Dec. 5, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.
Mr. Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Mr. Trump, rebuffed the idea.
Two days later, Mr. Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House, with a similar pitch. But Mr. Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off,” a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”
By Dec. 7, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Mr. Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Mr. Trump.
Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalizing the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results on Jan. 6.
Mr. Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”
The Fake Electors Meet
Rather than back down, Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.
Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to Ms. McDaniel’s House testimony. By Dec. 13, as the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of Election Day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.
Mr. Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight on Dec. 14, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”
Later that day, the bogus electors met at the Statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though they were not.
In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Mr. Pence.
In his testimony to House investigators, Mr. Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.
Moves in the White House
With other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he traveled to suburban Cobb County, Ga., during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots, which had been requested by Mr. Kemp.
Mr. Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.
During the visit, Mr. Meadows put Mr. Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Mr. Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”
Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Mr. Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the U.S.”
In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump.
Mr. Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the Justice Department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Mr. Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.
Mr. Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated Dec. 28, falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s election results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session — a dramatic intervention.
Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme.”
The letter was never sent.
One Last Call
Still, Mr. Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.
On Jan. 2, he called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect,” an hourlong mostly one-sided conversation during which Mr. Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.
“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”
Mr. Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”
Mr. Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the Black women working for the county elections office, telling Mr. Raffensperger that Ruby Freeman — whom he mentioned 18 times during the call — was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.”
“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Mr. Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Ms. Freeman, which had already been debunked by Mr. Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.
Trump-fueled conspiracy theories about Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Ms. Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last year, Ms. Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Ms. Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.
Then, on Jan. 4, Ms. Freeman received an unusual overture.
Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Kanye West, persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Ms. Freeman later said that Ms. Kutti — who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter — had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
‘Every Freaking Ballot’
On Jan. 7, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Mr. Pence certified the election results for Mr. Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.
In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.
A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Mr. Trump’s behalf traveled to Coffee County, about 200 miles from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.
“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.
A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”
Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”
By then, Ms. Willis’s investigation was well underway.
“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.”
The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election.
By Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, The New York Times
When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.
“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.
Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”
Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.
Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.
It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.
Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.
There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.
They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.
And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.
The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinized lesser-known players like a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Kanye West.
As soon as Monday, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Ms. Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.
If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centers on nine critical weeks from Election Day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Mr. Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.
Unleashing ‘Hate and Fury’
It did not take long for the gloves to come off.
During the Nov. 5 visit by Donald Trump Jr., the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.
But according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Mr. Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. disputed that characterization, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.)
Four days later, the two senators called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Ms. Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”
Four other battleground states had also flipped to Mr. Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.
By the end of November, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 29. And on Dec. 1: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”
But these efforts were not gaining traction. Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp were not bending. And on Dec. 1, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
A Show for Lawmakers
It was time to turn up the volume.
Mr. Giuliani was on the road, traveling to Phoenix and Lansing, Mich., to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Mr. Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.
Even though Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Mr. Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the State Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.
He repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.
Mr. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.
He accused two workers, a Black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.
Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.
John Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”
That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered.”
But a review of the data he was using found that Mr. Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.
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The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.
The President Calling
In the meantime, Mr. Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Mr. Biden’s win.
He called Governor Kemp on Dec. 5, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.
Mr. Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Mr. Trump, rebuffed the idea.
Two days later, Mr. Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House, with a similar pitch. But Mr. Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off,” a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”
By Dec. 7, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Mr. Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Mr. Trump.
Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalizing the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results on Jan. 6.
Mr. Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”
The Fake Electors Meet
Rather than back down, Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.
Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to Ms. McDaniel’s House testimony. By Dec. 13, as the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of Election Day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.
Mr. Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight on Dec. 14, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”
Later that day, the bogus electors met at the Statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though they were not.
In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Mr. Pence.
In his testimony to House investigators, Mr. Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.
Moves in the White House
With other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he traveled to suburban Cobb County, Ga., during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots, which had been requested by Mr. Kemp.
Mr. Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.
During the visit, Mr. Meadows put Mr. Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Mr. Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”
Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Mr. Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the U.S.”
In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump.
Mr. Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the Justice Department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Mr. Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.
Mr. Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated Dec. 28, falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s election results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session — a dramatic intervention.
Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme.”
The letter was never sent.
One Last Call
Still, Mr. Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.
On Jan. 2, he called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect,” an hourlong mostly one-sided conversation during which Mr. Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.
“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”
Mr. Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”
Mr. Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the Black women working for the county elections office, telling Mr. Raffensperger that Ruby Freeman — whom he mentioned 18 times during the call — was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.”
“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Mr. Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Ms. Freeman, which had already been debunked by Mr. Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.
Trump-fueled conspiracy theories about Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Ms. Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last year, Ms. Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Ms. Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.
Then, on Jan. 4, Ms. Freeman received an unusual overture.
Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Kanye West, persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Ms. Freeman later said that Ms. Kutti — who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter — had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
‘Every Freaking Ballot’
On Jan. 7, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Mr. Pence certified the election results for Mr. Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.
In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.
A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Mr. Trump’s behalf traveled to Coffee County, about 200 miles from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.
“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.
A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”
Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”
By then, Ms. Willis’s investigation was well underway.
“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.”
TRUMP SAYS, ‘I’M COMING AFTER YOU.’ WE SHOULD TAKE HIM AT HIS WORD.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
“If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”
Loyalists of former president Donald Trump have rushed to play down that message, posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, as the very definition of political speech — nothing more than a response to groups opposed to his presidential campaign. We have been here before. The country ignores such threats at its peril. History teaches that when Trump cloaks himself in martyrdom and political victimhood, bad things — violent, ugly and bloody — can happen.
Remember the Trump-inspired insurrection and assault on the Capitol? Recall Trump exhorting the Jan. 6, 2021, crowd to stop what he falsely described as an unlawful congressional transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden? “We fight like hell,” he said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Remember Trump directing his adoring MAGA fans to head to the Capitol, leaving them to believe that he was going with them and telling them to give Republicans in Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”?
Rid yourselves of any thought that only a handful of extremists were on hand to be goaded by Trump into behaving dangerously. Let’s do some stocktaking, courtesy of the Justice Department:
Let’s be clear: Jan. 6 was a call to arms. And Trump’s people responded by the hundreds.
So when Trump, on Aug. 3, the day he pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, resorts to self-pity — “It’s a very sad thing to see it. When you look at what’s happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America” — America should consider itself on notice.
And when Trump, at a South Carolina Republican fundraiser on Aug. 5, returns to casting himself as a martyr — “Every time the radical-left Democrats do this and the Marxist, communist fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you” — I suggest it’s time to mount the barricades.
Do you think it was pure coincidence that Trump’s “If you go after me, I’m coming after you” threat came one day after he was arraigned in federal court in Washington?
Trump’s rhetoric cultivates anger and resentment. It is rhetoric that mercilessly attacks and seeks to intimidate, whether it’s directed at prosecutors, witnesses and judges, or is aimed at poisoning a jury pool. Political speech? It’s the same cynical calculation that stoked the angry mob to storm the Capitol.
The people in that mob were determined to keep Trump in power. Might there be others equally fixated on impairing or obstructing trials set to begin against Trump in court?
Let’s not repeat the mistakes of Jan. 6. Get on high alert now. Double security around the courts. Take seriously any threats against special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan (who on Friday warned Trump not to say things that put the safety of witnesses in the case at risk — we’ll see how that goes).
The same applies to courts and prosecutors in New York and Georgia.
Yes, this is our nation’s capital. Don’t forget that Trump’s rabid supporters came to town and left in their wake more than 100 assaulted police officers and nearly $3 million in damage.
“I’m coming after you.” This time, let America be waiting.
By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post
“If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”
Loyalists of former president Donald Trump have rushed to play down that message, posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, as the very definition of political speech — nothing more than a response to groups opposed to his presidential campaign. We have been here before. The country ignores such threats at its peril. History teaches that when Trump cloaks himself in martyrdom and political victimhood, bad things — violent, ugly and bloody — can happen.
Remember the Trump-inspired insurrection and assault on the Capitol? Recall Trump exhorting the Jan. 6, 2021, crowd to stop what he falsely described as an unlawful congressional transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden? “We fight like hell,” he said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Remember Trump directing his adoring MAGA fans to head to the Capitol, leaving them to believe that he was going with them and telling them to give Republicans in Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”?
Rid yourselves of any thought that only a handful of extremists were on hand to be goaded by Trump into behaving dangerously. Let’s do some stocktaking, courtesy of the Justice Department:
- Some 140 police officers were assaulted at the Capitol — about 80 from the Capitol force and about 60 from the D.C. police.
- About 370 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees. That includes about 110 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
- Roughly 630 people have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, including some 200 to felonies and about 430 to misdemeanors.
- A total of 110 people have been found guilty at contested trials, including three in D.C. Superior Court.
- About 600 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences.
Let’s be clear: Jan. 6 was a call to arms. And Trump’s people responded by the hundreds.
So when Trump, on Aug. 3, the day he pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, resorts to self-pity — “It’s a very sad thing to see it. When you look at what’s happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America” — America should consider itself on notice.
And when Trump, at a South Carolina Republican fundraiser on Aug. 5, returns to casting himself as a martyr — “Every time the radical-left Democrats do this and the Marxist, communist fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you” — I suggest it’s time to mount the barricades.
Do you think it was pure coincidence that Trump’s “If you go after me, I’m coming after you” threat came one day after he was arraigned in federal court in Washington?
Trump’s rhetoric cultivates anger and resentment. It is rhetoric that mercilessly attacks and seeks to intimidate, whether it’s directed at prosecutors, witnesses and judges, or is aimed at poisoning a jury pool. Political speech? It’s the same cynical calculation that stoked the angry mob to storm the Capitol.
The people in that mob were determined to keep Trump in power. Might there be others equally fixated on impairing or obstructing trials set to begin against Trump in court?
Let’s not repeat the mistakes of Jan. 6. Get on high alert now. Double security around the courts. Take seriously any threats against special counsel Jack Smith and U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan (who on Friday warned Trump not to say things that put the safety of witnesses in the case at risk — we’ll see how that goes).
The same applies to courts and prosecutors in New York and Georgia.
Yes, this is our nation’s capital. Don’t forget that Trump’s rabid supporters came to town and left in their wake more than 100 assaulted police officers and nearly $3 million in damage.
“I’m coming after you.” This time, let America be waiting.
CLARENCE THOMAS’S LUXURY VACATIONS? THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
“As friends do.”
That’s what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had to say in April, after ProPublica reported on the travel benefits lavished on the justice and his wife by Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.
“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years,” Thomas said in a statement. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”
It turns out that Thomas is a man of many friends. And these friends — ultrawealthy friends mostly acquired after Thomas joined the court — do quite a bit for the justice and his family.
For instance, Anthony Welters, a health-care tycoon whose private financing enabled the Thomases to purchase in 1999 the $267,230 motor coach in which they tooled around the country. (Welters, whom Thomas met when they were both congressional staffers, played an essential role because there isn’t much of a commercial financing market for high-end recreational vehicles of the type the Thomases bought.)
Roughly nine years later, the loan was “satisfied,” according to Welters — a fuzzy term that might mean Thomas repaid Welters or that Welters forgave all or part of the debt.
As the New York Times reported, “He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.”
There’s no way for the public to know, because Thomas never reported the arrangement on his annual financial disclosure forms. Thomas was characteristically unresponsive when the Times submitted questions about the loan to the Supreme Court’s public information office.
Was Thomas obligated to report the loan? The Times explained: “Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.”
Now, a new ProPublica report offers the most exhaustive accounting yet of how Thomas parlayed his position into a mechanism for subsidizing vacations out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The report — “almost certainly an undercount,” ProPublica noted — details at least 38 “destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”
In other words, Thomas has any number of Harlan Crows to help make his life more exceptional, including oil executive Paul Novelly; David Sokol, a former Berkshire Hathaway executive; the late billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of AutoNation and Waste Management.
Other justices, past and present, have accepted hospitality including luxury travel, but we know about those trips because the justices disclosed the gifts. But the extent of Thomas’s travel appears extraordinary. As former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who served on the committee that reviews the justices’ financial disclosure forms, told ProPublica, “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anyone.”
It is conduct unbecoming any public official, no less a Supreme Court justice. “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire,” Don Fox, former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, told ProPublica.
Perhaps some of the benefits could be deemed “personal hospitality” and therefore not subject to the reporting requirements, although that exception does not seem to apply to private jet travel, such as Huizenga’s dispatch of one of his personal 737 jets to ferry Thomas to South Florida — at least twice.
But this isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a game of what an individual justice can get away with not disclosing. The federal courts’ “Guide to Judiciary Policy” prohibits judges from accepting gifts “from the same or different sources on a basis so frequent that a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” What would any reasonable person conclude about Thomas’s behavior? This isn’t just a problem for him — it’s a stain on the court.
I wrote four months ago — without any expectation that this would happen — that Thomas needs to provide a full accounting of the benefits he received, or that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. should insist on it. Since then, we have learned not just about the travel described above but also about Crow’s purchase of the house where Thomas’s mother was living and his tuition payments for Thomas’s grandnephew.
Thomas partisans may convince themselves that this is all part of a liberal plot to discredit the court’s most conservative member. But it is Thomas who is doing the discrediting — not just of himself but of the institution on which he serves. If he won’t wake up to that reality, his colleagues must.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
“As friends do.”
That’s what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had to say in April, after ProPublica reported on the travel benefits lavished on the justice and his wife by Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.
“Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years,” Thomas said in a statement. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them.”
It turns out that Thomas is a man of many friends. And these friends — ultrawealthy friends mostly acquired after Thomas joined the court — do quite a bit for the justice and his family.
For instance, Anthony Welters, a health-care tycoon whose private financing enabled the Thomases to purchase in 1999 the $267,230 motor coach in which they tooled around the country. (Welters, whom Thomas met when they were both congressional staffers, played an essential role because there isn’t much of a commercial financing market for high-end recreational vehicles of the type the Thomases bought.)
Roughly nine years later, the loan was “satisfied,” according to Welters — a fuzzy term that might mean Thomas repaid Welters or that Welters forgave all or part of the debt.
As the New York Times reported, “He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been ‘satisfied,’ he did not respond.”
There’s no way for the public to know, because Thomas never reported the arrangement on his annual financial disclosure forms. Thomas was characteristically unresponsive when the Times submitted questions about the loan to the Supreme Court’s public information office.
Was Thomas obligated to report the loan? The Times explained: “Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.”
Now, a new ProPublica report offers the most exhaustive accounting yet of how Thomas parlayed his position into a mechanism for subsidizing vacations out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The report — “almost certainly an undercount,” ProPublica noted — details at least 38 “destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”
In other words, Thomas has any number of Harlan Crows to help make his life more exceptional, including oil executive Paul Novelly; David Sokol, a former Berkshire Hathaway executive; the late billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of AutoNation and Waste Management.
Other justices, past and present, have accepted hospitality including luxury travel, but we know about those trips because the justices disclosed the gifts. But the extent of Thomas’s travel appears extraordinary. As former federal judge Jeremy Fogel, who served on the committee that reviews the justices’ financial disclosure forms, told ProPublica, “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anyone.”
It is conduct unbecoming any public official, no less a Supreme Court justice. “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire,” Don Fox, former general counsel of the Office of Government Ethics, told ProPublica.
Perhaps some of the benefits could be deemed “personal hospitality” and therefore not subject to the reporting requirements, although that exception does not seem to apply to private jet travel, such as Huizenga’s dispatch of one of his personal 737 jets to ferry Thomas to South Florida — at least twice.
But this isn’t — or shouldn’t be — a game of what an individual justice can get away with not disclosing. The federal courts’ “Guide to Judiciary Policy” prohibits judges from accepting gifts “from the same or different sources on a basis so frequent that a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” What would any reasonable person conclude about Thomas’s behavior? This isn’t just a problem for him — it’s a stain on the court.
I wrote four months ago — without any expectation that this would happen — that Thomas needs to provide a full accounting of the benefits he received, or that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. should insist on it. Since then, we have learned not just about the travel described above but also about Crow’s purchase of the house where Thomas’s mother was living and his tuition payments for Thomas’s grandnephew.
Thomas partisans may convince themselves that this is all part of a liberal plot to discredit the court’s most conservative member. But it is Thomas who is doing the discrediting — not just of himself but of the institution on which he serves. If he won’t wake up to that reality, his colleagues must.
TRUMP TRIED TO TAKE AWAY MY VOTE
by Irv Halter, retired U.S. Air Force major general For The Inquirer
In October 2020, my wife and I arrived in Philadelphia just in time to be registered voters in our new home. We joined a long line of folks at our early voting location to be certain our vote was counted.
This being Philadelphia, the line was a blend of young and old, white and Black and Latinx, gay and straight. Despite the 45-minute wait, folks were patient, polite, and happy. It was obvious that the majority were excited to exercise their right to vote, and that Joe Biden was their choice for president — except for the elderly couple just in front of us. The husband and wife were frail, in their late 80s, and somewhat unsteady on their feet. Even without speaking much, it became obvious that the gentleman did not share his line-mates’ enthusiasm for the Democrat.
We struck up a conversation about nonpolitical stuff. He was a Marine Corps veteran who had seen combat in the Korean War. I mentioned that I, too, had combat service in the Middle East, and we thanked each other for that shared commitment to our Constitution. As we climbed the final few steps into the polling place, I reached my hand out behind his back every time he started to stumble. But thankfully he righted himself and pressed on, determined to complete the task at hand.
My wife and I finished voting and walked outside. Our Marine friend was already there, anxiously waiting for his wife to come out of the building. I assured him that I saw her just finishing up and that she would be out shortly. We bid him farewell.
I have thought of that experience often since the events of November 2020, and again on Jan. 6, 2021. I was proud of our new city and state for conducting a well-administered election. I was well aware that there were those who tried to upend that effort. While reading the entire federal indictment of former President Donald Trump released last week, those thoughts came rushing back.
The indictment is clear: Trump has been charged for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania and six other battleground states.
Trump and his coconspirators tried to cancel my vote. They tried to cancel that Marine’s vote. They tried to cancel the votes of millions of folks from both parties and overrule the clear mandate of the electorate.
The fact that they did not succeed because other Americans would not let them is irrelevant. (Thank you, “too honest” Mike Pence.) Their nefarious goal was clear and unambiguous.
Read the indictment for yourself, and you will see that Trump tried in every way he could imagine to overturn a free and fair election. He knew it was free and fair despite every corrosive lie he told and continues to tell.
Those lies may be protected free speech. But his documented actions to subvert the election were not. Trump conspired to destroy the linchpin of our republic: our sacred vote.
Trump was abetted by numerous elected Pennsylvania Republicans, including State Sen. Doug Mastriano, in his attempt to reverse our decision. Their lack of fidelity to the Constitution and the laws of the land is a stain on their character that can never be erased. And one we should never forget.
Whatever you may think about our disagreements about politics, about President Biden, about Democrats or Republicans, or about policies you wish to support or not, remember this: Donald Trump tried to take away my vote and yours, disregarding my 32 years of service to the nation in support of the Constitution.
If that does not disgust and anger you, then you are no friend of mine. Worse, you are no friend of America if you do not walk away from Trump now. Because if he ever gets the chance, he’ll do it again.
by Irv Halter, retired U.S. Air Force major general For The Inquirer
In October 2020, my wife and I arrived in Philadelphia just in time to be registered voters in our new home. We joined a long line of folks at our early voting location to be certain our vote was counted.
This being Philadelphia, the line was a blend of young and old, white and Black and Latinx, gay and straight. Despite the 45-minute wait, folks were patient, polite, and happy. It was obvious that the majority were excited to exercise their right to vote, and that Joe Biden was their choice for president — except for the elderly couple just in front of us. The husband and wife were frail, in their late 80s, and somewhat unsteady on their feet. Even without speaking much, it became obvious that the gentleman did not share his line-mates’ enthusiasm for the Democrat.
We struck up a conversation about nonpolitical stuff. He was a Marine Corps veteran who had seen combat in the Korean War. I mentioned that I, too, had combat service in the Middle East, and we thanked each other for that shared commitment to our Constitution. As we climbed the final few steps into the polling place, I reached my hand out behind his back every time he started to stumble. But thankfully he righted himself and pressed on, determined to complete the task at hand.
My wife and I finished voting and walked outside. Our Marine friend was already there, anxiously waiting for his wife to come out of the building. I assured him that I saw her just finishing up and that she would be out shortly. We bid him farewell.
I have thought of that experience often since the events of November 2020, and again on Jan. 6, 2021. I was proud of our new city and state for conducting a well-administered election. I was well aware that there were those who tried to upend that effort. While reading the entire federal indictment of former President Donald Trump released last week, those thoughts came rushing back.
The indictment is clear: Trump has been charged for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania and six other battleground states.
Trump and his coconspirators tried to cancel my vote. They tried to cancel that Marine’s vote. They tried to cancel the votes of millions of folks from both parties and overrule the clear mandate of the electorate.
The fact that they did not succeed because other Americans would not let them is irrelevant. (Thank you, “too honest” Mike Pence.) Their nefarious goal was clear and unambiguous.
Read the indictment for yourself, and you will see that Trump tried in every way he could imagine to overturn a free and fair election. He knew it was free and fair despite every corrosive lie he told and continues to tell.
Those lies may be protected free speech. But his documented actions to subvert the election were not. Trump conspired to destroy the linchpin of our republic: our sacred vote.
Trump was abetted by numerous elected Pennsylvania Republicans, including State Sen. Doug Mastriano, in his attempt to reverse our decision. Their lack of fidelity to the Constitution and the laws of the land is a stain on their character that can never be erased. And one we should never forget.
Whatever you may think about our disagreements about politics, about President Biden, about Democrats or Republicans, or about policies you wish to support or not, remember this: Donald Trump tried to take away my vote and yours, disregarding my 32 years of service to the nation in support of the Constitution.
If that does not disgust and anger you, then you are no friend of mine. Worse, you are no friend of America if you do not walk away from Trump now. Because if he ever gets the chance, he’ll do it again.
CLIMATE IS NOW A CULTURE WAR ISSUE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Understanding climate denial used to seem easy: It was all about greed. Delve into the background of a researcher challenging the scientific consensus, a think tank trying to block climate action or a politician pronouncing climate change a hoax and you would almost always find major financial backing from the fossil fuel industry.
Those were simpler, more innocent times, and I miss them.
True, greed is still a major factor in anti-environmentalism. But climate denial has also become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support.
And this cultural dimension of climate arguments has emerged at the worst possible moment — a moment when both the extreme danger from unchecked emissions and the path toward slashing those emissions are clearer than ever.
Some background: Scientists who began warning decades ago that the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere would have dangerous effects on the climate have been overwhelmingly vindicated.
Worldwide, July was the hottest month on record, with devastating heat waves in many parts of the globe. Extreme weather events are proliferating. Florida is essentially sitting in a hot bath, with ocean temperatures off some of its coast higher than body temperature.
At the same time, technological progress in renewable energy has made it possible to envisage major reductions in emissions at little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards.
Back in 2009, when Democrats tried but failed to take significant climate action, their policy proposals consisted mainly of sticks — limits on emissions in the form of permits that businesses could buy and sell. In 2022, when the Biden administration finally succeeded in passing a major climate bill, it consisted almost entirely of carrots — tax credits and subsidies for green energy. Yet thanks to the revolution in renewable technology, energy experts believe that this all-gain-no-pain approach will have major effects in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But not if Republicans can help it. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading an effort called Project 2025 that will probably define the agenda if a Republican wins the White House next year. As The Times reports, it calls for “dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.”
What’s behind this destructive effort? Well, Project 2025 appears to have been largely devised by the usual suspects — fossil-fueled think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have been crusading against climate science and climate action for many years.
But the political force of this drive, and the likelihood that there will be no significant dissent from within the G.O.P. if Republicans do take the White House, has a lot to do with the way science in general and climate science in particular have become a front in the culture war.
About attitudes toward science: As recently as the mid-2000s, Republicans and Democrats had similar levels of trust in the scientific community. Since then, however, Republican trust has plunged as Democratic trust has risen; there’s now a 30-point gap between the parties.
We saw the effect of this anti-science trend when Covid vaccines became available: Vaccination was free to the public, so there was no economic cost to individuals, yet getting vaccinated was widely perceived as something “experts” and liberal elites wanted you to do. As a result, Republicans disproportionately refused to get their shots and suffered substantially higher rates of excess deaths — deaths over and above those you would normally have expected — than Democrats.
Does anyone seriously doubt that similar attitudes are driving rank-and-file Republicans to oppose action on climate change? The other day my colleague David Brooks argued that many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to “offend the elites.” He’s right. Look at the hysterical reaction to potential regulations on gas stoves, and while it’s clear that special interests were, um, fueling the fire, there was also a strong culture-war element: The elites want you to get an induction cooktop, but real men cook with gas.
The fact that the climate war is now part of the culture war worries me, a lot. Special interests can do a great deal of damage, but they can be bought off or counterbalanced with other special interests. Indeed, an important part of President Biden’s climate strategy is the idea that renewable energy investments, which have been soaring since his legislation passed, will give many businesses and communities a stake in continuing the green transition.
But such rational if self-interested considerations won’t do much to persuade people who believe that green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life. So the culture war has become a major problem for climate action — a problem we really, really don’t need right now.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Understanding climate denial used to seem easy: It was all about greed. Delve into the background of a researcher challenging the scientific consensus, a think tank trying to block climate action or a politician pronouncing climate change a hoax and you would almost always find major financial backing from the fossil fuel industry.
Those were simpler, more innocent times, and I miss them.
True, greed is still a major factor in anti-environmentalism. But climate denial has also become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support.
And this cultural dimension of climate arguments has emerged at the worst possible moment — a moment when both the extreme danger from unchecked emissions and the path toward slashing those emissions are clearer than ever.
Some background: Scientists who began warning decades ago that the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere would have dangerous effects on the climate have been overwhelmingly vindicated.
Worldwide, July was the hottest month on record, with devastating heat waves in many parts of the globe. Extreme weather events are proliferating. Florida is essentially sitting in a hot bath, with ocean temperatures off some of its coast higher than body temperature.
At the same time, technological progress in renewable energy has made it possible to envisage major reductions in emissions at little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards.
Back in 2009, when Democrats tried but failed to take significant climate action, their policy proposals consisted mainly of sticks — limits on emissions in the form of permits that businesses could buy and sell. In 2022, when the Biden administration finally succeeded in passing a major climate bill, it consisted almost entirely of carrots — tax credits and subsidies for green energy. Yet thanks to the revolution in renewable technology, energy experts believe that this all-gain-no-pain approach will have major effects in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But not if Republicans can help it. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading an effort called Project 2025 that will probably define the agenda if a Republican wins the White House next year. As The Times reports, it calls for “dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.”
What’s behind this destructive effort? Well, Project 2025 appears to have been largely devised by the usual suspects — fossil-fueled think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have been crusading against climate science and climate action for many years.
But the political force of this drive, and the likelihood that there will be no significant dissent from within the G.O.P. if Republicans do take the White House, has a lot to do with the way science in general and climate science in particular have become a front in the culture war.
About attitudes toward science: As recently as the mid-2000s, Republicans and Democrats had similar levels of trust in the scientific community. Since then, however, Republican trust has plunged as Democratic trust has risen; there’s now a 30-point gap between the parties.
We saw the effect of this anti-science trend when Covid vaccines became available: Vaccination was free to the public, so there was no economic cost to individuals, yet getting vaccinated was widely perceived as something “experts” and liberal elites wanted you to do. As a result, Republicans disproportionately refused to get their shots and suffered substantially higher rates of excess deaths — deaths over and above those you would normally have expected — than Democrats.
Does anyone seriously doubt that similar attitudes are driving rank-and-file Republicans to oppose action on climate change? The other day my colleague David Brooks argued that many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to “offend the elites.” He’s right. Look at the hysterical reaction to potential regulations on gas stoves, and while it’s clear that special interests were, um, fueling the fire, there was also a strong culture-war element: The elites want you to get an induction cooktop, but real men cook with gas.
The fact that the climate war is now part of the culture war worries me, a lot. Special interests can do a great deal of damage, but they can be bought off or counterbalanced with other special interests. Indeed, an important part of President Biden’s climate strategy is the idea that renewable energy investments, which have been soaring since his legislation passed, will give many businesses and communities a stake in continuing the green transition.
But such rational if self-interested considerations won’t do much to persuade people who believe that green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life. So the culture war has become a major problem for climate action — a problem we really, really don’t need right now.
A PRESIDENT ACCUSED OF BETRAYING HIS COUNTRY
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Of all the ways that Donald Trump desecrated his office as president, the gravest — as outlined in extraordinary detail in the criminal indictment issued against him on Tuesday — was his attempt to undermine the Constitution and overturn the results of the 2020 election, hoping to stay in office.
The special counsel Jack Smith got right to the point at the top of the four-count federal indictment, saying that Mr. Trump had knowingly “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy.
The criminal justice system of the United States had never seen an indictment of this magnitude. It’s the first time that a former president has been explicitly accused by the federal government of defrauding the country. It’s the first time a former president has been accused of obstructing an official proceeding, the congressional count of the electoral votes. Mr. Trump also stands accused of engaging in a conspiracy to deprive millions of citizens of the right to have their votes counted. This fraud, the indictment said, led directly to a deadly attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the seat of American government.
It’s the third criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, and it demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official. The crimes alleged in this indictment are, by far, the most serious because they undermine the country’s basic principles.
The prosecution’s list of false voter fraud claims made by Mr. Trump and his associates is extensive: that 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada, 30,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona and 200,000 mystery votes in Pennsylvania, as well as suspicious vote dumps and malfunctioning voting machines elsewhere.
After presenting this list, the indictment makes its case with 12 simple but searing words: “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.” Mr. Smith points out how many people told Mr. Trump that he was repeating lies. He was told by Vice President Mike Pence that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told the same thing by the Justice Department leaders he appointed, by the director of national intelligence, by the Department of Homeland Security, by senior White House attorneys, by leaders of his campaign, by state officials and, most significantly, by dozens of federal and state courts. The indictment emphasizes that every lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump and his allies to change the outcome was rejected, “providing the defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”
Demonstrating Mr. Trump’s knowledge that he was lying will be central to the prosecution’s case when it comes to trial, because Mr. Smith wants to make clear that Mr. Trump wasn’t genuinely trying to root out credible instances of voter fraud. The indictment doesn’t charge him with lying or speaking his mind about the outcome of the election, and it notes that he had the right to challenge the results through legal means. But the charges show in detail how, after all those methods failed, his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” set the table for the criminal activity that followed, specifically fraud, obstruction and deprivation of rights. As much as defense lawyers are trying to frame the case as an attack on Mr. Trump’s free speech, the indictment makes clear that it was his actions after Election Day that were criminal.
That “criminal scheme” began, the indictment says, on Nov. 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be “co-conspirator 1”) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost. “From that point on,” the charges state, “the defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states,” which also included Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In an example cited in the charges, Mr. Giuliani sent a text to the Senate majority leader in Michigan on Dec. 7 demanding that the legislature pass a resolution saying the election was in dispute and that the state’s electors were not official. That demand was refused, but Mr. Trump continued to claim that more than 100,000 ballots in Detroit were fraudulent.
The scope of Mr. Trump’s plot touched every level of American political life. While the four federal crimes charged by Mr. Smith all relate to the same set of facts, three of those crimes, one for fraud and two related to obstruction of a proceeding, are crimes against the U.S. government. The fourth crime is against the American people, millions of whom Mr. Trump sought to deprive of their right to have their vote counted. This crime carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
It appears increasingly likely that Mr. Trump will soon face charges for crimes against yet another level of American government — the states — as the district attorney in Atlanta reaches the final stages of a grand jury investigation into his pressure campaign to get Georgia to reverse its certified vote count and award its 16 electors to him instead of Joe Biden.
The former president responded to this latest and most serious indictment in his customary style, denouncing it as “corrupt” and invoking, among other things, the “Biden Crime Family” and Nazi Germany. Mr. Smith, a veteran prosecutor on the International Criminal Court who has prosecuted far more brutal and popular leaders than Mr. Trump, has surely heard it all before. But that does not excuse the support Mr. Trump is receiving from his Republican allies in Congress, who insist that this prosecution is political and have helped damage the respect for the criminal justice system in the minds of so many voters. Yes, some in Mr. Trump’s party, including his former vice president, have stood up for democratic norms in the wake of these indictments, and yet it is impossible to ignore those who have not. These attacks are dangerous and have led to death threats against prosecutors, judges and other civil servants for doing their jobs.
If Mr. Smith’s previous indictment of Mr. Trump is any indication, we have not heard the end of the charges in this case. In that earlier case, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally hoarding and refusing to return highly classified documents after he left office, the special counsel issued a superseding indictment last week, adding serious obstruction charges against the former president and one of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. It would not be surprising if Mr. Smith has more coming in the new case as well, whether additional evidence of Mr. Trump’s lawbreaking or charges against his co-conspirators, who are not named in the indictment but who are readily identifiable. Several are lawyers who advised or worked for the former president, including Mr. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman.
In many ways, the indictment continues the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, which uncovered many of the same allegations. Several of the committee’s members had urged this prosecution, particularly after the Senate failed to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. After he voted to acquit Mr. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said there were other ways to bring Mr. Trump to account. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” he said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”
In that, at least, Mr. McConnell was right. A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Of all the ways that Donald Trump desecrated his office as president, the gravest — as outlined in extraordinary detail in the criminal indictment issued against him on Tuesday — was his attempt to undermine the Constitution and overturn the results of the 2020 election, hoping to stay in office.
The special counsel Jack Smith got right to the point at the top of the four-count federal indictment, saying that Mr. Trump had knowingly “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy.
The criminal justice system of the United States had never seen an indictment of this magnitude. It’s the first time that a former president has been explicitly accused by the federal government of defrauding the country. It’s the first time a former president has been accused of obstructing an official proceeding, the congressional count of the electoral votes. Mr. Trump also stands accused of engaging in a conspiracy to deprive millions of citizens of the right to have their votes counted. This fraud, the indictment said, led directly to a deadly attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the seat of American government.
It’s the third criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, and it demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official. The crimes alleged in this indictment are, by far, the most serious because they undermine the country’s basic principles.
The prosecution’s list of false voter fraud claims made by Mr. Trump and his associates is extensive: that 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada, 30,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona and 200,000 mystery votes in Pennsylvania, as well as suspicious vote dumps and malfunctioning voting machines elsewhere.
After presenting this list, the indictment makes its case with 12 simple but searing words: “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.” Mr. Smith points out how many people told Mr. Trump that he was repeating lies. He was told by Vice President Mike Pence that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told the same thing by the Justice Department leaders he appointed, by the director of national intelligence, by the Department of Homeland Security, by senior White House attorneys, by leaders of his campaign, by state officials and, most significantly, by dozens of federal and state courts. The indictment emphasizes that every lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump and his allies to change the outcome was rejected, “providing the defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”
Demonstrating Mr. Trump’s knowledge that he was lying will be central to the prosecution’s case when it comes to trial, because Mr. Smith wants to make clear that Mr. Trump wasn’t genuinely trying to root out credible instances of voter fraud. The indictment doesn’t charge him with lying or speaking his mind about the outcome of the election, and it notes that he had the right to challenge the results through legal means. But the charges show in detail how, after all those methods failed, his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” set the table for the criminal activity that followed, specifically fraud, obstruction and deprivation of rights. As much as defense lawyers are trying to frame the case as an attack on Mr. Trump’s free speech, the indictment makes clear that it was his actions after Election Day that were criminal.
That “criminal scheme” began, the indictment says, on Nov. 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be “co-conspirator 1”) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost. “From that point on,” the charges state, “the defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states,” which also included Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In an example cited in the charges, Mr. Giuliani sent a text to the Senate majority leader in Michigan on Dec. 7 demanding that the legislature pass a resolution saying the election was in dispute and that the state’s electors were not official. That demand was refused, but Mr. Trump continued to claim that more than 100,000 ballots in Detroit were fraudulent.
The scope of Mr. Trump’s plot touched every level of American political life. While the four federal crimes charged by Mr. Smith all relate to the same set of facts, three of those crimes, one for fraud and two related to obstruction of a proceeding, are crimes against the U.S. government. The fourth crime is against the American people, millions of whom Mr. Trump sought to deprive of their right to have their vote counted. This crime carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
It appears increasingly likely that Mr. Trump will soon face charges for crimes against yet another level of American government — the states — as the district attorney in Atlanta reaches the final stages of a grand jury investigation into his pressure campaign to get Georgia to reverse its certified vote count and award its 16 electors to him instead of Joe Biden.
The former president responded to this latest and most serious indictment in his customary style, denouncing it as “corrupt” and invoking, among other things, the “Biden Crime Family” and Nazi Germany. Mr. Smith, a veteran prosecutor on the International Criminal Court who has prosecuted far more brutal and popular leaders than Mr. Trump, has surely heard it all before. But that does not excuse the support Mr. Trump is receiving from his Republican allies in Congress, who insist that this prosecution is political and have helped damage the respect for the criminal justice system in the minds of so many voters. Yes, some in Mr. Trump’s party, including his former vice president, have stood up for democratic norms in the wake of these indictments, and yet it is impossible to ignore those who have not. These attacks are dangerous and have led to death threats against prosecutors, judges and other civil servants for doing their jobs.
If Mr. Smith’s previous indictment of Mr. Trump is any indication, we have not heard the end of the charges in this case. In that earlier case, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally hoarding and refusing to return highly classified documents after he left office, the special counsel issued a superseding indictment last week, adding serious obstruction charges against the former president and one of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. It would not be surprising if Mr. Smith has more coming in the new case as well, whether additional evidence of Mr. Trump’s lawbreaking or charges against his co-conspirators, who are not named in the indictment but who are readily identifiable. Several are lawyers who advised or worked for the former president, including Mr. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman.
In many ways, the indictment continues the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, which uncovered many of the same allegations. Several of the committee’s members had urged this prosecution, particularly after the Senate failed to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. After he voted to acquit Mr. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said there were other ways to bring Mr. Trump to account. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” he said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”
In that, at least, Mr. McConnell was right. A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.
NEW INDICTMENT PROVES TRUMP NEVER LEARNED THE FIRST LESSON OF WATERGATE
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
If the allegations in the latest indictment of Donald Trump hold up, the former president is a common criminal — and an uncommonly stupid one.
Everyone knows, as the Watergate scandal drove home: The coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone, that is, but Trump.
According to the superseding indictment handed up late Thursday, even after Trump knew the FBI was onto his improper retention of classified information, and even after he knew they were seeking security camera footage from the Mar-a-Lago storage areas where the material was kept — in other words, when any reasonably adept criminal would have known to stop digging holes — Trump made matters infinitely worse.
The alleged conduct — yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms — is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.
As set out in the indictment’s relentlessly damning timeline, Trump enlisted his personal aide, Waltine Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago worker, Carlos De Oliveira, in a conspiracy to delete the subpoenaed footage.
Consider: According to the indictment, on June 22, 2022, the Justice Department emailed to a Trump lawyer a draft grand jury subpoena for security camera footage. The next day, the former president called De Oliveira — who has reportedly worked for Trump for almost two decades -- “and they spoke for approximately 24 minutes.” Hard to imagine what that might have been about.
After that, the pace picked up. Nauta claiming a “family emergency,” changed plans to accompany Trump to Illinois and made a secret trip to Florida, where he met up with De Oliveira. On June 27, 2022, De Oliveira met with another Trump employee, and, after saying the conversation should “remain between the two of them,” asked how many days the server retained video footage — and advised him that “the boss” wanted the server deleted.
“Trump Employee 4 responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” the indictment relates. De Oliveira “then insisted to TRUMP Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, ‘what are we going to do?’”
And then: “At 3:55 p.m., TRUMP called DE OLIVEIRA and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes.”
That isn’t all. On August 26, 2022, two weeks after the FBI seized classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Nauta called another Trump employee “and said words to the effect of, ‘someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good.’” The employee reassured Nauta that De Oliveira “would not do anything to affect his relationship” with Trump. “That same day,” the indictment states, Trump called De Oliveira and assured him that Trump would get him a lawyer.
Even before this new evidence, the allegations of obstruction lodged against Trump were already damning. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump allegedly asked his lawyer — after the documents were subpoenaed. He tried to get the lawyer to deep-six any problematic documents. As the lawyer recalled, “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”
But this — the alleged conspiracy to destroy the security footage — is the epitome of obstruction, stunning in its brazenness.
There is an argument, depressing but not unreasonable, that none of this matters, legally or in the court of public opinion. The unlawful retention of documents and obstruction case against Trump appeared strong when they were first made public more than a month ago. And the new Mar-a-Lago charges are unrelated to the impending indictment of Trump for his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election.
Those who insist on seeing Trump as the beleaguered victim of partisan prosecutors will not be moved by the fact of his 24-minute chat with a longtime retainer. The rest of us have long understood who he is. These new charges simply add to the pile.
But drip by drip, count by count, obstructive act by obstructive act, the seriousness of this situation comes into focus, the stakes of the next election become clearer. Trump in office was willing to do whatever it took to remain in power. Trump out of office was willing to do whatever it took to keep “my boxes.” One demonstration of narcissistic entitlement bolsters the other and deepens the urgency of holding this man to account, once and for all, and for all that he has done.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
If the allegations in the latest indictment of Donald Trump hold up, the former president is a common criminal — and an uncommonly stupid one.
Everyone knows, as the Watergate scandal drove home: The coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone, that is, but Trump.
According to the superseding indictment handed up late Thursday, even after Trump knew the FBI was onto his improper retention of classified information, and even after he knew they were seeking security camera footage from the Mar-a-Lago storage areas where the material was kept — in other words, when any reasonably adept criminal would have known to stop digging holes — Trump made matters infinitely worse.
The alleged conduct — yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms — is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.
As set out in the indictment’s relentlessly damning timeline, Trump enlisted his personal aide, Waltine Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago worker, Carlos De Oliveira, in a conspiracy to delete the subpoenaed footage.
Consider: According to the indictment, on June 22, 2022, the Justice Department emailed to a Trump lawyer a draft grand jury subpoena for security camera footage. The next day, the former president called De Oliveira — who has reportedly worked for Trump for almost two decades -- “and they spoke for approximately 24 minutes.” Hard to imagine what that might have been about.
After that, the pace picked up. Nauta claiming a “family emergency,” changed plans to accompany Trump to Illinois and made a secret trip to Florida, where he met up with De Oliveira. On June 27, 2022, De Oliveira met with another Trump employee, and, after saying the conversation should “remain between the two of them,” asked how many days the server retained video footage — and advised him that “the boss” wanted the server deleted.
“Trump Employee 4 responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that,” the indictment relates. De Oliveira “then insisted to TRUMP Employee 4 that ‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted and asked, ‘what are we going to do?’”
And then: “At 3:55 p.m., TRUMP called DE OLIVEIRA and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes.”
That isn’t all. On August 26, 2022, two weeks after the FBI seized classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Nauta called another Trump employee “and said words to the effect of, ‘someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good.’” The employee reassured Nauta that De Oliveira “would not do anything to affect his relationship” with Trump. “That same day,” the indictment states, Trump called De Oliveira and assured him that Trump would get him a lawyer.
Even before this new evidence, the allegations of obstruction lodged against Trump were already damning. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” Trump allegedly asked his lawyer — after the documents were subpoenaed. He tried to get the lawyer to deep-six any problematic documents. As the lawyer recalled, “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”
But this — the alleged conspiracy to destroy the security footage — is the epitome of obstruction, stunning in its brazenness.
There is an argument, depressing but not unreasonable, that none of this matters, legally or in the court of public opinion. The unlawful retention of documents and obstruction case against Trump appeared strong when they were first made public more than a month ago. And the new Mar-a-Lago charges are unrelated to the impending indictment of Trump for his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election.
Those who insist on seeing Trump as the beleaguered victim of partisan prosecutors will not be moved by the fact of his 24-minute chat with a longtime retainer. The rest of us have long understood who he is. These new charges simply add to the pile.
But drip by drip, count by count, obstructive act by obstructive act, the seriousness of this situation comes into focus, the stakes of the next election become clearer. Trump in office was willing to do whatever it took to remain in power. Trump out of office was willing to do whatever it took to keep “my boxes.” One demonstration of narcissistic entitlement bolsters the other and deepens the urgency of holding this man to account, once and for all, and for all that he has done.
A YEAR AFTER DOBBS, HOUSE GOP PROPOSES TAKING FOOD FROM HUNGRY BABIES
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
A year ago, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion access, Republican politicians pledged to support women facing unplanned pregnancies.
Today? Republican lawmakers are literally trying to take food away from disadvantaged new moms and their children.
They’re doing so via the annual House appropriations agricultural bill, specifically the GOP-written House version that was slated for a vote this week. This legislation covers a lot of ground, including rural development grants and loans for farmers. But among its most critical, least appreciated, highest return-on-investment programs is one known as WIC (officially, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).
WIC was created in the early 1970s to serve low-income pregnant women, new moms, babies and young children at nutritional risk. Unlike the better-known food stamp program — which allows beneficiaries to spend their assistance on almost any groceries they like — WIC targets the specific nutritional requirements of prenatal and postpartum mothers and their children up to age 5, based on legally required, regular scientific reviews of their dietary needs.
The program provides modest but evidence-based food benefits (for example, up to a dozen eggs per month per toddler). It also offers screening and referrals to other health and social services, such as breastfeeding counseling and substance-abuse programs. You know, basic stuff you’d expect a rich country to provide for low-income babies and struggling new moms.
Historically, we’ve risen to the occasion. There’s been strong bipartisan support for WIC for decades. Every year since 1997, Congress has committed to fully funding WIC — a fancy way of saying we’ve ensured there would be enough money to serve everyone eligible who applied.
Government officials have stuck to this commitment regardless of which party controlled the White House or either chamber of Congress, “even under Republican trifectas,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Robert Greenstein. In fact, even in years in which more funding turned out to be needed than was budgeted — because a recession increased the number of families eligible or food prices unexpectedly spiked — Congress and the Agriculture Department have made sure money was available to serve anyone eligible who applied, Greenstein said.
Now that commitment might be ending.
The GOP-controlled House’s fiscal 2024 agricultural bill would either eliminate or reduce benefits for 5.3 million kids and pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding adults, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates.
Of that total, roughly 4.6 million participants would have their benefits cut, primarily because of rollbacks of a fruit and vegetable benefit that had been expanded in 2021 based on recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Another 650,000 to 750,000 eligible people would likely be turned away from the program entirely because of funding shortfalls.
The House’s plan to turn away or waitlist these vulnerable families, for the first time in a quarter-century, would be an astonishing break in precedent. Especially so given the timing.
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which was almost uniformly celebrated by Republican lawmakers (including the House agricultural bill’s sponsor, Maryland Rep. Andy Harris), caused thousands of women to have babies they weren’t prepared to support. We also recently saw nationwide infant-formula shortages. Republican lawmakers (including Harris) treated this crisis as political fodder, as desperate families scoured the country to feed their newborns.
And of course we’re now roughly two years into a run of elevated inflation. This has been another crisis Republicans have mined for political advantage — and pledged to remedy — while Americans struggled to put food on the table.
As is always true, voters should pay more attention to what politicians do than to what they say.
To be clear, GOP-proposed cuts to WIC don’t seem motivated by any particular animus toward the program or a desire to hurt poor families. Rather, the party just has other priorities: Republicans have committed to huge cuts to nondefense spending, even bigger cuts than those agreed to in their recent debt limit deal. Adhering to their self-imposed budget constraints, while safeguarding other programs they care more about (border security, etc.), requires slashing safety-net programs.
So, it’s not like the House GOP hates poor babies or postpartum moms. It’s just ... indifferent to them.
There’s a twist of irony in all this, though. If your priority is really fiscal rectitude, WIC is a terrible program to cut.
Available research suggests that every dollar spent on WIC saves much more than a dollar on other government spending programs. That’s because investing in maternal and early childhood nutrition is associated with fewer preterm births, higher birthweights and other improvements in mental and physical development.
Republicans portray their spending cuts as fiscally responsible. In reality, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
A year ago, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion access, Republican politicians pledged to support women facing unplanned pregnancies.
Today? Republican lawmakers are literally trying to take food away from disadvantaged new moms and their children.
They’re doing so via the annual House appropriations agricultural bill, specifically the GOP-written House version that was slated for a vote this week. This legislation covers a lot of ground, including rural development grants and loans for farmers. But among its most critical, least appreciated, highest return-on-investment programs is one known as WIC (officially, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).
WIC was created in the early 1970s to serve low-income pregnant women, new moms, babies and young children at nutritional risk. Unlike the better-known food stamp program — which allows beneficiaries to spend their assistance on almost any groceries they like — WIC targets the specific nutritional requirements of prenatal and postpartum mothers and their children up to age 5, based on legally required, regular scientific reviews of their dietary needs.
The program provides modest but evidence-based food benefits (for example, up to a dozen eggs per month per toddler). It also offers screening and referrals to other health and social services, such as breastfeeding counseling and substance-abuse programs. You know, basic stuff you’d expect a rich country to provide for low-income babies and struggling new moms.
Historically, we’ve risen to the occasion. There’s been strong bipartisan support for WIC for decades. Every year since 1997, Congress has committed to fully funding WIC — a fancy way of saying we’ve ensured there would be enough money to serve everyone eligible who applied.
Government officials have stuck to this commitment regardless of which party controlled the White House or either chamber of Congress, “even under Republican trifectas,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Robert Greenstein. In fact, even in years in which more funding turned out to be needed than was budgeted — because a recession increased the number of families eligible or food prices unexpectedly spiked — Congress and the Agriculture Department have made sure money was available to serve anyone eligible who applied, Greenstein said.
Now that commitment might be ending.
The GOP-controlled House’s fiscal 2024 agricultural bill would either eliminate or reduce benefits for 5.3 million kids and pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding adults, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates.
Of that total, roughly 4.6 million participants would have their benefits cut, primarily because of rollbacks of a fruit and vegetable benefit that had been expanded in 2021 based on recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Another 650,000 to 750,000 eligible people would likely be turned away from the program entirely because of funding shortfalls.
The House’s plan to turn away or waitlist these vulnerable families, for the first time in a quarter-century, would be an astonishing break in precedent. Especially so given the timing.
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which was almost uniformly celebrated by Republican lawmakers (including the House agricultural bill’s sponsor, Maryland Rep. Andy Harris), caused thousands of women to have babies they weren’t prepared to support. We also recently saw nationwide infant-formula shortages. Republican lawmakers (including Harris) treated this crisis as political fodder, as desperate families scoured the country to feed their newborns.
And of course we’re now roughly two years into a run of elevated inflation. This has been another crisis Republicans have mined for political advantage — and pledged to remedy — while Americans struggled to put food on the table.
As is always true, voters should pay more attention to what politicians do than to what they say.
To be clear, GOP-proposed cuts to WIC don’t seem motivated by any particular animus toward the program or a desire to hurt poor families. Rather, the party just has other priorities: Republicans have committed to huge cuts to nondefense spending, even bigger cuts than those agreed to in their recent debt limit deal. Adhering to their self-imposed budget constraints, while safeguarding other programs they care more about (border security, etc.), requires slashing safety-net programs.
So, it’s not like the House GOP hates poor babies or postpartum moms. It’s just ... indifferent to them.
There’s a twist of irony in all this, though. If your priority is really fiscal rectitude, WIC is a terrible program to cut.
Available research suggests that every dollar spent on WIC saves much more than a dollar on other government spending programs. That’s because investing in maternal and early childhood nutrition is associated with fewer preterm births, higher birthweights and other improvements in mental and physical development.
Republicans portray their spending cuts as fiscally responsible. In reality, they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A REPUBLICAN NIGHTMARE SEEMS ABOUT TO BECOME REAL
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses. Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic and unfit Donald Trump, right?
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump. They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump. Listen, stealing and bandying about top-secret documents isn’t so bad, is it? And, after all, he didn’t do all that much on Jan. 6, 2021, did he?
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
For years now, some Republicans — and, to a large extent, the mainstream media — have harbored the notion that the GOP eventually would come to its senses. Surely, it would eventually dump the unhinged, disloyal, undemocratic and unfit Donald Trump, right?
But if Republicans did not wake from their slumber after the first impeachment or the second, after a jury decided he had lied about sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, after an indictment accusing him of obstruction and violating the Espionage Act (set out in shocking detail), and after replete evidence of his alleged role in an attempted coup, it is hard to imagine what would bring them to their senses. There is scant evidence that Trump would flee the race to focus on his legal defense; to the contrary, the worse his legal position, the more desperate he becomes to regain power.
Elected Republicans and right-wing media figures have contributed to the predicament as they have minimized, rationalized and denied jaw-dropping allegations against Trump. They have made it easy for Republicans to cling to Trump. Listen, stealing and bandying about top-secret documents isn’t so bad, is it? And, after all, he didn’t do all that much on Jan. 6, 2021, did he?
This is what results when a party, its pundit class and millions of followers cut themselves off from reality, fall into a world of paranoid conspiracies and refuse to simply acknowledge they were very, very wrong to side with him.
And, frankly, the mainstream media has made it that much easier for cowardly Republicans to stick with Trump. Rather than challenge Republicans at every turn to defend their embrace of Trump or even to examine seriously the historical origins of toxic racist, xenophobic and delusional beliefs, the mainstream media largely sticks to horserace politics. (How disagreeable to grapple with the deep pathology in American politics and abandon false equivalence between the parties.)
Before going down the road to political doom, Republicans should understand how refusing to jettison Trump as their standard-bearer would play out. The so-called E. Jean Carroll II trial is scheduled for January. The Manhattan criminal trial is set for March, but even a conviction there might not move the GOP primary electorate. (Trivial! Set up!) The Mar-a-Lago documents case won’t begin before May. (All are subject to delay.) Meanwhile, the GOP presidential primary will have gotten underway in January and will run through March. Republicans might crown a presumptive winner by early May (as happened in 2016), even before the Mar-a-Lago trial concludes.
Without verdicts in the Jan. 6 cases and with appeals pending in any others (e.g., New York, Florida), the chances that a Republican National Convention in July filled with Trump-pledged delegates experiencing a spasm of buyer’s remorse (and overturning the primary winner) are slight. (Think of that being as probable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy growing a spine or the party rediscovering the charms of moderate governors).
The GOP could very well be saddled with a nominee who has been indicted multiple times and perhaps convicted more than once. They would be betting that millions of voters who didn’t vote for him last time would vote for an indicted or possibly convicted nominee who spends most of his time railing about his plight.
And, keep in mind, even without the legal baggage, Trump would face an uphill climb to match his 2016 results. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller recently wrote for The Post that “between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people.” Put differently, the 2024 electorate will be younger and more Democratic — by a lot — than the electorate that chose Trump in 2016. The GOP will be pleading with a less Trump-friendly electorate to ignore his alleged crime spree and reelect the Jan. 6 instigator.
If it seems fantastical, even unimaginable, that a party would put itself in such a position, remember this is a party that obsesses over Hunter Biden, elevates to prominence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and still won’t admit that Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, barring an epiphany, the GOP’s self-delusion is risking a political wipeout that will take out more than its disastrous nominee. And it won’t be able to claim it wasn’t warned.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH FOR OUR LIAR IN CHIEF
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.
That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.
The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?
Or is Smith Muellering it?
We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.
Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.
Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.
Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)
This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.
So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.
Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.
His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.
Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.
The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.
On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”
A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.
Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.
“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”
DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.
Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?
Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.
If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.
That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.
The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?
Or is Smith Muellering it?
We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.
Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.
Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.
Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)
This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.
So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.
Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.
His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.
Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.
The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.
On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”
A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.
Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.
“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”
DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.
Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?
Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.
If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.
TRUMP HAS A PLAN TO CONSOLIDATE POWER IN A SECOND TERM. IT JUST MIGHT WORK.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
From the moment he entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump was at war with the government he led; as his close adviser Stephen K. Bannon said at the time, the administration’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” It was a war Trump mostly lost. But as he campaigns for another term, his loyalists are planning to refight that war, and win.
There are reasons to think they could fail again. Yet there is also cause to be deeply concerned about this aspect of a potential Trump presidency in the future.
As we say in Washington, personnel is policy. And the personnel of a second Trump executive branch would be very different from the first, both in who its members would be and in their plans for remaking the federal government.
The “administrative state” is composed of all the people and agencies who carry out policy, enforce laws and provide services, much of it designed to be somewhat insulated from political influence. That independence has long rankled right-wing thinkers, who have held that the Constitution gives the president almost unfettered authority over the executive branch. For decades — though mostly when a Republican is in the White House — they have sought to expand the power of the president.
This effort is now focused on expanding Trump’s power in a second term. Working through established conservative organizations and newer Trump-centric ones such as the America First Policy Institute, Trump’s associates are developing a plan to concentrate federal authority in his hands. It involves firing large swaths of the civil service and staffing those positions with loyalists, seizing authority from independent agencies and refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress.
The more sweeping their ambitions, the more likely they are to fall short at least some of the time, because they are restrained by either the courts or their own incompetence, something that is never in short supply where Trump is concerned. But many of their failures the last time around came when they were scrambling on the fly to carry out some harebrained scheme (such as stealing an election). This time, they’re planning carefully.
The Heritage Foundation’s massive plan for the next GOP administration states, “Nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state.” And as the organizer of Heritage’s effort to assemble lists of potential administration appointments told the Economist, devotion to Trump is nonnegotiable: If you have “fought against the Trump administration,” including by blaming him for the insurrection, that will get you struck from the list.
This effort is meant to avoid a repeat of the personnel chaos of the first Trump administration. Unlike politicians who rise through the ranks to the presidency, Trump came to Washington without a network of aides and associates ready to move into the executive branch. So he cobbled together an administration of GOP apparatchiks, inexperienced ideologues and grifters. But often, he was foiled by the occasionally principled people he appointed, who displayed integrity at key moments.
“A lot of Trump’s frustration with what he called the deep state was as much as anything frustration towards his own political appointees,” says Donald Moynihan, a Georgetown University political scientist who studies government administration. “He has solved that problem,” because now he has “thousands of vetted loyalists” ready to staff the executive branch.
The civil service, with its strong job protections and mandate for nonpartisanship, is being targeted for a purge. Two weeks before the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order called Schedule F, which would have enabled him to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to political appointee status, meaning he could fire them at will and replace them with his own cronies.
It came too late to have an impact, and President Biden rescinded it when he took office. But reviving Schedule F is at the heart of the Trump force’s plan to break the civil service. The president now makes around 4,000 political appointments, already a preposterously large number. Trump’s people believe that with Schedule F, they could increase that number to more than 50,000.
They’re trying to “change the equilibrium of public sector work, possibly for a generation or more,” Moynihan told me, making it difficult to recruit skilled people who want to serve their country in a nonpolitical way.
That could make government both more corrupt and less capable. “This feels like the biggest bomb that’s waiting to go off under the next Republican administration,” Moynihan continued. “And it’s not like they’re doing it in secret. They’re very upfront about what they plan to do.”
Should Trump become president again, he would pursue a standard Republican policy agenda — tax cuts, abortion restrictions, environmental deregulation. But his biggest impact could be a wholesale remaking of government, of a kind not seen since the New Deal — and it could be one of his most lasting and harmful legacies.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
From the moment he entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump was at war with the government he led; as his close adviser Stephen K. Bannon said at the time, the administration’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” It was a war Trump mostly lost. But as he campaigns for another term, his loyalists are planning to refight that war, and win.
There are reasons to think they could fail again. Yet there is also cause to be deeply concerned about this aspect of a potential Trump presidency in the future.
As we say in Washington, personnel is policy. And the personnel of a second Trump executive branch would be very different from the first, both in who its members would be and in their plans for remaking the federal government.
The “administrative state” is composed of all the people and agencies who carry out policy, enforce laws and provide services, much of it designed to be somewhat insulated from political influence. That independence has long rankled right-wing thinkers, who have held that the Constitution gives the president almost unfettered authority over the executive branch. For decades — though mostly when a Republican is in the White House — they have sought to expand the power of the president.
This effort is now focused on expanding Trump’s power in a second term. Working through established conservative organizations and newer Trump-centric ones such as the America First Policy Institute, Trump’s associates are developing a plan to concentrate federal authority in his hands. It involves firing large swaths of the civil service and staffing those positions with loyalists, seizing authority from independent agencies and refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress.
The more sweeping their ambitions, the more likely they are to fall short at least some of the time, because they are restrained by either the courts or their own incompetence, something that is never in short supply where Trump is concerned. But many of their failures the last time around came when they were scrambling on the fly to carry out some harebrained scheme (such as stealing an election). This time, they’re planning carefully.
The Heritage Foundation’s massive plan for the next GOP administration states, “Nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state.” And as the organizer of Heritage’s effort to assemble lists of potential administration appointments told the Economist, devotion to Trump is nonnegotiable: If you have “fought against the Trump administration,” including by blaming him for the insurrection, that will get you struck from the list.
This effort is meant to avoid a repeat of the personnel chaos of the first Trump administration. Unlike politicians who rise through the ranks to the presidency, Trump came to Washington without a network of aides and associates ready to move into the executive branch. So he cobbled together an administration of GOP apparatchiks, inexperienced ideologues and grifters. But often, he was foiled by the occasionally principled people he appointed, who displayed integrity at key moments.
“A lot of Trump’s frustration with what he called the deep state was as much as anything frustration towards his own political appointees,” says Donald Moynihan, a Georgetown University political scientist who studies government administration. “He has solved that problem,” because now he has “thousands of vetted loyalists” ready to staff the executive branch.
The civil service, with its strong job protections and mandate for nonpartisanship, is being targeted for a purge. Two weeks before the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order called Schedule F, which would have enabled him to convert tens of thousands of civil servants to political appointee status, meaning he could fire them at will and replace them with his own cronies.
It came too late to have an impact, and President Biden rescinded it when he took office. But reviving Schedule F is at the heart of the Trump force’s plan to break the civil service. The president now makes around 4,000 political appointments, already a preposterously large number. Trump’s people believe that with Schedule F, they could increase that number to more than 50,000.
They’re trying to “change the equilibrium of public sector work, possibly for a generation or more,” Moynihan told me, making it difficult to recruit skilled people who want to serve their country in a nonpolitical way.
That could make government both more corrupt and less capable. “This feels like the biggest bomb that’s waiting to go off under the next Republican administration,” Moynihan continued. “And it’s not like they’re doing it in secret. They’re very upfront about what they plan to do.”
Should Trump become president again, he would pursue a standard Republican policy agenda — tax cuts, abortion restrictions, environmental deregulation. But his biggest impact could be a wholesale remaking of government, of a kind not seen since the New Deal — and it could be one of his most lasting and harmful legacies.
REPUBLICANS LOB A BOMB OF CYNICISM AT OUR SOLDIERS
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Why would Republicans want the military to prepare for real wars when fighting culture wars is so much more fun?
In recent years, the GOP has abandoned its commitment to many of the core principles it once stood for (law and order, family values, fiscal responsibility, etc.). Lately, we can add to that list: a strong commitment to U.S. national security.
Consider Republicans’ recent shenanigans surrounding the marquee annual defense legislation, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This is a must-pass bill that Republican lawmakers have lately been trying to convert into a less-likely-to-pass, more-likely-to-shut-down-the-entire-government bill.
For most of the past six decades, the NDAA has passed Congress with strong bipartisan support. That tradition was ignored last Friday, when the fiscal 2024 defense bill passed the GOP-controlled House overwhelmingly along party lines.
This time around, only four Democrats voted for the measure. To be clear, that’s not because Democratic lawmakers have suddenly become less supportive of our military. It’s because Republicans decided to compromise national security by dragging the Pentagon into unrelated and divisive culture-war issues, which made the final legislation too toxic for Democrats to support.
At the last minute, after the House Armed Services Committee had spent months hashing out a bipartisan deal, House Republicans voted to add poison-pill amendments demanded by far-right lawmakers.
Among these amendments: new limits on abortion access for service members and their families, through language prohibiting reimbursement for travel and transportation costs related to abortion or fertility care.
The bill would also prohibit the military from implementing directives related to climate change. As military leaders appointed by presidents of both parties have observed, climate change represents a serious security threat, as it affects not only U.S. military readiness but also geopolitical unrest abroad, through floods, famine, drought and other contributors to population displacement and conflict.
The GOP bill would gut the military’s diversity and inclusion programs. (Phew, good thing we don’t need diverse personnel in the armed services.) And it includes a litany of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions, including one curbing medical care for transgender troops. Another would limit the flags that employees of the military may display in public places — language designed to ban the Pride flag.
Yet other language would prohibit military-run schools that educate the children of service members from keeping any “radical gender ideology books” on their library shelves.
Hard-right lawmakers demanded that these measures be added to the bill, knowing full well they would cause the bill to lose Democratic votes.
What to make of such cynical behavior? Consider the wise words of a former House minority leader, who once said: “The NDAA was a test for this new majority. It was a test of whether they could put their radicalism aside and work across the aisle to do what was right for the country. … [They] failed.”
The elder statesman who made these observations was Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). He made the comments back in 2019, when Democrats had just retaken the House. McCarthy was upset that the majority had larded up its defense authorization bill with what he considered partisan priorities (e.g., language blocking use of defense funds for President Donald Trump’s border wall). That bill received a party-line vote in the House, too.
Now back in the majority, and serving as House speaker, McCarthy has changed his tune. Today, he argues that a little culture-warring to slow down the defense bill is not only desirable but necessary. Apparently the greatest risk to U.S. national security is not international terrorism, Russian aggression or even Chinese authoritarianism. It’s homegrown woke-ism.
“We don’t want Disneyland to train our military,” McCarthy said Friday.
Given all this, perhaps the best way to summarize GOP priorities these days is merely promotion of cultural grievances and fearmongering. Certainly there have been many policies — so-called bathroom bills, anti-immigrant measures, book bans, anti-drag legislation — playing up the culture wars, particularly at the state level.
But at the federal level, the GOP seems to have another broad objective, too: throwing sand in the gears of government, and sowing government dysfunction wherever possible.
After all, the House bill’s culture-war measures are probably dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Maybe this means that at the other end of this process, legislators will have worked out a more normal, bipartisan, cultural-grievance-free bill. Perhaps more likely, unresolvable conflict over the defense bill will help precipitate a government shutdown, which some Republican lawmakers have openly signaled they want.
Culture wars and chaos: the brand conservatives can get behind.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Why would Republicans want the military to prepare for real wars when fighting culture wars is so much more fun?
In recent years, the GOP has abandoned its commitment to many of the core principles it once stood for (law and order, family values, fiscal responsibility, etc.). Lately, we can add to that list: a strong commitment to U.S. national security.
Consider Republicans’ recent shenanigans surrounding the marquee annual defense legislation, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This is a must-pass bill that Republican lawmakers have lately been trying to convert into a less-likely-to-pass, more-likely-to-shut-down-the-entire-government bill.
For most of the past six decades, the NDAA has passed Congress with strong bipartisan support. That tradition was ignored last Friday, when the fiscal 2024 defense bill passed the GOP-controlled House overwhelmingly along party lines.
This time around, only four Democrats voted for the measure. To be clear, that’s not because Democratic lawmakers have suddenly become less supportive of our military. It’s because Republicans decided to compromise national security by dragging the Pentagon into unrelated and divisive culture-war issues, which made the final legislation too toxic for Democrats to support.
At the last minute, after the House Armed Services Committee had spent months hashing out a bipartisan deal, House Republicans voted to add poison-pill amendments demanded by far-right lawmakers.
Among these amendments: new limits on abortion access for service members and their families, through language prohibiting reimbursement for travel and transportation costs related to abortion or fertility care.
The bill would also prohibit the military from implementing directives related to climate change. As military leaders appointed by presidents of both parties have observed, climate change represents a serious security threat, as it affects not only U.S. military readiness but also geopolitical unrest abroad, through floods, famine, drought and other contributors to population displacement and conflict.
The GOP bill would gut the military’s diversity and inclusion programs. (Phew, good thing we don’t need diverse personnel in the armed services.) And it includes a litany of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions, including one curbing medical care for transgender troops. Another would limit the flags that employees of the military may display in public places — language designed to ban the Pride flag.
Yet other language would prohibit military-run schools that educate the children of service members from keeping any “radical gender ideology books” on their library shelves.
Hard-right lawmakers demanded that these measures be added to the bill, knowing full well they would cause the bill to lose Democratic votes.
What to make of such cynical behavior? Consider the wise words of a former House minority leader, who once said: “The NDAA was a test for this new majority. It was a test of whether they could put their radicalism aside and work across the aisle to do what was right for the country. … [They] failed.”
The elder statesman who made these observations was Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). He made the comments back in 2019, when Democrats had just retaken the House. McCarthy was upset that the majority had larded up its defense authorization bill with what he considered partisan priorities (e.g., language blocking use of defense funds for President Donald Trump’s border wall). That bill received a party-line vote in the House, too.
Now back in the majority, and serving as House speaker, McCarthy has changed his tune. Today, he argues that a little culture-warring to slow down the defense bill is not only desirable but necessary. Apparently the greatest risk to U.S. national security is not international terrorism, Russian aggression or even Chinese authoritarianism. It’s homegrown woke-ism.
“We don’t want Disneyland to train our military,” McCarthy said Friday.
Given all this, perhaps the best way to summarize GOP priorities these days is merely promotion of cultural grievances and fearmongering. Certainly there have been many policies — so-called bathroom bills, anti-immigrant measures, book bans, anti-drag legislation — playing up the culture wars, particularly at the state level.
But at the federal level, the GOP seems to have another broad objective, too: throwing sand in the gears of government, and sowing government dysfunction wherever possible.
After all, the House bill’s culture-war measures are probably dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Maybe this means that at the other end of this process, legislators will have worked out a more normal, bipartisan, cultural-grievance-free bill. Perhaps more likely, unresolvable conflict over the defense bill will help precipitate a government shutdown, which some Republican lawmakers have openly signaled they want.
Culture wars and chaos: the brand conservatives can get behind.
SELF-GOVERNMENT IS WORTH DEFENDING FROM AN ILLEGITIMATE SUPREME COURT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
On this Independence Day, we should reaffirm the twin pillars of democracy: Voters (not the mob) pick their leaders, and elected leaders (not unelected judges) make policy decisions for which they are held accountable. Just as we need to preserve the sanctity of elections (by prosecuting coup instigators), democracy defenders need to address judicial radicals’ gross distortion of our system, resulting in the current Supreme Court’s subversion of democracy.
Unhinged from judicial standards, the court now roves through the policy landscape, overturning decades of law and reordering Americans’ lives and institutions. It upends women’s health, revamps college admissions, snatches student aid from millions and redefines public accommodations (allowing egregious discrimination). In aggrandizing power, the court illegitimately dominates policymaking, undermining democracy to an extent we have not seen in nearly 100 years. (Ronald Brownstein pointed out that similar constitutional collisions in the 1850s and 1930s took a civil war or threat of court-packing to resolve.)
Something must change if we want to preserve rule by the people’s elected leaders responsible to voters.
As a preliminary matter, it is essential to identify the problem. As morally and politically offensive as Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, LGBTQ+ discrimination and student debt forgiveness might be to millions of Americans, merely criticizing the court’s result is misguided and unproductive. The task is to expose the court’s disintegration as a legitimate judicial body and note its emergence as a supreme right-wing policymaker. When the court operates on an ends-justify-the-means basis, shreds legal doctrine and dishonestly presents the facts, critics should not play whack-a-mole, decrying each individual rejection of widespread American values. In doing so, the court negates self-government.
One telltale sign that the justices have become partisan politicians: their refusal to adopt mandatory ethics rules, which destroys the essence of judicial impartiality that is the root of their legitimacy. When judges cease to eliminate conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof, they appear indistinguishable from politicians wined and dined in rarefied settings by lobbyists. The stench of financial corruption, coupled with justices’ intemperate rants in partisan settings and in op-eds, convinces Americans that the justices are partisan players out to score points for their own side.
Moreover, the court strays out of its constitutional lane when it refuses to follow consistent rules of construction and honestly address cases’ facts. When, for example, the majority casts aside stare decisis (as in the affirmative action case) without admitting it or refuses to apply the test for departing from precedent (as in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), it is simply muscling its way to desired outcomes because it has the votes.
Worse, cases are now manufactured to create policy. The majority has made complete hash out of standing and concepts such as “case and controversy” to reach decisions it had no business deciding.
In the student loan debt relief case, the court created standing out of whole cloth. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “The requirement that the proper party — the party actually affected — challenge an action ensures that courts do not overstep their proper bounds. … Without that requirement, courts become ‘forums for the ventilation of public grievances’ — for settlement of ideological and political disputes.” Here the court deliberately ignored that the aggrieved party was not a litigant. Likewise, in the case of a web designer worried about selling her services to a gay couple (who appear to be fabricated), the court defied every principle of standing. When the court goes beyond actual cases and controversies to answer hypotheticals, it goes beyond its constitutional mandate.
And, worst of all, the newfangled “major questions doctrine” allows the court to subjectively decide when the issue is of “major political salience” (whatever the court says it is); if so, the court demands the application at issue be specifically authorized by statute (a standard lawmakers somehow never meet in this court’s eyes). It has become a crutch whenever the court seeks to invalidate a program it doesn’t like. In the student debt relief case, the court reached the desired result by ignoring the word “waive” in the statute authorizing loan forgiveness to reach the finding that Congress hadn’t delegated power to, well, waive student debt. “The Court once again substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch — and the hundreds of millions of people they represent — in making this Nation’s most important, as well as most contested, policy decisions,” Kagan wrote.
The mumbo-jumbo “major questions doctrine” is not the stuff of judging. No wonder the chief justice got touchy when Kagan pointed out that the court “is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.” What the Slaughter-House Cases and substantive due process were to the New Deal-era right-wing court, the “major questions doctrine" is to the current court: a smokescreen for enforcing a right-wing agenda (or vetoing a progressive one).
In departing from the authentic judicial review, the right-wing majority unsurprisingly produces results perfectly aligned with the right’s agenda on hot-button topics. (By the law of averages, its “analysis” should occasionally favor the other side.) When foretelling a case’s outcome or following the majority’s “reasoning” requires a crib sheet on GOP political aims, something is wrong.
And voters have figured out what’s going on. According to an ABC News-Ipsos poll, 53 percent “believe that the nation’s highest court rules mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law (33%), while 14% say they don’t know.” Before the Dobbs opinion, a separate January 2022 poll showed that “38% of Americans believed that the justices rule mainly on the basis of law, versus 43% who believed that the court rules on the basis of their political views.”
The transformation of the court into a partisan player contradicts the central premise of democracy. We should reject the obtuse and naive argument that this court isn’t so bad because it didn’t entirely obliterate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and declined to impose the outrageous independent state legislature doctrine. Now is no time for self-delusion. Ending the right-wing majority’s intolerable war on self-government will require that the other two branches and the voters cut the court down to size. A single election or a single reform might not suffice. Cogent law review articles, informed public debate and exquisite dissents revealing that the right-wing judicial emperors have no clothes can assist reformers. Term limits, jurisdiction stripping, court expansion and ethics reform should be on the table. Simply put, if we want democracy to survive, each election must be a referendum on the court’s legitimacy.
On this Independence Day, which celebrates rebellion against a monarch lacking consent of the governed, it behooves us to dedicate ourselves to robust and authentic democracy: government of the people, by the people, for the people — not by arrogant right-wing justices.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
On this Independence Day, we should reaffirm the twin pillars of democracy: Voters (not the mob) pick their leaders, and elected leaders (not unelected judges) make policy decisions for which they are held accountable. Just as we need to preserve the sanctity of elections (by prosecuting coup instigators), democracy defenders need to address judicial radicals’ gross distortion of our system, resulting in the current Supreme Court’s subversion of democracy.
Unhinged from judicial standards, the court now roves through the policy landscape, overturning decades of law and reordering Americans’ lives and institutions. It upends women’s health, revamps college admissions, snatches student aid from millions and redefines public accommodations (allowing egregious discrimination). In aggrandizing power, the court illegitimately dominates policymaking, undermining democracy to an extent we have not seen in nearly 100 years. (Ronald Brownstein pointed out that similar constitutional collisions in the 1850s and 1930s took a civil war or threat of court-packing to resolve.)
Something must change if we want to preserve rule by the people’s elected leaders responsible to voters.
As a preliminary matter, it is essential to identify the problem. As morally and politically offensive as Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, LGBTQ+ discrimination and student debt forgiveness might be to millions of Americans, merely criticizing the court’s result is misguided and unproductive. The task is to expose the court’s disintegration as a legitimate judicial body and note its emergence as a supreme right-wing policymaker. When the court operates on an ends-justify-the-means basis, shreds legal doctrine and dishonestly presents the facts, critics should not play whack-a-mole, decrying each individual rejection of widespread American values. In doing so, the court negates self-government.
One telltale sign that the justices have become partisan politicians: their refusal to adopt mandatory ethics rules, which destroys the essence of judicial impartiality that is the root of their legitimacy. When judges cease to eliminate conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof, they appear indistinguishable from politicians wined and dined in rarefied settings by lobbyists. The stench of financial corruption, coupled with justices’ intemperate rants in partisan settings and in op-eds, convinces Americans that the justices are partisan players out to score points for their own side.
Moreover, the court strays out of its constitutional lane when it refuses to follow consistent rules of construction and honestly address cases’ facts. When, for example, the majority casts aside stare decisis (as in the affirmative action case) without admitting it or refuses to apply the test for departing from precedent (as in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), it is simply muscling its way to desired outcomes because it has the votes.
Worse, cases are now manufactured to create policy. The majority has made complete hash out of standing and concepts such as “case and controversy” to reach decisions it had no business deciding.
In the student loan debt relief case, the court created standing out of whole cloth. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “The requirement that the proper party — the party actually affected — challenge an action ensures that courts do not overstep their proper bounds. … Without that requirement, courts become ‘forums for the ventilation of public grievances’ — for settlement of ideological and political disputes.” Here the court deliberately ignored that the aggrieved party was not a litigant. Likewise, in the case of a web designer worried about selling her services to a gay couple (who appear to be fabricated), the court defied every principle of standing. When the court goes beyond actual cases and controversies to answer hypotheticals, it goes beyond its constitutional mandate.
And, worst of all, the newfangled “major questions doctrine” allows the court to subjectively decide when the issue is of “major political salience” (whatever the court says it is); if so, the court demands the application at issue be specifically authorized by statute (a standard lawmakers somehow never meet in this court’s eyes). It has become a crutch whenever the court seeks to invalidate a program it doesn’t like. In the student debt relief case, the court reached the desired result by ignoring the word “waive” in the statute authorizing loan forgiveness to reach the finding that Congress hadn’t delegated power to, well, waive student debt. “The Court once again substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch — and the hundreds of millions of people they represent — in making this Nation’s most important, as well as most contested, policy decisions,” Kagan wrote.
The mumbo-jumbo “major questions doctrine” is not the stuff of judging. No wonder the chief justice got touchy when Kagan pointed out that the court “is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.” What the Slaughter-House Cases and substantive due process were to the New Deal-era right-wing court, the “major questions doctrine" is to the current court: a smokescreen for enforcing a right-wing agenda (or vetoing a progressive one).
In departing from the authentic judicial review, the right-wing majority unsurprisingly produces results perfectly aligned with the right’s agenda on hot-button topics. (By the law of averages, its “analysis” should occasionally favor the other side.) When foretelling a case’s outcome or following the majority’s “reasoning” requires a crib sheet on GOP political aims, something is wrong.
And voters have figured out what’s going on. According to an ABC News-Ipsos poll, 53 percent “believe that the nation’s highest court rules mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law (33%), while 14% say they don’t know.” Before the Dobbs opinion, a separate January 2022 poll showed that “38% of Americans believed that the justices rule mainly on the basis of law, versus 43% who believed that the court rules on the basis of their political views.”
The transformation of the court into a partisan player contradicts the central premise of democracy. We should reject the obtuse and naive argument that this court isn’t so bad because it didn’t entirely obliterate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and declined to impose the outrageous independent state legislature doctrine. Now is no time for self-delusion. Ending the right-wing majority’s intolerable war on self-government will require that the other two branches and the voters cut the court down to size. A single election or a single reform might not suffice. Cogent law review articles, informed public debate and exquisite dissents revealing that the right-wing judicial emperors have no clothes can assist reformers. Term limits, jurisdiction stripping, court expansion and ethics reform should be on the table. Simply put, if we want democracy to survive, each election must be a referendum on the court’s legitimacy.
On this Independence Day, which celebrates rebellion against a monarch lacking consent of the governed, it behooves us to dedicate ourselves to robust and authentic democracy: government of the people, by the people, for the people — not by arrogant right-wing justices.
REPUBLICANS’ ANTI-WOKE, ANTI-VOTE CRUSADE HAS CRASHED INTO THE CONSTITUTION
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Before the dust had cleared on the 2020 election, Republicans in statehouses across the country had already regrouped and coalesced around a core crusade — revived and revitalized — that was anti-woke and anti-vote.
Having lost control of the presidency and Congress, they funneled their quest for control into voting booths, bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms and doctors’ offices.
If they couldn’t control the highest rungs of power, they would look to exert control over Americans’ lives at the lower rungs. They would come to insert themselves into the most intimate of activities — between voters and ballots, between families and doctors, between teachers and students.
The battle would move from an aerial assault to trench warfare.
In that fight, Arkansas passed the first-in-the-nation law outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender children.
In 2021, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is no friend to the queer community, vetoed the bill, saying that it created “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths.” He said that the bill positioned “the state as the definitive oracle of medical care, overriding parents, patients and health care experts,” which he called a “vast government overreach.”
Hutchinson — now a long-shot Republican presidential candidate — seemingly understood that the effort was unconstitutional, and came between doctors, families and patients in the same way that Republicans once disingenuously claimed that Obamacare “death panels” would.
Nevertheless, the Arkansas legislature overrode the governor’s veto. The new law was quickly challenged, and last week a federal judge permanently enjoined it, writing that it is, in fact, unconstitutional.
Across states, we’re seeing promising signs that the judiciary may wind up serving as a check on the relentless Republican campaign to disempower and disenfranchise. G.O.P. attempts to impose a kind of semi-fascist federalism is being trumped by our own constitutional democracy.
This month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction for three trans youths against provisions in a Florida law denying gender affirming care to children, with the judge saying in a scathing opinion that their families are “likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”
Nearly 20 states have rushed to enact similar laws, seeing political advantage in inflaming culture wars, steamrollering the health and well-being of these children and their constitutional rights.
Last year, after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas directed his state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate cases of “Texas children being subjected to abusive gender-transitioning procedures,” a state judge issued a temporary injunction blocking some of the inquiries. The judge wrote that without the order, the families would “suffer probable, imminent and irreparable injury in the interim.”
On another note, last week a federal judge temporarily blocked a law that allowed Florida to penalize businesses that allowed children to attend drag performances. The law was written so loosely that some Pride parades in the state were either altered or canceled to avoid running afoul of the law.
This month, a federal judge ruled against a similar anti-drag law in Tennessee, saying the measure “reeks with constitutional maladies of vagueness.”
The same party that argues for parental rights when haranguing and harassing educators about what is being taught and read in the classroom couldn’t care less about the parental rights of those trying to provide the best care for their children or who want their children to have an awareness and understanding of the broad spectrum of humanity and its expressions of love.
The Republican politicians pushing these un-American laws aren’t constitutional absolutists; they’re constitutional opportunists.
The same is true when it comes to elections, where the Republican strategy has become clear: Rather than change their party to appeal more broadly to the electorate, many Republican politicians are whittling away at the electorate and our election architecture, trying to remove or hamstring those aspects of the process that could lead to them losing.
They want to change the very meaning of democracy, shrinking to a government chosen by the chosen, a more originalist version of our system in which only certain people participate.
But again, the judiciary — in this case, the Supreme Court — has stepped in to stop them. The Supreme Court just ruled that a lower court should review Louisiana’s congressional map, which should result in it being redrawn to include an additional majority-Black district, and it has rejected the outrageous “independent state legislature” theory that would have left partisan state legislatures as the final word on federal election administration. Republicans were rebuffed on both turns. The Constitution prevailed.
This should sting for a party that has maintained for decades that it was led by the Constitution.
The Tea Party of the 2000s and early 2010s hailed itself as a constitutional movement, with many adherents professing constitutional originalism as one of its core tenets.
In 2012, the Republican Party platform asserted, “We are the party of the Constitution, the solemn compact which confirms our God-given individual rights and assures that all Americans stand equal before the law.”
The 2016 platform essentially repeated the line, but added, “We reaffirm the Constitution’s fundamental principles: limited government, separation of powers, individual liberty and the rule of law.” (The party didn’t even produce a new platform in 2020.)
Those declarations were never wholly true, but now they’re a mockery. That Republican Party has been swallowed whole the way a cobra swallows a lesser snake. MAGA is ascendant.
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Before the dust had cleared on the 2020 election, Republicans in statehouses across the country had already regrouped and coalesced around a core crusade — revived and revitalized — that was anti-woke and anti-vote.
Having lost control of the presidency and Congress, they funneled their quest for control into voting booths, bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms and doctors’ offices.
If they couldn’t control the highest rungs of power, they would look to exert control over Americans’ lives at the lower rungs. They would come to insert themselves into the most intimate of activities — between voters and ballots, between families and doctors, between teachers and students.
The battle would move from an aerial assault to trench warfare.
In that fight, Arkansas passed the first-in-the-nation law outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender children.
In 2021, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is no friend to the queer community, vetoed the bill, saying that it created “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths.” He said that the bill positioned “the state as the definitive oracle of medical care, overriding parents, patients and health care experts,” which he called a “vast government overreach.”
Hutchinson — now a long-shot Republican presidential candidate — seemingly understood that the effort was unconstitutional, and came between doctors, families and patients in the same way that Republicans once disingenuously claimed that Obamacare “death panels” would.
Nevertheless, the Arkansas legislature overrode the governor’s veto. The new law was quickly challenged, and last week a federal judge permanently enjoined it, writing that it is, in fact, unconstitutional.
Across states, we’re seeing promising signs that the judiciary may wind up serving as a check on the relentless Republican campaign to disempower and disenfranchise. G.O.P. attempts to impose a kind of semi-fascist federalism is being trumped by our own constitutional democracy.
This month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction for three trans youths against provisions in a Florida law denying gender affirming care to children, with the judge saying in a scathing opinion that their families are “likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”
Nearly 20 states have rushed to enact similar laws, seeing political advantage in inflaming culture wars, steamrollering the health and well-being of these children and their constitutional rights.
Last year, after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas directed his state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate cases of “Texas children being subjected to abusive gender-transitioning procedures,” a state judge issued a temporary injunction blocking some of the inquiries. The judge wrote that without the order, the families would “suffer probable, imminent and irreparable injury in the interim.”
On another note, last week a federal judge temporarily blocked a law that allowed Florida to penalize businesses that allowed children to attend drag performances. The law was written so loosely that some Pride parades in the state were either altered or canceled to avoid running afoul of the law.
This month, a federal judge ruled against a similar anti-drag law in Tennessee, saying the measure “reeks with constitutional maladies of vagueness.”
The same party that argues for parental rights when haranguing and harassing educators about what is being taught and read in the classroom couldn’t care less about the parental rights of those trying to provide the best care for their children or who want their children to have an awareness and understanding of the broad spectrum of humanity and its expressions of love.
The Republican politicians pushing these un-American laws aren’t constitutional absolutists; they’re constitutional opportunists.
The same is true when it comes to elections, where the Republican strategy has become clear: Rather than change their party to appeal more broadly to the electorate, many Republican politicians are whittling away at the electorate and our election architecture, trying to remove or hamstring those aspects of the process that could lead to them losing.
They want to change the very meaning of democracy, shrinking to a government chosen by the chosen, a more originalist version of our system in which only certain people participate.
But again, the judiciary — in this case, the Supreme Court — has stepped in to stop them. The Supreme Court just ruled that a lower court should review Louisiana’s congressional map, which should result in it being redrawn to include an additional majority-Black district, and it has rejected the outrageous “independent state legislature” theory that would have left partisan state legislatures as the final word on federal election administration. Republicans were rebuffed on both turns. The Constitution prevailed.
This should sting for a party that has maintained for decades that it was led by the Constitution.
The Tea Party of the 2000s and early 2010s hailed itself as a constitutional movement, with many adherents professing constitutional originalism as one of its core tenets.
In 2012, the Republican Party platform asserted, “We are the party of the Constitution, the solemn compact which confirms our God-given individual rights and assures that all Americans stand equal before the law.”
The 2016 platform essentially repeated the line, but added, “We reaffirm the Constitution’s fundamental principles: limited government, separation of powers, individual liberty and the rule of law.” (The party didn’t even produce a new platform in 2020.)
Those declarations were never wholly true, but now they’re a mockery. That Republican Party has been swallowed whole the way a cobra swallows a lesser snake. MAGA is ascendant.
A HANDY GUIDE TO THE REPUBLICAN DEFINITION OF A CRIME
By David Firestone, The New York Times
If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.
Not a crime: Federal crimes.
All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.
The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.
Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.
“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)
Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.
Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.
Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.
But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.
Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.
The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.
Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.
Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.
Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.
There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.
Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.
The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)
Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.
Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.
Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.
Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.
Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).
Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.
The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.
Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.
By David Firestone, The New York Times
If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.
Not a crime: Federal crimes.
All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.
The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.
Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.
“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)
Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.
Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.
Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.
But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.
Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.
The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.
Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.
Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.
Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.
There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.
Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.
The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)
Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.
Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.
Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.
Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.
Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).
Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.
The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.
Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG: THE SUPREME COURT IS CORRUPT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been arguing for years that a flood of “dark money” flowing through right-wing front groups has corrupted the Supreme Court. Never has there been more evidence to bolster his claim.
Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told me in an extensive phone interview last week that Justice Samuel A. Alito’s Jr.’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal intending to pre-but a ProPublica story revealing he failed to disclose gifts from billionaire and right-wing donor Paul Singer and recuse from a case involving Singer was “very, very weird.” And it was not merely because he took to the op-ed pages of a sympathetic right-wing Rupert Murdoch newspaper as though he were a panicky politician trying to control the damage. (If that were his intent, it horribly backfired because the stunt only called attention to his angry response and the underlying charges. He managed to make it front-page news. "“If you were filing a pleading, this would have pretty much failed,” Whitehouse observed.)
The senator ticked off the problems with Alito’s argument: factual omissions (e.g., the standard for exempt gifts does not include transportation); Alito’s lame effort to turn an airplane into a “facility” to jam it into an exempt-gift category (“It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Whitehouse said); Alito’s plea that he couldn’t possibly have known Singer had a financial stake ($2 billion) in the outcome of a case before the court (although it was widely reported in the media); and the insistence that yet another billionaire was a “friend,” which somehow absolved him from his obligation to report gifts of “hospitality.” And, Whitehouse argued, it strains credulity that Alito (like Justice Clarence Thomas) could be confused about reporting requirements when there is a Financial Disclosure Committee expressly set up to help judges navigate these issues.
All in all, the poorly reasoned argument amounted to what Whitehouse called “a painful exhibit for an actual ethics code.” A bill he co-authored with Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), set to be marked up after July 4, would confirm that the code of ethics applicable to all judges applies to the high court, set up a process for screening ethics complaints and allow chief judges of the circuit to advise on how their circuits handle similar matters. This is “not remotely unconstitutional,” he noted. (Whitehouse wryly remarked that the last thing the justices want is a comparison to circuit courts’ conduct. “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight stick alongside it,” he said.) Whitehouse is merely asking for the court to develop a process that the judicial branch would oversee for the sake of restoring confidence in the Supreme Court.
Yet another poll, this time from Quinnipiac, shows the court’s approval at an all-time low — 29 percent. Don’t they care? Whitehouse surmises that some justices resent anyone questioning their conduct. But, more troubling, he worries that the chief justice has yet to promise a mandatory ethics scheme nor has there been “a chink in the Omerta armor” of the other justices. Any one of them could come forward to acknowledge the problem.
When asked to testify before Congress on ethics reform, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who heads the Judicial Conference, an entity created by Congress and dedicated to court administration — refused to come. Mind you, Roberts was not being asked to testify not about the court’s decisions or internal debates but about his own administrative role. Whitehouse said that Roberts’s refusal was “astonishing.”
Whitehouse has long maintained that the court’s unprincipled, outcome-oriented and partisan decision-making is very much linked to the ethics problems. “The ethics problem is not just relevant to expensive gifts and fancy vacations,” he told me. The ethics issues “don’t occur in a vacuum,” he said. They point to “a bigger enterprise whose purpose is to capture the court.”
Whitehouse explained that dark-money groups such as the Federalist Society, led for years by Leonard Leo, put together a list of acceptable high court nominees from which President Donald Trump picked three justices. A closely aligned entity, the Judicial Crisis Network, spent millions to help get the justices confirmed (while donating to Senate Republicans to guarantee their support). Leo and others in dark-money groups filed amicus briefs to advance their agenda. And then Leo set up cozy connections between the billionaire donors and the justices for “hospitality” from their “friends.” Leo arranged Alito’s fishing jaunt and helped set up Thomas with billionaire Harlan Crow. If you put together billionaires, dark money and “phony front groups,” you wind up in a “whole new world,” he argued.
Even if Whitehouse’s ideal ethics bill got passed (currently impossible with the GOP majority in the House and the filibuster in the Senate), major problems would remain with the court. Whitehouse does not — for now — want to “get out over our skis” in jumping to court expansion, one proposed solution to the court’s issues. The country isn’t there yet, in his view. However, “The public knows enough about the troubles at the court to support reasonable term limits.”
Whitehouse is well aware that the constitutionality of a statute imposing term limits would be challenged and, yes, would likely find its way up to this very Supreme Court. However, a case would likely start in district court and advance to a circuit court before reaching the high court. There would be full briefing, a factual record and decisions by lower courts. If, after all that, the Supreme Court nixed a widely popular term limits law, the public outrage and academic criticism would be intense. Indeed, the appetite for expanding the court might grow.
Despite this dreary and depressing state of affairs, Whitehouse remains undaunted. “We’re still finding out the facts,” he told me regarding the latest ethics scandal. He said he is confident that as the full story is brought before the public, the impetus to act on court reform, at least among Democrats, will intensify.
In the meantime, the best argument for court reform comes from Alito, whose arrogant, slipshod and unconvincing defense makes him the poster boy for serious court reform.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been arguing for years that a flood of “dark money” flowing through right-wing front groups has corrupted the Supreme Court. Never has there been more evidence to bolster his claim.
Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told me in an extensive phone interview last week that Justice Samuel A. Alito’s Jr.’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal intending to pre-but a ProPublica story revealing he failed to disclose gifts from billionaire and right-wing donor Paul Singer and recuse from a case involving Singer was “very, very weird.” And it was not merely because he took to the op-ed pages of a sympathetic right-wing Rupert Murdoch newspaper as though he were a panicky politician trying to control the damage. (If that were his intent, it horribly backfired because the stunt only called attention to his angry response and the underlying charges. He managed to make it front-page news. "“If you were filing a pleading, this would have pretty much failed,” Whitehouse observed.)
The senator ticked off the problems with Alito’s argument: factual omissions (e.g., the standard for exempt gifts does not include transportation); Alito’s lame effort to turn an airplane into a “facility” to jam it into an exempt-gift category (“It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Whitehouse said); Alito’s plea that he couldn’t possibly have known Singer had a financial stake ($2 billion) in the outcome of a case before the court (although it was widely reported in the media); and the insistence that yet another billionaire was a “friend,” which somehow absolved him from his obligation to report gifts of “hospitality.” And, Whitehouse argued, it strains credulity that Alito (like Justice Clarence Thomas) could be confused about reporting requirements when there is a Financial Disclosure Committee expressly set up to help judges navigate these issues.
All in all, the poorly reasoned argument amounted to what Whitehouse called “a painful exhibit for an actual ethics code.” A bill he co-authored with Judiciary Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), set to be marked up after July 4, would confirm that the code of ethics applicable to all judges applies to the high court, set up a process for screening ethics complaints and allow chief judges of the circuit to advise on how their circuits handle similar matters. This is “not remotely unconstitutional,” he noted. (Whitehouse wryly remarked that the last thing the justices want is a comparison to circuit courts’ conduct. “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is to lay a straight stick alongside it,” he said.) Whitehouse is merely asking for the court to develop a process that the judicial branch would oversee for the sake of restoring confidence in the Supreme Court.
Yet another poll, this time from Quinnipiac, shows the court’s approval at an all-time low — 29 percent. Don’t they care? Whitehouse surmises that some justices resent anyone questioning their conduct. But, more troubling, he worries that the chief justice has yet to promise a mandatory ethics scheme nor has there been “a chink in the Omerta armor” of the other justices. Any one of them could come forward to acknowledge the problem.
When asked to testify before Congress on ethics reform, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who heads the Judicial Conference, an entity created by Congress and dedicated to court administration — refused to come. Mind you, Roberts was not being asked to testify not about the court’s decisions or internal debates but about his own administrative role. Whitehouse said that Roberts’s refusal was “astonishing.”
Whitehouse has long maintained that the court’s unprincipled, outcome-oriented and partisan decision-making is very much linked to the ethics problems. “The ethics problem is not just relevant to expensive gifts and fancy vacations,” he told me. The ethics issues “don’t occur in a vacuum,” he said. They point to “a bigger enterprise whose purpose is to capture the court.”
Whitehouse explained that dark-money groups such as the Federalist Society, led for years by Leonard Leo, put together a list of acceptable high court nominees from which President Donald Trump picked three justices. A closely aligned entity, the Judicial Crisis Network, spent millions to help get the justices confirmed (while donating to Senate Republicans to guarantee their support). Leo and others in dark-money groups filed amicus briefs to advance their agenda. And then Leo set up cozy connections between the billionaire donors and the justices for “hospitality” from their “friends.” Leo arranged Alito’s fishing jaunt and helped set up Thomas with billionaire Harlan Crow. If you put together billionaires, dark money and “phony front groups,” you wind up in a “whole new world,” he argued.
Even if Whitehouse’s ideal ethics bill got passed (currently impossible with the GOP majority in the House and the filibuster in the Senate), major problems would remain with the court. Whitehouse does not — for now — want to “get out over our skis” in jumping to court expansion, one proposed solution to the court’s issues. The country isn’t there yet, in his view. However, “The public knows enough about the troubles at the court to support reasonable term limits.”
Whitehouse is well aware that the constitutionality of a statute imposing term limits would be challenged and, yes, would likely find its way up to this very Supreme Court. However, a case would likely start in district court and advance to a circuit court before reaching the high court. There would be full briefing, a factual record and decisions by lower courts. If, after all that, the Supreme Court nixed a widely popular term limits law, the public outrage and academic criticism would be intense. Indeed, the appetite for expanding the court might grow.
Despite this dreary and depressing state of affairs, Whitehouse remains undaunted. “We’re still finding out the facts,” he told me regarding the latest ethics scandal. He said he is confident that as the full story is brought before the public, the impetus to act on court reform, at least among Democrats, will intensify.
In the meantime, the best argument for court reform comes from Alito, whose arrogant, slipshod and unconvincing defense makes him the poster boy for serious court reform.
TRUMP, THE WORST BOSS YOU’VE EVER HAD
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Donald Trump did not — and does not — recognize any distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is it and it is him.
This view is as close a fundamental rejection of American constitutionalism as you can imagine — and it helps explain much of the former president’s behavior in and out of office. It is why he could not abide any opposition to anything he tried to pursue, why he raged against the “deep state,” why he strained against every limit on his authority, why he rejected the very idea that he could lose the 2020 presidential election and why he decided he could simply take classified documents to his home in Florida.
For Trump, he is the president. He is the government. The documents, in his mind, belonged to him.
What this means in practical terms is that as Trump runs for president, he has promised to bring key parts of the federal government under his control as soon as he takes office. He wants to clear out as much of the executive branch as possible and swap professionals for true believers — a new crop of officials whose chief loyalty is to the power and authority of Donald Trump, rather than their office or the letter of the law. And in particular, Trump wants to clear house at the Department of Justice, which is investigating him for mishandling those documents.
Trump cannot tolerate the existence of an independent Justice Department, and so, if made president again, he’ll simply put it under his thumb.
Obviously, if it is a preoccupation for Trump, it is a preoccupation for the Republican Party. And in addition to covering for the former president in the face of federal charges, the other Republicans vying for the nomination have adopted his view that the independence of federal law enforcement violates his (and potentially their) authority as president.
Ron DeSantis — whose tight grip on the operations of government has been a hallmark of his tenure as governor of Florida — made his distaste for an independent law enforcement apparatus clear in a set of recent comments. “I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” he said of the Justice Department. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence has promised to “clean house at the highest levels of the Justice Department” if elected president. “Lady Justice is blind,” Pence said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And there are tens of millions of Americans who have reason to believe that the blinders have been taken off and that we haven’t seen equal treatment under the law.”
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has said, similarly, that if elected president, he will “clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J.”
As to what ends? It is not hard to imagine a world where a second-term President Trump orders a newly purged and reconstituted Justice Department to investigate any group or individual that happens to be a target of MAGA rage, whether they broke the law or not.
Trump has upended nearly half a century of tradition with his contempt for the idea that law enforcement ought to remain separate and independent of the White House. But his actions grow naturally from an increasingly vocal faction within the conservative movement, as well as reflect a key change in the nature and composition of the Republican coalition.
With regard to the former, there is the recent enthusiasm among so-called nationalist or populist conservatives for using the state to enforce a particular social order. And with regard to the latter, there is the way that, influenced by Trump, the Republican Party has begun to take on the values and attitudes of the small-time capitalist and the family firm.
Of course, business owners have always been a critical part of state and local Republican politics. The nation’s state legislatures and county boards of supervisors are full of the proprietors of family-owned car dealerships, fast food franchises, construction companies, landscaping businesses and regional distribution firms. And in fact, many of the most visible and important families in conservative politics have their own family firms, albeit supersized ones: the Kochs, the DeVoses, the Crows and the Trumps.
Among the elements that distinguish this closely held model of ownership from that of, say, a multinational corporation is the degree to which the business is understood to be an extension of the business owner, who appears to exercise total authority over the place of production, except in cases where the employees have a union (one of the many reasons members of this class are often intensely and exceptionally anti-labor).
If the nature of our work shapes our values — if the habits of mind we cultivate on the job extend to our lives beyond it — then someone in a position of total control over a closely held business like, say, the Trump empire might bring those attitudes, those same habits and pathologies, to political office.
Donald Trump certainly did, and as the Republican Party has come to shape itself around his person, it has also adopted his worldview, which is to say, the worldview and ideology of the boss. No longer content to run government for business, the Republican Party now hopes to run government as a business.
But this doesn’t mean greater efficiency or responsiveness or whatever else most people (mistakenly) associate with private industry. It means, instead, government as the fief of a small-business tyrant.
The next Republican president, in short, will almost certainly be the worst boss you, and American democracy, have ever had.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
Donald Trump did not — and does not — recognize any distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is it and it is him.
This view is as close a fundamental rejection of American constitutionalism as you can imagine — and it helps explain much of the former president’s behavior in and out of office. It is why he could not abide any opposition to anything he tried to pursue, why he raged against the “deep state,” why he strained against every limit on his authority, why he rejected the very idea that he could lose the 2020 presidential election and why he decided he could simply take classified documents to his home in Florida.
For Trump, he is the president. He is the government. The documents, in his mind, belonged to him.
What this means in practical terms is that as Trump runs for president, he has promised to bring key parts of the federal government under his control as soon as he takes office. He wants to clear out as much of the executive branch as possible and swap professionals for true believers — a new crop of officials whose chief loyalty is to the power and authority of Donald Trump, rather than their office or the letter of the law. And in particular, Trump wants to clear house at the Department of Justice, which is investigating him for mishandling those documents.
Trump cannot tolerate the existence of an independent Justice Department, and so, if made president again, he’ll simply put it under his thumb.
Obviously, if it is a preoccupation for Trump, it is a preoccupation for the Republican Party. And in addition to covering for the former president in the face of federal charges, the other Republicans vying for the nomination have adopted his view that the independence of federal law enforcement violates his (and potentially their) authority as president.
Ron DeSantis — whose tight grip on the operations of government has been a hallmark of his tenure as governor of Florida — made his distaste for an independent law enforcement apparatus clear in a set of recent comments. “I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” he said of the Justice Department. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence has promised to “clean house at the highest levels of the Justice Department” if elected president. “Lady Justice is blind,” Pence said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And there are tens of millions of Americans who have reason to believe that the blinders have been taken off and that we haven’t seen equal treatment under the law.”
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has said, similarly, that if elected president, he will “clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J.”
As to what ends? It is not hard to imagine a world where a second-term President Trump orders a newly purged and reconstituted Justice Department to investigate any group or individual that happens to be a target of MAGA rage, whether they broke the law or not.
Trump has upended nearly half a century of tradition with his contempt for the idea that law enforcement ought to remain separate and independent of the White House. But his actions grow naturally from an increasingly vocal faction within the conservative movement, as well as reflect a key change in the nature and composition of the Republican coalition.
With regard to the former, there is the recent enthusiasm among so-called nationalist or populist conservatives for using the state to enforce a particular social order. And with regard to the latter, there is the way that, influenced by Trump, the Republican Party has begun to take on the values and attitudes of the small-time capitalist and the family firm.
Of course, business owners have always been a critical part of state and local Republican politics. The nation’s state legislatures and county boards of supervisors are full of the proprietors of family-owned car dealerships, fast food franchises, construction companies, landscaping businesses and regional distribution firms. And in fact, many of the most visible and important families in conservative politics have their own family firms, albeit supersized ones: the Kochs, the DeVoses, the Crows and the Trumps.
Among the elements that distinguish this closely held model of ownership from that of, say, a multinational corporation is the degree to which the business is understood to be an extension of the business owner, who appears to exercise total authority over the place of production, except in cases where the employees have a union (one of the many reasons members of this class are often intensely and exceptionally anti-labor).
If the nature of our work shapes our values — if the habits of mind we cultivate on the job extend to our lives beyond it — then someone in a position of total control over a closely held business like, say, the Trump empire might bring those attitudes, those same habits and pathologies, to political office.
Donald Trump certainly did, and as the Republican Party has come to shape itself around his person, it has also adopted his worldview, which is to say, the worldview and ideology of the boss. No longer content to run government for business, the Republican Party now hopes to run government as a business.
But this doesn’t mean greater efficiency or responsiveness or whatever else most people (mistakenly) associate with private industry. It means, instead, government as the fief of a small-business tyrant.
The next Republican president, in short, will almost certainly be the worst boss you, and American democracy, have ever had.
TRUMP COUP PLOTTER JOHN EASTMAN IS FINALLY FACING REAL ACCOUNTABILITY
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his supporters have blamed his indictment on a “two-tiered” justice system. As it happens, we do have a two-tiered system, but here’s a better example of it: Hundreds of ordinary peoplehave been convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, yet not one member of Trump’s inner circle of coup-plotters has faced real accountability for it.
That’s why you should pay attention to the disbarment proceedings that lawyer John Eastman is facing in California. Eastman, who manufactured the bogus theory behind Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss, could lose his law license — making him the first elite insurrectionist to pay a serious professional price for the coup attempt.
Eastman faces 11 charges from the California State Bar, most concerning his lawyerly lies about election fraud. Importantly, the bar also accused Eastman of advising Vice President Mike Pence that a fabricated legal rationale empowered him to reverse or delay the presidential electoral count in Congress.
“No reasonable attorney with expertise in constitutional or election law would conclude that Pence was legally authorized to take the actions that respondent proposed,” the bar states in its charges. It adds that Eastman knew those actions would violate the law and the Constitution.
If Eastman is disbarred for that charge, it would be genuinely novel. When fellow coup-plotter Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York last year, it was for the conventional charge of making false statements as a lawyer. Eastman, by contrast, would be sanctioned for corrupting the law to try to subvert our constitutional order and help usurp the presidency.
You’ve heard of “mob lawyers.” Well, the Trump era has brought us the “coup lawyer,” which calls for a new kind of disciplinary response.
The glaring need for this was driven home during Eastman’s bar hearing this week. In a dramatic moment, lawyer Greg Jacob — who advised Pence to resist pressure from Trump to halt the electoral count — testified that Eastman’s invented legal theory had inspired the Jan. 6 rioters.
The rioters had been duped into believing Pence had the power to reverse the election, as the House committee on Jan. 6 demonstrated. Trump had bombarded his followers with this message, based on Eastman’s theory, and as Jacob testified, this bore fruit when rioters stormed the Capitol, many apparently looking to intimidate Pence into doing what Eastman said he could do. As Jacob said: “I thought that it brought our profession into disrepute.”
Given this, it’s beyond absurd that hundreds of people have been prosecuted for invading the Capitol while none of the people who manufactured the legal basis for the false hope that motivated the invaders have faced accountability.
Trump’s coup-plotters carried out all manner of other corrupt acts, yet none has faced serious professional discomfort. Not former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who pushed for Pence to execute the plot. Not Jeffrey Clark, who tried to get the Justice Department to fabricate a rationale for reversing Trump’s loss.
Trump himself might face prosecution over Jan. 6, but that’s hardly guaranteed. Eastman might be the only one to face comeuppance, which is sobering, but it would at least send the message that professional sanction awaits lawyerly abuses designed to reverse elections.
True, disciplining lawyers over advice to clients is a tricky business. Eastman’s defense is that his theory was based on a reading of history and the Constitution that’s genuinely contested among scholars. But it strains credulity that Eastman really believed that.
As legal expert Matthew A. Seligman has detailed, Eastman’s theory rested on a tortured reading of constitutional history that essentially invented a vice-presidential power to count electoral votes. And it is not a contested issue among scholars. Seligman was set to testify against Eastman as an expert witness, which should drive home his bad faith.
Elite accountability in this country is at a crossroads. Many of the coup-plotters have skated, and though Trump faces prosecution for hoarding classified documents, he might evade accountability for the insurrection. Tucker Carlson’s propaganda about Jan. 6 helped topple the cable host from his Fox News perch, but Elon Musk has created a safe space for his disinformation to continue. Dogged journalism has produced extraordinary revelations about corrupt Supreme Court justices, but Congress’s refusal to place checks on them only reinforces the sense that our elites operate with impunity.
Yet it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in some respects, our national response to Jan. 6 was surprisingly robust. The House hearings on the insurrection dramatically illustrated its gravity. Many high-profile election-denying candidates lost in 2022. Prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters have proceeded apace. Congress passed strong protections against another Jan. 6 by a wide bipartisan margin.
If Eastman loses his law license expressly for abusing his professional stature to destroy our constitutional democracy, it would constitute yet another step, however small, in that direction. At the very least, it will send a message: Coup-lawyering will no longer be tolerated.
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his supporters have blamed his indictment on a “two-tiered” justice system. As it happens, we do have a two-tiered system, but here’s a better example of it: Hundreds of ordinary people
That’s why you should pay attention to the disbarment proceedings that lawyer John Eastman is facing in California. Eastman, who manufactured the bogus theory behind Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss, could lose his law license — making him the first elite insurrectionist to pay a serious professional price for the coup attempt.
Eastman faces 11 charges from the California State Bar, most concerning his lawyerly lies about election fraud. Importantly, the bar also accused Eastman of advising Vice President Mike Pence that a fabricated legal rationale empowered him to reverse or delay the presidential electoral count in Congress.
“No reasonable attorney with expertise in constitutional or election law would conclude that Pence was legally authorized to take the actions that respondent proposed,” the bar states in its charges. It adds that Eastman knew those actions would violate the law and the Constitution.
If Eastman is disbarred for that charge, it would be genuinely novel. When fellow coup-plotter Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York last year, it was for the conventional charge of making false statements as a lawyer. Eastman, by contrast, would be sanctioned for corrupting the law to try to subvert our constitutional order and help usurp the presidency.
You’ve heard of “mob lawyers.” Well, the Trump era has brought us the “coup lawyer,” which calls for a new kind of disciplinary response.
The glaring need for this was driven home during Eastman’s bar hearing this week. In a dramatic moment, lawyer Greg Jacob — who advised Pence to resist pressure from Trump to halt the electoral count — testified that Eastman’s invented legal theory had inspired the Jan. 6 rioters.
The rioters had been duped into believing Pence had the power to reverse the election, as the House committee on Jan. 6 demonstrated. Trump had bombarded his followers with this message, based on Eastman’s theory, and as Jacob testified, this bore fruit when rioters stormed the Capitol, many apparently looking to intimidate Pence into doing what Eastman said he could do. As Jacob said: “I thought that it brought our profession into disrepute.”
Given this, it’s beyond absurd that hundreds of people have been prosecuted for invading the Capitol while none of the people who manufactured the legal basis for the false hope that motivated the invaders have faced accountability.
Trump’s coup-plotters carried out all manner of other corrupt acts, yet none has faced serious professional discomfort. Not former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who pushed for Pence to execute the plot. Not Jeffrey Clark, who tried to get the Justice Department to fabricate a rationale for reversing Trump’s loss.
Trump himself might face prosecution over Jan. 6, but that’s hardly guaranteed. Eastman might be the only one to face comeuppance, which is sobering, but it would at least send the message that professional sanction awaits lawyerly abuses designed to reverse elections.
True, disciplining lawyers over advice to clients is a tricky business. Eastman’s defense is that his theory was based on a reading of history and the Constitution that’s genuinely contested among scholars. But it strains credulity that Eastman really believed that.
As legal expert Matthew A. Seligman has detailed, Eastman’s theory rested on a tortured reading of constitutional history that essentially invented a vice-presidential power to count electoral votes. And it is not a contested issue among scholars. Seligman was set to testify against Eastman as an expert witness, which should drive home his bad faith.
Elite accountability in this country is at a crossroads. Many of the coup-plotters have skated, and though Trump faces prosecution for hoarding classified documents, he might evade accountability for the insurrection. Tucker Carlson’s propaganda about Jan. 6 helped topple the cable host from his Fox News perch, but Elon Musk has created a safe space for his disinformation to continue. Dogged journalism has produced extraordinary revelations about corrupt Supreme Court justices, but Congress’s refusal to place checks on them only reinforces the sense that our elites operate with impunity.
Yet it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in some respects, our national response to Jan. 6 was surprisingly robust. The House hearings on the insurrection dramatically illustrated its gravity. Many high-profile election-denying candidates lost in 2022. Prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters have proceeded apace. Congress passed strong protections against another Jan. 6 by a wide bipartisan margin.
If Eastman loses his law license expressly for abusing his professional stature to destroy our constitutional democracy, it would constitute yet another step, however small, in that direction. At the very least, it will send a message: Coup-lawyering will no longer be tolerated.
SUPREME COURT, CONSIDER JUSTICE SPONSORSHIP!
By Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice. Nothing seems to bring billionaires so much simple joy as having a personal justice to accompany them on yacht and fishing trips, flights on their private planes and jaunts to rustic lodges where the wine was certainly not $1,000 a bottle (in Justice Samuel A. Alito’s opinion). Instead of getting upset (which is unproductive and irritates the people who decide whether we can vote and control our bodies), we need to acknowledge that people who want their own Supreme Court justices are going to get them — if they are wealthy enough. Instead of pretending that a code of ethics can prevent this, let’s find a better system so we can end all this sneaking around.
After all, we live in a capitalist country. There is clearly demand for access to the Supreme Court justices; let us figure out how to regulate the supply. Let us create a marketplace where all can compete. It’s time we allow the sponsorship of justices!
Look at the Supreme Court justices’ robes. All that wasted black space where the names of sponsors could be! Why are we pretending to have an impartial deliberative body when we could be getting rulings from an appropriately emblazoned Samuel Alito (“Brought to you by the Federalist Society”) or Brett “Michelob Ultra” Kavanaugh (“I LIKE BEER!”). And look at those SCOTUS decisions — all that wasted blank space around the margins. Let the sponsors fill it! Or better yet, have them contribute footnotes! Say $10,000 apiece; $15,000 for one with a wry joke in it.
Nobody would need to disclose anything; it would be right there in the ruling or on the robe. They would never need to recuse themselves; petitioners would just know that there would be no getting a ruling against Wilson Baseball EZ Gear (“We love a man who calls balls and strikes!”) out of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Also, Justice Alito could post on Facebook when he caught a big sturgeon with a billionaire friend — without worrying about whether it would be a bad look. Think of the money that Harlan Crow would save on photorealistic paintings if he could just post on social media about his favorite Justice Clarence Thomas memories. And Justice Elena Kagan could finally accept those lox that she refused years ago.
Some people want cameras in the courtroom. I want cameras in the room when billionaires bid to sponsor a justice of their choosing and take that justice on fun little jaunts for the next 10, 15, even 30 years! Open the process up to public scrutiny!
And we, the people, could actually take part in this instead of just watching from the sidelines. Why, millions of us could get together and each put in $5 to sponsor a small fraction of Justice Neil Gorsuch, and perhaps he would allow us to keep control of our uteruses! That would be just great! Or, if everyone with a uterus in the United States throws in three bucks, maybe we can buy a trip for Justice Barrett and Justice Kavanaugh to an emergency room where they can watch a woman suffering a doomed pregnancy go into life-threatening sepsis before receiving medical treatment. Would that help? I don’t know! The point is, we could all be throwing treats at the wall, not just an opaque little group of billionaires who happen to know Leonard Leo. That seems more just to me.
Also, under a system where Supreme Court justices openly and proudly wore the names of their sponsors on their robes and rulings, we could understand more clearly when things did or didn’t go our way, instead of having to pretend that it had something to do with closely interpreting signals sent to the justices by Thomas Jefferson’s ghost. (“This ruling sponsored in part by [Your Name Here]!”)
Given the disparity between the number of Supreme Court justices and the number of would-be sponsors, an alternative solution is to increase the number of justices until supply meets demand. I think this is also viable, although Mitch McConnell probably doesn’t. But as long as billionaires are willing to pay for justice access privileges (I, personally, would pay good money to not have to spend time listening to Justice Alito, but as an American I cannot opt out of that; he gets to decide what all the laws are), I say ... let them!
We know the court thinks money is speech. Well, let it speak where we can hear it! Legalize justice sponsorship now!
By Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice. Nothing seems to bring billionaires so much simple joy as having a personal justice to accompany them on yacht and fishing trips, flights on their private planes and jaunts to rustic lodges where the wine was certainly not $1,000 a bottle (in Justice Samuel A. Alito’s opinion). Instead of getting upset (which is unproductive and irritates the people who decide whether we can vote and control our bodies), we need to acknowledge that people who want their own Supreme Court justices are going to get them — if they are wealthy enough. Instead of pretending that a code of ethics can prevent this, let’s find a better system so we can end all this sneaking around.
After all, we live in a capitalist country. There is clearly demand for access to the Supreme Court justices; let us figure out how to regulate the supply. Let us create a marketplace where all can compete. It’s time we allow the sponsorship of justices!
Look at the Supreme Court justices’ robes. All that wasted black space where the names of sponsors could be! Why are we pretending to have an impartial deliberative body when we could be getting rulings from an appropriately emblazoned Samuel Alito (“Brought to you by the Federalist Society”) or Brett “Michelob Ultra” Kavanaugh (“I LIKE BEER!”). And look at those SCOTUS decisions — all that wasted blank space around the margins. Let the sponsors fill it! Or better yet, have them contribute footnotes! Say $10,000 apiece; $15,000 for one with a wry joke in it.
Nobody would need to disclose anything; it would be right there in the ruling or on the robe. They would never need to recuse themselves; petitioners would just know that there would be no getting a ruling against Wilson Baseball EZ Gear (“We love a man who calls balls and strikes!”) out of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Also, Justice Alito could post on Facebook when he caught a big sturgeon with a billionaire friend — without worrying about whether it would be a bad look. Think of the money that Harlan Crow would save on photorealistic paintings if he could just post on social media about his favorite Justice Clarence Thomas memories. And Justice Elena Kagan could finally accept those lox that she refused years ago.
Some people want cameras in the courtroom. I want cameras in the room when billionaires bid to sponsor a justice of their choosing and take that justice on fun little jaunts for the next 10, 15, even 30 years! Open the process up to public scrutiny!
And we, the people, could actually take part in this instead of just watching from the sidelines. Why, millions of us could get together and each put in $5 to sponsor a small fraction of Justice Neil Gorsuch, and perhaps he would allow us to keep control of our uteruses! That would be just great! Or, if everyone with a uterus in the United States throws in three bucks, maybe we can buy a trip for Justice Barrett and Justice Kavanaugh to an emergency room where they can watch a woman suffering a doomed pregnancy go into life-threatening sepsis before receiving medical treatment. Would that help? I don’t know! The point is, we could all be throwing treats at the wall, not just an opaque little group of billionaires who happen to know Leonard Leo. That seems more just to me.
Also, under a system where Supreme Court justices openly and proudly wore the names of their sponsors on their robes and rulings, we could understand more clearly when things did or didn’t go our way, instead of having to pretend that it had something to do with closely interpreting signals sent to the justices by Thomas Jefferson’s ghost. (“This ruling sponsored in part by [Your Name Here]!”)
Given the disparity between the number of Supreme Court justices and the number of would-be sponsors, an alternative solution is to increase the number of justices until supply meets demand. I think this is also viable, although Mitch McConnell probably doesn’t. But as long as billionaires are willing to pay for justice access privileges (I, personally, would pay good money to not have to spend time listening to Justice Alito, but as an American I cannot opt out of that; he gets to decide what all the laws are), I say ... let them!
We know the court thinks money is speech. Well, let it speak where we can hear it! Legalize justice sponsorship now!
THE TEST ISN’T FOR THE JUSTICE SYSTEM. IT’S ALSO FOR REPUBLICANS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some people are blithely claiming that the indictment of former president Donald Trump on charges of violating the Espionage Act, obstruction, conspiracy and other crimes puts the justice system on trial. Balderdash. The cliché has no meaning at this stage — and it improperly shifts the attention and blame from a treacherous defendant alleged to have endangered U.S. national security.
The justice system already proved its mettle in the investigation and indictment of Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith meticulously investigated the facts, interviewing every imaginable witness and got Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to supply invaluable evidence. Ordinary Americans serving on a grand jury indicted him. Should this go to trial, Trump’s fate, as with every criminal defendant who chooses a jury trial, will rest with a jury of his peers.
If there is a test, it is for Republicans. Indeed, it’s a test they have failed repeatedly thus far. When Senate Republicans adopted the “big lie” and acquitted Trump in the second impeachment, they took the side of lawlessness, authoritarianism and contempt for the Constitution.
Now they have a second chance (or third chance, if you consider they could have jettisoned him in the first impeachment). Republicans must decide whether they will continue with self-delusion (aided by lame rationales provided by the right-wing media that will excuse any conduct and minimize any charge) to the detriment of the country, our democracy and the rule of law. Voters need to think long and hard about nominating someone who has been indicted (and, by next year, might be convicted) on charges of serious crimes. Entrusting this guy with U.S. secrets would be ludicrous. Do they really care so little for national security? Do they lack any appreciation for the insult to the Constitution that they’d return to office someone so cavalier about it?
Republican officeholders’ gob-smacking determination to defend him should disqualify them from office. They apparently would stop at nothing to further their own careers (by pandering to the base they’ve radicalized) to the detriment of our democracy.
Democrats might be rooting for Republicans to sleepwalk their way to nominating Trump, believing he would surely lose in the general election. Perhaps. But we should not encourage millions of Americans to play Russian roulette with our democracy. Indeed, we should root for millions of our fellow Americans to regain their decency, honor and sobriety by rejecting someone so manifestly unfit and dangerous.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Some people are blithely claiming that the indictment of former president Donald Trump on charges of violating the Espionage Act, obstruction, conspiracy and other crimes puts the justice system on trial. Balderdash. The cliché has no meaning at this stage — and it improperly shifts the attention and blame from a treacherous defendant alleged to have endangered U.S. national security.
The justice system already proved its mettle in the investigation and indictment of Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith meticulously investigated the facts, interviewing every imaginable witness and got Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran to supply invaluable evidence. Ordinary Americans serving on a grand jury indicted him. Should this go to trial, Trump’s fate, as with every criminal defendant who chooses a jury trial, will rest with a jury of his peers.
If there is a test, it is for Republicans. Indeed, it’s a test they have failed repeatedly thus far. When Senate Republicans adopted the “big lie” and acquitted Trump in the second impeachment, they took the side of lawlessness, authoritarianism and contempt for the Constitution.
Now they have a second chance (or third chance, if you consider they could have jettisoned him in the first impeachment). Republicans must decide whether they will continue with self-delusion (aided by lame rationales provided by the right-wing media that will excuse any conduct and minimize any charge) to the detriment of the country, our democracy and the rule of law. Voters need to think long and hard about nominating someone who has been indicted (and, by next year, might be convicted) on charges of serious crimes. Entrusting this guy with U.S. secrets would be ludicrous. Do they really care so little for national security? Do they lack any appreciation for the insult to the Constitution that they’d return to office someone so cavalier about it?
Republican officeholders’ gob-smacking determination to defend him should disqualify them from office. They apparently would stop at nothing to further their own careers (by pandering to the base they’ve radicalized) to the detriment of our democracy.
Democrats might be rooting for Republicans to sleepwalk their way to nominating Trump, believing he would surely lose in the general election. Perhaps. But we should not encourage millions of Americans to play Russian roulette with our democracy. Indeed, we should root for millions of our fellow Americans to regain their decency, honor and sobriety by rejecting someone so manifestly unfit and dangerous.
THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS INDICTMENT IS A STUNNING DISPLAY OF TRUMP’S NARCISSISM
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The now-unsealed indictment in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta has it all, seemingly every Trump flaw condensed into 49 pages and 38 counts of squalid detail. It is a devastating legal document, but it is also a damning character study of a man whose faults are all too familiar yet retain the power to shock and appall.
In the neutered language of lawyers and their numbered paragraphs, 96 in all, the indictment details the relentless selfishness of Trump’s conduct. The former and would-be future president, in prosecutors’ telling, lied to his own lawyers, pushed them to hide evidence on his behalf, then stood by as they submitted a blatantly false affidavit to federal authorities — all while proclaiming himself an “open book.”
He stored the most classified of government secrets — about matters as sensitive as the vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack — on the stage of the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. He permitted secret “Five Eyes” intelligence material to spill onto the floor of a storage room easily accessible from the pool patio. Responsible people view such documents in a SCIF, shielded from electronic eavesdropping and fortified against intruders. Trump kept them in a chandeliered bathroom.
He hammered his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, for mishandling classified information, then behaved in a far more egregious manner. The indictment doesn’t mention Clinton by name, but prosecutors took pains to lay out numerous Trump campaign statements criticizing her — and hammering home the importance of safeguarding classified information.
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” Trump insisted as Election Day 2016 approached. “One of the first things we must do is to enforce all classification rules and to enforce all laws relating to the handling of classified information.”
So said the man who, according to the indictment, dramatically brandished classified documents for guests at his Bedminster, N.J., country club, guests notably lacking security clearances. “As president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” Trump told two people working on the memoir of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, discussing a memo that outlined the U.S. “plan of attack” on Iran. It’s on tape. The defendant indicted himself.
Prosecutors use the term “speaking indictment” to describe a charging document that narrates a story of criminal conduct. This indictment all but shouts: This man is a danger to the country. He is a liar. He is a hypocrite. He is a crook. It does not say, but I will: He should never again be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
Missing from the indictment — unnecessary as a matter of law, unavoidable as an element of human psychology — is the question of motive: Why did Trump do this? Why his zeal, his mania, to retain these particular documents when government officials came calling for them? Why persist — why dig the hole deep into the territory of obstruction — when a subpoena underscored that the government meant business?
Part of the explanation may be that of Trump as the eternal toddler: He wants what he wants. The papers are his toys, and he will not give them back. “I don’t want anybody looking,” Trump is quoted as telling his lawyer, in the lawyer’s damning memo-to-self. “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t.” My boxes. Mine, mine, mine.
These toys impress — and Trump’s pathetic need to puff himself up cannot be underestimated. Thus, meeting with an unnamed “representative” of his PAC at Bedminster, Trump brandished a classified map of “Country B” and told the person “that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and not to get too close.” If that’s evidence for prosecutors that Trump knew he wasn’t supposed to treat classified material so cavalierly, it’s a reminder to the rest of us about Trump’s compulsion to display his importance.
To read the indictment is to drown again in Trump’s narcissism: Others exist only to serve his needs and sacrifice themselves to the greater good of Trump. The indictment relates that in May 2022, speaking with one of his attorneys, Trump blithely suggests that the lawyer deep-six any problem documents. As the lawyer later recalled: “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Yeah, why don’t you commit a felony and jeopardize your law license?
And then there are the moments of pure deliciousness, the awkward glimpses behind the scenes in Trumpworld. The indictment quotes a Trump family member — I’m guessing his wife, Melania — texting Nauta, the former president’s personal aide, just ahead of a flight out of town. “I saw you put boxes to Potus room,” the text states. “Just FYI and I will tell him as well: Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.” Forget your boxes. I need that cargo space for my couture.
Announcing the indictment Friday, special counsel Jack Smith said: “I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.” Please do. It is a document that should never have had to be written about an American president. Trump’s own conduct made it unavoidable.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The now-unsealed indictment in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta has it all, seemingly every Trump flaw condensed into 49 pages and 38 counts of squalid detail. It is a devastating legal document, but it is also a damning character study of a man whose faults are all too familiar yet retain the power to shock and appall.
In the neutered language of lawyers and their numbered paragraphs, 96 in all, the indictment details the relentless selfishness of Trump’s conduct. The former and would-be future president, in prosecutors’ telling, lied to his own lawyers, pushed them to hide evidence on his behalf, then stood by as they submitted a blatantly false affidavit to federal authorities — all while proclaiming himself an “open book.”
He stored the most classified of government secrets — about matters as sensitive as the vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack — on the stage of the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. He permitted secret “Five Eyes” intelligence material to spill onto the floor of a storage room easily accessible from the pool patio. Responsible people view such documents in a SCIF, shielded from electronic eavesdropping and fortified against intruders. Trump kept them in a chandeliered bathroom.
He hammered his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, for mishandling classified information, then behaved in a far more egregious manner. The indictment doesn’t mention Clinton by name, but prosecutors took pains to lay out numerous Trump campaign statements criticizing her — and hammering home the importance of safeguarding classified information.
“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified,” Trump insisted as Election Day 2016 approached. “One of the first things we must do is to enforce all classification rules and to enforce all laws relating to the handling of classified information.”
So said the man who, according to the indictment, dramatically brandished classified documents for guests at his Bedminster, N.J., country club, guests notably lacking security clearances. “As president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” Trump told two people working on the memoir of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, discussing a memo that outlined the U.S. “plan of attack” on Iran. It’s on tape. The defendant indicted himself.
Prosecutors use the term “speaking indictment” to describe a charging document that narrates a story of criminal conduct. This indictment all but shouts: This man is a danger to the country. He is a liar. He is a hypocrite. He is a crook. It does not say, but I will: He should never again be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
Missing from the indictment — unnecessary as a matter of law, unavoidable as an element of human psychology — is the question of motive: Why did Trump do this? Why his zeal, his mania, to retain these particular documents when government officials came calling for them? Why persist — why dig the hole deep into the territory of obstruction — when a subpoena underscored that the government meant business?
Part of the explanation may be that of Trump as the eternal toddler: He wants what he wants. The papers are his toys, and he will not give them back. “I don’t want anybody looking,” Trump is quoted as telling his lawyer, in the lawyer’s damning memo-to-self. “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t.” My boxes. Mine, mine, mine.
These toys impress — and Trump’s pathetic need to puff himself up cannot be underestimated. Thus, meeting with an unnamed “representative” of his PAC at Bedminster, Trump brandished a classified map of “Country B” and told the person “that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and not to get too close.” If that’s evidence for prosecutors that Trump knew he wasn’t supposed to treat classified material so cavalierly, it’s a reminder to the rest of us about Trump’s compulsion to display his importance.
To read the indictment is to drown again in Trump’s narcissism: Others exist only to serve his needs and sacrifice themselves to the greater good of Trump. The indictment relates that in May 2022, speaking with one of his attorneys, Trump blithely suggests that the lawyer deep-six any problem documents. As the lawyer later recalled: “He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Yeah, why don’t you commit a felony and jeopardize your law license?
And then there are the moments of pure deliciousness, the awkward glimpses behind the scenes in Trumpworld. The indictment quotes a Trump family member — I’m guessing his wife, Melania — texting Nauta, the former president’s personal aide, just ahead of a flight out of town. “I saw you put boxes to Potus room,” the text states. “Just FYI and I will tell him as well: Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.” Forget your boxes. I need that cargo space for my couture.
Announcing the indictment Friday, special counsel Jack Smith said: “I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.” Please do. It is a document that should never have had to be written about an American president. Trump’s own conduct made it unavoidable.
REPUBLICANS SHOULD LISTEN TO BILL BARR
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Former attorney general William P. Barr could not influence special counsel Jack Smith or Attorney General Merrick Garland in their decision to indict former president Donald Trump. By the time a jury is selected, most jurors (if they had even heard Barr’s remarks) will have forgotten the reaction in the first few days after the indictment. But with the indictment now released — making public the damning series of charges — Barr can play a vital role in helping Republicans accept that their front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination faces the likelihood of trial and conviction — developments that cannot be wished away.
Since he left the Trump administration, Barr has been candid about Trump’s shortcomings. Barr provided testimony to the Jan. 6, 2021, House select committee, saying he told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. He told the committee, “Right out of the box on election night, the president claimed that there was major fraud underway. I mean, this [claim of fraud] happened, as far as I could tell, before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.”
More recently, he’s been open about Trump’s unfitness for office. “He does not have the discipline. He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking — or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system,” Barr told a Cleveland group in early May. “It’s a horror show, you know, when he’s left to his own devices.”
With regard to the case stemming from Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Barr has been a lonely Republican voice warning that the charges are serious. He said on ABC’s “This Week” on April 9, “I think that’s a serious potential case. I think they probably have some very good evidence there.” In May, he told CBS News, “It’s very clear that he had no business having those documents.” He explained, “He was given a long time to send them back. And they were subpoenaed. And I’ve said all along that he wouldn’t get in trouble, probably, just for taking them, just as [President] Biden I don’t think is going to get in trouble or [former vice president Mike] Pence is not going to get in trouble.” Barr added, “The problem is what did he do after the government asked for them back and subpoenaed them. And if there’s any games being played there, he’s going to be very exposed.”
This past week on CBS, he declared, “This is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt. … This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half. … There is no excuse for what he did here.” He went on at length about Trump’s mind-set:
Never-Trump Republican Bill Kristol told me, “Bill Barr served Trump, distorted the Mueller report for Trump, defended the indefensible for Trump. But even he acknowledges the classified documents is a crime too far.”
Why should any of this matter? As Trump’s former attorney general, Barr’s willingness to speak out tells Republicans still capable of reason that the case is real, it’s serious, it cannot be brushed off and that the Justice Department didn’t engage in misconduct. Barr could break through the right-wing media bubble that shelters millions of Republicans from reality. They have convinced themselves that Trump is innocent and/or that this will all go away. Even after word of the indictment spread, Republican politicians continued to attack the Justice Department as if it, not Trump, were on trial. Barr is there to shake them by the lapels, effectively telling them, “No, he’s in big trouble because he did something very, very wrong.”
Barr is not alone in calling out Trump’s conduct. After the indictment was unsealed, Trump’s former counsel Ty Cobb told CNN, “I think Trump is in an enormous amount of trouble. This indictment is about as carefully structured and evidentially supported as any indictment in history.” Law professor Jonathan Turley, who frequently defended Trump’s behavior during his impeachments, wrote, “For two years, I have said that the Mar-a-Lago charges — particularly obstruction — represent the greatest threat to Donald Trump. It remains baffling why Trump forced this issue over these documents rather than just give them all back.” And yet Barr remains the best-known lawyer for many Americans. As a former attorney general, his words carry additional weight.
Perhaps, now that the indictment has moved from theoretical to actual, Republicans will come to their senses. And Barr might be just the person to help that process along. Never-Trump strategist Sarah Longwell told me, “Bill Barr being vocal about the seriousness of the documents case will make it harder for many Republicans to casually dismiss this indictment as they did with the [Manhattan district attorney Alvin] Bragg indictment.”
Perhaps this will be too little too late to stop Trump’s 2024 candidacy. However, donors, establishment Republicans and ordinary voters might listen to Barr even though they would not pay attention to the mainstream media or even former GOP New Jersey governor Chris Christie. (On Friday, Christie slammed Trump: “The facts that are laid out here are damning in terms of Donald Trump’s conduct. … Do we really believe that someone who engaged in this type of conduct is going to be the best person to put up against Joe Biden?”)
Meanwhile, Barr will be a critical factor in creating a permission structure in which Republicans need not concede that their past support for Trump was “wrong.” Barr could convince a significant number of former Trump voters that the documents case is so serious that reelecting Trump would be dangerous — either because he could be convicted before taking office or because his actions, even if not illegal, were reckless.
Barr’s statements might help “soft Republicans,” independents and those who believe that electing Trump will “solve” his legal dilemma to finally reject Trump. They can tell themselves, “I was right to vote for him before. I was right that he was a good president. But now he’s done something really wrong.”
In the short term, Barr’s remarks might encourage other Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to reject Trump’s cries of persecution. Republicans’ awareness of Trump’s unfitness (or at least his unelectability) could then swell. If so, Barr would have done something — finally! — in defense of our democracy and the rule of law.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Former attorney general William P. Barr could not influence special counsel Jack Smith or Attorney General Merrick Garland in their decision to indict former president Donald Trump. By the time a jury is selected, most jurors (if they had even heard Barr’s remarks) will have forgotten the reaction in the first few days after the indictment. But with the indictment now released — making public the damning series of charges — Barr can play a vital role in helping Republicans accept that their front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination faces the likelihood of trial and conviction — developments that cannot be wished away.
Since he left the Trump administration, Barr has been candid about Trump’s shortcomings. Barr provided testimony to the Jan. 6, 2021, House select committee, saying he told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. He told the committee, “Right out of the box on election night, the president claimed that there was major fraud underway. I mean, this [claim of fraud] happened, as far as I could tell, before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.”
More recently, he’s been open about Trump’s unfitness for office. “He does not have the discipline. He does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking — or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system,” Barr told a Cleveland group in early May. “It’s a horror show, you know, when he’s left to his own devices.”
With regard to the case stemming from Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Barr has been a lonely Republican voice warning that the charges are serious. He said on ABC’s “This Week” on April 9, “I think that’s a serious potential case. I think they probably have some very good evidence there.” In May, he told CBS News, “It’s very clear that he had no business having those documents.” He explained, “He was given a long time to send them back. And they were subpoenaed. And I’ve said all along that he wouldn’t get in trouble, probably, just for taking them, just as [President] Biden I don’t think is going to get in trouble or [former vice president Mike] Pence is not going to get in trouble.” Barr added, “The problem is what did he do after the government asked for them back and subpoenaed them. And if there’s any games being played there, he’s going to be very exposed.”
This past week on CBS, he declared, “This is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt. … This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents, but he jerked them around for a year and a half. … There is no excuse for what he did here.” He went on at length about Trump’s mind-set:
Never-Trump Republican Bill Kristol told me, “Bill Barr served Trump, distorted the Mueller report for Trump, defended the indefensible for Trump. But even he acknowledges the classified documents is a crime too far.”
Why should any of this matter? As Trump’s former attorney general, Barr’s willingness to speak out tells Republicans still capable of reason that the case is real, it’s serious, it cannot be brushed off and that the Justice Department didn’t engage in misconduct. Barr could break through the right-wing media bubble that shelters millions of Republicans from reality. They have convinced themselves that Trump is innocent and/or that this will all go away. Even after word of the indictment spread, Republican politicians continued to attack the Justice Department as if it, not Trump, were on trial. Barr is there to shake them by the lapels, effectively telling them, “No, he’s in big trouble because he did something very, very wrong.”
Barr is not alone in calling out Trump’s conduct. After the indictment was unsealed, Trump’s former counsel Ty Cobb told CNN, “I think Trump is in an enormous amount of trouble. This indictment is about as carefully structured and evidentially supported as any indictment in history.” Law professor Jonathan Turley, who frequently defended Trump’s behavior during his impeachments, wrote, “For two years, I have said that the Mar-a-Lago charges — particularly obstruction — represent the greatest threat to Donald Trump. It remains baffling why Trump forced this issue over these documents rather than just give them all back.” And yet Barr remains the best-known lawyer for many Americans. As a former attorney general, his words carry additional weight.
Perhaps, now that the indictment has moved from theoretical to actual, Republicans will come to their senses. And Barr might be just the person to help that process along. Never-Trump strategist Sarah Longwell told me, “Bill Barr being vocal about the seriousness of the documents case will make it harder for many Republicans to casually dismiss this indictment as they did with the [Manhattan district attorney Alvin] Bragg indictment.”
Perhaps this will be too little too late to stop Trump’s 2024 candidacy. However, donors, establishment Republicans and ordinary voters might listen to Barr even though they would not pay attention to the mainstream media or even former GOP New Jersey governor Chris Christie. (On Friday, Christie slammed Trump: “The facts that are laid out here are damning in terms of Donald Trump’s conduct. … Do we really believe that someone who engaged in this type of conduct is going to be the best person to put up against Joe Biden?”)
Meanwhile, Barr will be a critical factor in creating a permission structure in which Republicans need not concede that their past support for Trump was “wrong.” Barr could convince a significant number of former Trump voters that the documents case is so serious that reelecting Trump would be dangerous — either because he could be convicted before taking office or because his actions, even if not illegal, were reckless.
Barr’s statements might help “soft Republicans,” independents and those who believe that electing Trump will “solve” his legal dilemma to finally reject Trump. They can tell themselves, “I was right to vote for him before. I was right that he was a good president. But now he’s done something really wrong.”
In the short term, Barr’s remarks might encourage other Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to reject Trump’s cries of persecution. Republicans’ awareness of Trump’s unfitness (or at least his unelectability) could then swell. If so, Barr would have done something — finally! — in defense of our democracy and the rule of law.
MERRICK GARLAND AND JACK SMITH COME THROUGH: TRUMP WILL FACE JUSTICE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Attorney General Merrick Garland promised he would follow the law and facts in his investigations. He kept his word.
In the first-ever federal indictment against a former president, special counsel Jack Smith has charged former president Donald Trump with 37 felony counts, the bulk of which allege violations of the Espionage Act. The rest allege obstruction, conspiracy and false statements, arising out of Trump’s reported retention of and refusal to return classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Trump aide Walt Nauta has also been indicted.
Smith’s indictment relays, in mind-numbing detail, alleged efforts by Trump to stash classified documents in nonsecure locations, including the Mar-a-Lago resort ballroom, his private residence and even a bathroom.
During his presidency, Trump was amply briefed on classification rules and made frequent comments vowing to enforce them. However, in departing the White House he directed boxes containing documents detailing U.S. secrets to be taken to with him. A giant shell game then commenced, according to the indictment, with Trump ordering boxes moved, suggesting documents be concealed and pushing for his lawyers to deceive the Justice Department. At Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where prosecutors say some documents were taken, the former president allegedly shared secret material with others, even as he acknowledged that it remained classified.
The portrait painted could hardly be clearer: Throughout the special prosecutor’s account, Trump is shown to be personally and intimately involved in the movement and storage of the classified material. Trump was no passive bystander; according to prosecutors, he made every effort to deceive the Justice Department to retain “his” documents.
According to the indictment, the classified documents in Trump’s possession concerned myriad serious national security matters. The indictment states that “the classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
Simply put, Trump’s indictment describes some of the most egregious conduct we have seen in cases involving the alleged mishandling of classified information by politicians. Trump’s defenders will claim a double standard, but the comparisons they will raise don’t hold water. Other prominent cases that were not pursued (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence) do not involve willful retention of documents, refusal to return them when requested, lying to authorities or other obstructive conduct. They do not involve manufacturing a false rationale (e.g., magical declassification) to excuse deception and defiance of the law. And they don’t involve a willful game of hide-and-seek with authorities.
Expect MAGA world to continue to denounce the indictment as a witch hunt in the coming days. But to date, Trump has still not articulated a cogent criminal defense. He has attacked prosecutors, wrongly asserted that President Biden stashed boxes of documents in D.C.’s Chinatown, insisted he declassified documents (despite saying he did not in the taped Bedminster conversation) and falsely declared the documents were his.
None of these constitute a viable (or even coherent) defense. At best, these arguments are fodder for the right-wing media outrage machine.
The excuse that Trump was merely acting on “advice of counsel” does not apply when his lawyers apparently were telling him to return the documents. And, despite Trump’s shrieks, the Justice Department properly executed the search warrant based on probable cause to recover certain documents.
What comes next? Trump might try to stall and use interlocutory appeals (before a verdict) to delay. However, federal judges (as seen in the super-fast review of attorney-client and executive privilege claims in the D.C. federal district court) increasingly seem fed up with his stalling tactics.
At Trump’s arraignment, scheduled for Tuesday in Miami, the judge will set a series of dates, including a trial date. It behooves the judge, consistent with due process, to move speedily so as to allow voters to make an informed decision about their presidential pick in 2024. We could see a trial roughly a year from now.
While not relating to Jan. 6, 2021, Trump now faces serious charges. In running for president again with the express intent to seek revenge against those who holding him to account, Trump threatens the basic concept of the rule of law. If a president can commit crimes with impunity, then we have an autocrat, not an elected executive.
Trump has the presumption of innocence in court. But based upon what has been reported, the case against him is devastating. The political question, however, remains open: Has the GOP become so contemptuous of democracy as to nominate an indicted candidate?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Attorney General Merrick Garland promised he would follow the law and facts in his investigations. He kept his word.
In the first-ever federal indictment against a former president, special counsel Jack Smith has charged former president Donald Trump with 37 felony counts, the bulk of which allege violations of the Espionage Act. The rest allege obstruction, conspiracy and false statements, arising out of Trump’s reported retention of and refusal to return classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Trump aide Walt Nauta has also been indicted.
Smith’s indictment relays, in mind-numbing detail, alleged efforts by Trump to stash classified documents in nonsecure locations, including the Mar-a-Lago resort ballroom, his private residence and even a bathroom.
During his presidency, Trump was amply briefed on classification rules and made frequent comments vowing to enforce them. However, in departing the White House he directed boxes containing documents detailing U.S. secrets to be taken to with him. A giant shell game then commenced, according to the indictment, with Trump ordering boxes moved, suggesting documents be concealed and pushing for his lawyers to deceive the Justice Department. At Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where prosecutors say some documents were taken, the former president allegedly shared secret material with others, even as he acknowledged that it remained classified.
The portrait painted could hardly be clearer: Throughout the special prosecutor’s account, Trump is shown to be personally and intimately involved in the movement and storage of the classified material. Trump was no passive bystander; according to prosecutors, he made every effort to deceive the Justice Department to retain “his” documents.
According to the indictment, the classified documents in Trump’s possession concerned myriad serious national security matters. The indictment states that “the classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
Simply put, Trump’s indictment describes some of the most egregious conduct we have seen in cases involving the alleged mishandling of classified information by politicians. Trump’s defenders will claim a double standard, but the comparisons they will raise don’t hold water. Other prominent cases that were not pursued (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence) do not involve willful retention of documents, refusal to return them when requested, lying to authorities or other obstructive conduct. They do not involve manufacturing a false rationale (e.g., magical declassification) to excuse deception and defiance of the law. And they don’t involve a willful game of hide-and-seek with authorities.
Expect MAGA world to continue to denounce the indictment as a witch hunt in the coming days. But to date, Trump has still not articulated a cogent criminal defense. He has attacked prosecutors, wrongly asserted that President Biden stashed boxes of documents in D.C.’s Chinatown, insisted he declassified documents (despite saying he did not in the taped Bedminster conversation) and falsely declared the documents were his.
None of these constitute a viable (or even coherent) defense. At best, these arguments are fodder for the right-wing media outrage machine.
The excuse that Trump was merely acting on “advice of counsel” does not apply when his lawyers apparently were telling him to return the documents. And, despite Trump’s shrieks, the Justice Department properly executed the search warrant based on probable cause to recover certain documents.
What comes next? Trump might try to stall and use interlocutory appeals (before a verdict) to delay. However, federal judges (as seen in the super-fast review of attorney-client and executive privilege claims in the D.C. federal district court) increasingly seem fed up with his stalling tactics.
At Trump’s arraignment, scheduled for Tuesday in Miami, the judge will set a series of dates, including a trial date. It behooves the judge, consistent with due process, to move speedily so as to allow voters to make an informed decision about their presidential pick in 2024. We could see a trial roughly a year from now.
While not relating to Jan. 6, 2021, Trump now faces serious charges. In running for president again with the express intent to seek revenge against those who holding him to account, Trump threatens the basic concept of the rule of law. If a president can commit crimes with impunity, then we have an autocrat, not an elected executive.
Trump has the presumption of innocence in court. But based upon what has been reported, the case against him is devastating. The political question, however, remains open: Has the GOP become so contemptuous of democracy as to nominate an indicted candidate?
A SHOWER FULL OF SECRET DOCUMENTS LEADS TO A SOLID TRUMP INDICTMENT
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
No one should celebrate Thursday’s indictment of Donald Trump in a case involving classified documents improperly stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Something has gone deeply wrong when, in a historic first, federal prosecutors reach the point of filing criminal charges against a former and possibly future president. Yet, in this matter, the defendant appears to have left them little choice.
The 38-count indictment against Mr. Trump and an aide, unsealed on Friday, includes disturbing details: “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the onetime commander in chief says in a transcript of a recording during which he described a “plan of attack” prepared by the Defense Department against a foreign adversary. His audience, according to the indictment, included a writer, a publisher and two members of his staff, none of whom had a security clearance. This was only one episode of gross mishandling of hundreds of pages of materials that included papers on U.S. nuclear programs and this nation’s potential vulnerabilities to attack.
Boxes were moved from a ballroom stage to a storage closet to a bathroom and shower, at one point spilling onto the floor (“Oh no oh no,” texted an employee). Mar-a-Lago hosted tens of thousands of guests at 150 social events, including weddings and movie premieres, during the time the documents were on the premises.
It’s not only the alleged cavalier treatment of classified materials. It is also the extensive effort to avoid compliance with legitimate demands, from which a clear, prosecutable picture of obstruction emerges. Consider Mr. Trump’s alleged instructions to valet and body man Waltine Nauta, also indicted, to hide boxes from his team’s attorney, the FBI and the grand jury; the suggestion to his attorney to make false representations to the FBI and grand jury as well as to conceal or destroy some of the documents called for in a subpoena; and the submission to the FBI and grand jury declaring all relevant documents had been handed over when they had not. Mr. Trump reportedly even asked after receiving a subpoena for the documents’ return: “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
These details support a story that has been unfolding in the media for months: of an elected official not only abusing his access to sensitive information but also knowingly sharing it. They distinguish the Mar-a-Lago documents imbroglio from the ongoing investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert K. Hur into President Biden’s own retention of classified documents. Those materials were willingly returned upon discovery; so far, there’s nothing to suggest they were intentionally retained. Treating different cases differently isn’t necessarily an indication of politicization. On the contrary, it can be the sign of a job carefully done.
Similarly, it is the Justice Department’s duty to assure that no person, not even a former president, is beyond the reach of the law — regardless of the discord or division doing so could sow. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his staff have cautiously followed proper protocol to safeguard the department’s independence — from tapping special counsel Jack Smith, who assembled the case, to choosing to file charges in Miami rather than go judge-shopping in more liberal environs. The presiding judge will be Trump-appointee Aileen M. Cannon, whose (eventually overruled) decision to freeze a portion of the Justice Department’s inquiry last fall set liberals aflame.
Nonetheless, even before the indictment was unsealed, voters were treated to an onslaught of GOP comments tarring the case as corrupt and unconscionable. See House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) decrying a “grave injustice.” Listen to former vice president and 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pence contort himself into an impossible position arguing simultaneously that no one should be above the law and that the indictment shouldn’t have moved forward.
If anyone is guilty of turning the legal system into a political hand grenade, it has been the Republicans themselves. In the 2016 campaign, when questions were raised about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Mr. Trump himself urged rally crowds to chant “lock her up.” This time, however, they’re the ones on the defense with regard to the possibly illegal handling of sensitive government information.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
No one should celebrate Thursday’s indictment of Donald Trump in a case involving classified documents improperly stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Something has gone deeply wrong when, in a historic first, federal prosecutors reach the point of filing criminal charges against a former and possibly future president. Yet, in this matter, the defendant appears to have left them little choice.
The 38-count indictment against Mr. Trump and an aide, unsealed on Friday, includes disturbing details: “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the onetime commander in chief says in a transcript of a recording during which he described a “plan of attack” prepared by the Defense Department against a foreign adversary. His audience, according to the indictment, included a writer, a publisher and two members of his staff, none of whom had a security clearance. This was only one episode of gross mishandling of hundreds of pages of materials that included papers on U.S. nuclear programs and this nation’s potential vulnerabilities to attack.
Boxes were moved from a ballroom stage to a storage closet to a bathroom and shower, at one point spilling onto the floor (“Oh no oh no,” texted an employee). Mar-a-Lago hosted tens of thousands of guests at 150 social events, including weddings and movie premieres, during the time the documents were on the premises.
It’s not only the alleged cavalier treatment of classified materials. It is also the extensive effort to avoid compliance with legitimate demands, from which a clear, prosecutable picture of obstruction emerges. Consider Mr. Trump’s alleged instructions to valet and body man Waltine Nauta, also indicted, to hide boxes from his team’s attorney, the FBI and the grand jury; the suggestion to his attorney to make false representations to the FBI and grand jury as well as to conceal or destroy some of the documents called for in a subpoena; and the submission to the FBI and grand jury declaring all relevant documents had been handed over when they had not. Mr. Trump reportedly even asked after receiving a subpoena for the documents’ return: “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
These details support a story that has been unfolding in the media for months: of an elected official not only abusing his access to sensitive information but also knowingly sharing it. They distinguish the Mar-a-Lago documents imbroglio from the ongoing investigation by Justice Department special counsel Robert K. Hur into President Biden’s own retention of classified documents. Those materials were willingly returned upon discovery; so far, there’s nothing to suggest they were intentionally retained. Treating different cases differently isn’t necessarily an indication of politicization. On the contrary, it can be the sign of a job carefully done.
Similarly, it is the Justice Department’s duty to assure that no person, not even a former president, is beyond the reach of the law — regardless of the discord or division doing so could sow. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his staff have cautiously followed proper protocol to safeguard the department’s independence — from tapping special counsel Jack Smith, who assembled the case, to choosing to file charges in Miami rather than go judge-shopping in more liberal environs. The presiding judge will be Trump-appointee Aileen M. Cannon, whose (eventually overruled) decision to freeze a portion of the Justice Department’s inquiry last fall set liberals aflame.
Nonetheless, even before the indictment was unsealed, voters were treated to an onslaught of GOP comments tarring the case as corrupt and unconscionable. See House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) decrying a “grave injustice.” Listen to former vice president and 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pence contort himself into an impossible position arguing simultaneously that no one should be above the law and that the indictment shouldn’t have moved forward.
If anyone is guilty of turning the legal system into a political hand grenade, it has been the Republicans themselves. In the 2016 campaign, when questions were raised about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Mr. Trump himself urged rally crowds to chant “lock her up.” This time, however, they’re the ones on the defense with regard to the possibly illegal handling of sensitive government information.
HERE ARE THE CHARGES AGAINST TRUMP AND WHAT THEY MEAN
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he had been indicted in federal court in Florida over the classified information found at his Mar-a-Lago home. The indictment remains under seal, so we don’t know the full scope of the charges, including the particular counts Trump faces or whether others are charged alongside him. Here’s what we can say about the indictment and charges, as described by Trump’s legal team and other people familiar with the matter.
What are the charges against Trump?
Espionage Act/unauthorized retention of national defense information: Trump is charged under a part of the Espionage Act that bars willful retention of national defense information by someone not authorized to have it, according to people familiar with the case. Such information is defined as “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Technically, that information does not have to be classified, but in practice the law is almost exclusively used to prosecute retention of classified material.
A conviction does not require any evidence of a desire to disseminate the classified information; having it in an unauthorized location is enough. But the crime requires a “willful” mishandling of material “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Charges are generally not brought without some aggravating factor making clear the retention was not accidental — such as evidence of intent to share the information, signs of disloyalty to the U.S. government, or simply the amount of documents taken.
Unlike other government employees, the president does not go through a security clearance process that includes a pledge to follow classification rules. But Trump received requests from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and subpoenas from the Justice Department indicating that the documents in question were classified and needed to be returned to the U.S. government. Prosecutors say he instead sought to hide them from federal investigators. And while the president can declassify most information, there is a process for doing so. According to a person familiar with the transcript, prosecutors have a recording of Trump acknowledging that one “secret” document he held onto was still classified and lamenting that he no longer had the power to declassify it.
Obstruction of justice: Trump is also charged obstruction of justice for his alleged efforts to stymie the federal investigation, according to people familiar with the charges. People familiar with the investigation say the government gathered evidence that Trump directed his aides to hide classified papers in advance of an FBI search and told advisers and lawyers to falsely assert that all classified documents in his possession had been returned to the federal government.
False statements: Jim Trusty, an attorney for Trump, said on CNN that the former president is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators. It is unclear so far what those particular statements are. Publicly, Trump has suggested without evidence that FBI agents planted classified evidence at his home and claimed that anything sensitive found there had been declassified.
Conspiracy: Trump is charged as part of a conspiracy, meaning prosecutors will have to show at least one other person was helping him violate the law. It is unclear who that is, but numerous Trump aides, associates and attorneys involved in the storage of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago have been called to testify in front of grand jurors.
What possible penalties does Trump face?
The maximum punishment for unlawful retention of national defense information is 10 years in prison; for obstruction of justice it is 20 years, and for conspiracy and false statements five years. All those sentences could run consecutively, but federal defendants are rarely given the maximum possible punishment.
Sentences in unlawful retention cases vary widely, depending in part on how sensitive the material is, how much of it there is, how long the person held on to it and his or her cooperation with investigators. A Defense Department employee in Manila who took home a small amount of secret-level information to work on a classified thesis project served only three months incarceration. Kenneth Wayne Ford Jr., who was found guilty at trial of bringing home national defense information after leaving the National Security Agency and lying about the case, received a six-year sentence. A former NSA contractor who over two decades amassed a huge trove of highly sensitive material, including hacking tools and details of overseas operations, was sentenced to nine years in prison. A Navy sailor who took pictures of classified areas of a nuclear-powered submarine and then destroyed the evidence was sentenced to a year in prison for retention and obstruction; he was later pardoned by Trump.
Retired general David H. Petraeus was given probation after pleading guilty to sharing classified information with his biographer. At the time, the crime of mishandling classified information — as opposed to national defense information — was a misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of a year behind bars. It became a felony under President Trump.
What other criminal charges does Trump face?
Trump is charged in New York State Court with unrelated crimes for conduct that predates his presidency. He is accused of falsifying business records to hide payments during the 2016 campaign made to an adult-film star to keep her from saying publicly that she had an affair with Trump.
Trump is also under investigation by a state prosecutor in Georgia, who is looking at Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in that state. Special counsel Jack Smith is also investigating Trump’s attempts to stay in office after losing the presidential election, including his pressure on officials in battleground states and fundraising off false claims of election fraud.
Has Trump responded to the charges?
The former president described himself as “an innocent man” being treated unfairly in comparison to President Biden. Classified documents from the Obama administration were discovered in Biden’s Delaware home late last year by lawyers cleaning out his home office. Biden’s attorneys turned those documents over to NARA, and the president gave the Justice Department permission to search the home, as well as his beach house and think tank office. The White House has said only “a small number” of documents from Biden’s vice-presidential tenure were found. A special counsel has been appointed to oversee that investigation.
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he had been indicted in federal court in Florida over the classified information found at his Mar-a-Lago home. The indictment remains under seal, so we don’t know the full scope of the charges, including the particular counts Trump faces or whether others are charged alongside him. Here’s what we can say about the indictment and charges, as described by Trump’s legal team and other people familiar with the matter.
What are the charges against Trump?
Espionage Act/unauthorized retention of national defense information: Trump is charged under a part of the Espionage Act that bars willful retention of national defense information by someone not authorized to have it, according to people familiar with the case. Such information is defined as “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Technically, that information does not have to be classified, but in practice the law is almost exclusively used to prosecute retention of classified material.
A conviction does not require any evidence of a desire to disseminate the classified information; having it in an unauthorized location is enough. But the crime requires a “willful” mishandling of material “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Charges are generally not brought without some aggravating factor making clear the retention was not accidental — such as evidence of intent to share the information, signs of disloyalty to the U.S. government, or simply the amount of documents taken.
Unlike other government employees, the president does not go through a security clearance process that includes a pledge to follow classification rules. But Trump received requests from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and subpoenas from the Justice Department indicating that the documents in question were classified and needed to be returned to the U.S. government. Prosecutors say he instead sought to hide them from federal investigators. And while the president can declassify most information, there is a process for doing so. According to a person familiar with the transcript, prosecutors have a recording of Trump acknowledging that one “secret” document he held onto was still classified and lamenting that he no longer had the power to declassify it.
Obstruction of justice: Trump is also charged obstruction of justice for his alleged efforts to stymie the federal investigation, according to people familiar with the charges. People familiar with the investigation say the government gathered evidence that Trump directed his aides to hide classified papers in advance of an FBI search and told advisers and lawyers to falsely assert that all classified documents in his possession had been returned to the federal government.
False statements: Jim Trusty, an attorney for Trump, said on CNN that the former president is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators. It is unclear so far what those particular statements are. Publicly, Trump has suggested without evidence that FBI agents planted classified evidence at his home and claimed that anything sensitive found there had been declassified.
Conspiracy: Trump is charged as part of a conspiracy, meaning prosecutors will have to show at least one other person was helping him violate the law. It is unclear who that is, but numerous Trump aides, associates and attorneys involved in the storage of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago have been called to testify in front of grand jurors.
What possible penalties does Trump face?
The maximum punishment for unlawful retention of national defense information is 10 years in prison; for obstruction of justice it is 20 years, and for conspiracy and false statements five years. All those sentences could run consecutively, but federal defendants are rarely given the maximum possible punishment.
Sentences in unlawful retention cases vary widely, depending in part on how sensitive the material is, how much of it there is, how long the person held on to it and his or her cooperation with investigators. A Defense Department employee in Manila who took home a small amount of secret-level information to work on a classified thesis project served only three months incarceration. Kenneth Wayne Ford Jr., who was found guilty at trial of bringing home national defense information after leaving the National Security Agency and lying about the case, received a six-year sentence. A former NSA contractor who over two decades amassed a huge trove of highly sensitive material, including hacking tools and details of overseas operations, was sentenced to nine years in prison. A Navy sailor who took pictures of classified areas of a nuclear-powered submarine and then destroyed the evidence was sentenced to a year in prison for retention and obstruction; he was later pardoned by Trump.
Retired general David H. Petraeus was given probation after pleading guilty to sharing classified information with his biographer. At the time, the crime of mishandling classified information — as opposed to national defense information — was a misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of a year behind bars. It became a felony under President Trump.
What other criminal charges does Trump face?
Trump is charged in New York State Court with unrelated crimes for conduct that predates his presidency. He is accused of falsifying business records to hide payments during the 2016 campaign made to an adult-film star to keep her from saying publicly that she had an affair with Trump.
Trump is also under investigation by a state prosecutor in Georgia, who is looking at Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in that state. Special counsel Jack Smith is also investigating Trump’s attempts to stay in office after losing the presidential election, including his pressure on officials in battleground states and fundraising off false claims of election fraud.
Has Trump responded to the charges?
The former president described himself as “an innocent man” being treated unfairly in comparison to President Biden. Classified documents from the Obama administration were discovered in Biden’s Delaware home late last year by lawyers cleaning out his home office. Biden’s attorneys turned those documents over to NARA, and the president gave the Justice Department permission to search the home, as well as his beach house and think tank office. The White House has said only “a small number” of documents from Biden’s vice-presidential tenure were found. A special counsel has been appointed to oversee that investigation.
HOW TO BLOCK THE BOOK BAN BANDWAGON
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Last fall, Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in Escambia County, Fla., launched a crusade against more than 100 books she wanted banned from local school libraries because of “explicit sexual content, graphic language, themes, vulgarity and political pushes.” A 32-page children’s book on the career of Black runner and Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph made her list. So did Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” classics that have appeared on school reading lists for decades.
The policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — such as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop Woke) Act of 2022 that prohibits teaching students that they “must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” — no doubt encouraged Ms. Baggett’s efforts, which are now the subject of a federal lawsuit from publisher Penguin Random House, the free speech advocacy group PEN America, some of the authors whose works are on the list and local parents. But her crusade is also not unique; parents, activists and others have tried to impose “book bans” in school districts across the country, a mounting problem that threatens to limit the ideas available to students, particularly those in higher grades, and curb critical thinking.
If it eventually hears the Escambia County case, the Supreme Court should clarify its confusing precedent on First Amendment rights for students and bolster their constitutional protections. But those who oppose censorship cannot assume court intervention. As the litigation proceeds, their best option is to oppose book bans where they begin — at the level of local activists and school boards — by pushing educational officials to respect students’ interest to learn.
In the second half of 2022, PEN America documented 1,477 instances of books being banned in 37 states, a significant increase from the first half of that year. Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina lead the nation, according to PEN America’s data. The Post found that at least seven states have passed laws in the past two years allowing librarians to face prison time or staggering fines for giving children access to “harmful” books, although the definition of what constitutes such a book is rarely clear. About another dozen states considered similar bills, some of which are due to be reevaluated next year.
Ms. Baggett, for one, claims her attempts to ban certain books are meant to protect students from feeling “uncomfortable,” though she has posted images of a Confederate flag on Facebook and admitted that she belongs to a neo-Confederate group.
Parents who express concern with what their children are reading, especially in the lower grades, are not necessarily trying to fight Ms. Baggett’s culture war. Many school districts properly try to accommodate them; if teachers flag particular works as “controversial,” students can opt out of reading the texts or read an alternate text instead. But book bans prevent all students from encountering targeted texts. In the case of, say, a children’s book about a child with parents in a same-sex relationship, students lose access to material that reflects the nation’s reality. In the case of books at higher reading levels, such as “Slaughterhouse-Five,” students miss out on texts that challenge their assumptions. The bans often target minority voices unwelcome among those who would prefer the nation’s complex past and present to be sanitized — of both its struggles and triumphs.
It is unclear whether the Escambia County lawsuit will reverse the book-banning trend, because the law around student First Amendment rights is murky. School districts have the right to control course contents, but teachers are also supposed to refrain from openly espousing clear political or religious perspectives. Books on library shelves are a slightly different matter. The Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that middle and high school libraries, as centers of voluntary inquiry, were limited in what they could remove. But the decision was fractured, leaving its scope vague. Should the Escambia County case make it to the Supreme Court, the justices should use it as an opportunity to clarify where the law stands on student First Amendment rights, and they should err on the side of stronger constitutional protections, rather than weaker.
Barring judicial intervention, the best option is for opponents of censorship to counter the nation’s Vicki Baggetts on their own turf. Right-wing activists have pressed their local officials, with a discouraging amount of success, to restrict poetry by Amanda Gorman and the novels of Jodi Picoult and Nora Roberts. The way to fight them is to follow their example: Show up and volunteer, serve on library boards and advocate for free expression. Force censorship to play defense.
Efforts to police what can be read and thought always fail, sooner or later. Reality asserts itself. History eventually comes for the censors. The task is to limit the damage they do in the meantime.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
Last fall, Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in Escambia County, Fla., launched a crusade against more than 100 books she wanted banned from local school libraries because of “explicit sexual content, graphic language, themes, vulgarity and political pushes.” A 32-page children’s book on the career of Black runner and Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph made her list. So did Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” classics that have appeared on school reading lists for decades.
The policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — such as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop Woke) Act of 2022 that prohibits teaching students that they “must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” — no doubt encouraged Ms. Baggett’s efforts, which are now the subject of a federal lawsuit from publisher Penguin Random House, the free speech advocacy group PEN America, some of the authors whose works are on the list and local parents. But her crusade is also not unique; parents, activists and others have tried to impose “book bans” in school districts across the country, a mounting problem that threatens to limit the ideas available to students, particularly those in higher grades, and curb critical thinking.
If it eventually hears the Escambia County case, the Supreme Court should clarify its confusing precedent on First Amendment rights for students and bolster their constitutional protections. But those who oppose censorship cannot assume court intervention. As the litigation proceeds, their best option is to oppose book bans where they begin — at the level of local activists and school boards — by pushing educational officials to respect students’ interest to learn.
In the second half of 2022, PEN America documented 1,477 instances of books being banned in 37 states, a significant increase from the first half of that year. Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina lead the nation, according to PEN America’s data. The Post found that at least seven states have passed laws in the past two years allowing librarians to face prison time or staggering fines for giving children access to “harmful” books, although the definition of what constitutes such a book is rarely clear. About another dozen states considered similar bills, some of which are due to be reevaluated next year.
Ms. Baggett, for one, claims her attempts to ban certain books are meant to protect students from feeling “uncomfortable,” though she has posted images of a Confederate flag on Facebook and admitted that she belongs to a neo-Confederate group.
Parents who express concern with what their children are reading, especially in the lower grades, are not necessarily trying to fight Ms. Baggett’s culture war. Many school districts properly try to accommodate them; if teachers flag particular works as “controversial,” students can opt out of reading the texts or read an alternate text instead. But book bans prevent all students from encountering targeted texts. In the case of, say, a children’s book about a child with parents in a same-sex relationship, students lose access to material that reflects the nation’s reality. In the case of books at higher reading levels, such as “Slaughterhouse-Five,” students miss out on texts that challenge their assumptions. The bans often target minority voices unwelcome among those who would prefer the nation’s complex past and present to be sanitized — of both its struggles and triumphs.
It is unclear whether the Escambia County lawsuit will reverse the book-banning trend, because the law around student First Amendment rights is murky. School districts have the right to control course contents, but teachers are also supposed to refrain from openly espousing clear political or religious perspectives. Books on library shelves are a slightly different matter. The Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that middle and high school libraries, as centers of voluntary inquiry, were limited in what they could remove. But the decision was fractured, leaving its scope vague. Should the Escambia County case make it to the Supreme Court, the justices should use it as an opportunity to clarify where the law stands on student First Amendment rights, and they should err on the side of stronger constitutional protections, rather than weaker.
Barring judicial intervention, the best option is for opponents of censorship to counter the nation’s Vicki Baggetts on their own turf. Right-wing activists have pressed their local officials, with a discouraging amount of success, to restrict poetry by Amanda Gorman and the novels of Jodi Picoult and Nora Roberts. The way to fight them is to follow their example: Show up and volunteer, serve on library boards and advocate for free expression. Force censorship to play defense.
Efforts to police what can be read and thought always fail, sooner or later. Reality asserts itself. History eventually comes for the censors. The task is to limit the damage they do in the meantime.
THE FOUR FREEDOMS, ACCORDING TO REPUBLICANS
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
On Tuesday, Republicans in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to pass a strict limit on bodily autonomy in the form of a 12-week abortion ban.
In addition to this new limit on abortion, the law extends the waiting period for people seeking abortions to 72 hours and puts onerous new rules on clinics. As intended, the net effect is to limit access to abortion and other reproductive health services to everyone but those with the time and resources to seek care outside the state.
North Carolina Republicans are obviously not the only ones fighting to ban, limit or restrict the right to bodily autonomy, whether abortion or gender-affirming health care for transgender people. All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the party’s powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court.
You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build.
larger effort to restore traditional hierarchies of gender and sexuality. What else is on the Republican Party’s agenda, if we use those states as our guide to the party’s priorities?
There is the push to free business from the suffocating grasp of child labor laws. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have advanced legislation to make it easier for children as young as 14 to work more hours, work without a permit and be subjected to more dangerous working conditions. The reason to loosen child labor laws — as a group of Wisconsin Republicans explained in a memo in support of a bill that would allow minors to serve alcohol at restaurants — is to deal with a shortage of low-wage workers in those states.
There are other ways to solve this problem — you could raise wages, for one — but in addition to making life easier for the midsize-capitalist class that is the material backbone of Republican politics, freeing businesses to hire underage workers for otherwise adult jobs would undermine organized labor and public education, two bêtes noires of the conservative movement.
Elsewhere in the country, Republican-led legislatures are placing harsh limits on what teachers and other educators can say in the classroom about American history or the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This week in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans discussion in general education courses at public institutions of “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” He also signed a bill that prohibits state colleges and universities from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs beyond what is necessary to retain accreditation as educational institutions.
Nationwide, Republicans in at least 18 states have passed laws or imposed bans designed to keep discussion of racial discrimination, structural inequality and other divisive concepts out of classrooms and far away from students.
Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit.
Republicans have also moved aggressively to expand the scope of “stand your ground” laws, which erode the longstanding duty to retreat in favor of a right to use deadly force in the face of perceived danger. These laws, which have been cited to defend shooters in countless cases, such as George Zimmerman in 2013, are associated with a moderate increase in firearm homicide rates, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open. Republicans, however, say they are necessary.
“If someone tries to kill you, you should have the right to return fire and preserve your life,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, who introduced a national “stand your ground” bill this month. “It’s time to reaffirm in law what exists in our Constitution and in the hearts of our fellow Americans,” he added. “We must abolish the legal duty of retreat everywhere.”
It should be said as well that some Republicans want to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits. Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee did just that this month — after a shooting in Nashville killed six people, including three children, in March — signing a bill that gives additional protections to the gun industry.
What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.
There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
On Tuesday, Republicans in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to pass a strict limit on bodily autonomy in the form of a 12-week abortion ban.
In addition to this new limit on abortion, the law extends the waiting period for people seeking abortions to 72 hours and puts onerous new rules on clinics. As intended, the net effect is to limit access to abortion and other reproductive health services to everyone but those with the time and resources to seek care outside the state.
North Carolina Republicans are obviously not the only ones fighting to ban, limit or restrict the right to bodily autonomy, whether abortion or gender-affirming health care for transgender people. All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the party’s powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court.
You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build.
larger effort to restore traditional hierarchies of gender and sexuality. What else is on the Republican Party’s agenda, if we use those states as our guide to the party’s priorities?
There is the push to free business from the suffocating grasp of child labor laws. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have advanced legislation to make it easier for children as young as 14 to work more hours, work without a permit and be subjected to more dangerous working conditions. The reason to loosen child labor laws — as a group of Wisconsin Republicans explained in a memo in support of a bill that would allow minors to serve alcohol at restaurants — is to deal with a shortage of low-wage workers in those states.
There are other ways to solve this problem — you could raise wages, for one — but in addition to making life easier for the midsize-capitalist class that is the material backbone of Republican politics, freeing businesses to hire underage workers for otherwise adult jobs would undermine organized labor and public education, two bêtes noires of the conservative movement.
Elsewhere in the country, Republican-led legislatures are placing harsh limits on what teachers and other educators can say in the classroom about American history or the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This week in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans discussion in general education courses at public institutions of “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” He also signed a bill that prohibits state colleges and universities from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs beyond what is necessary to retain accreditation as educational institutions.
Nationwide, Republicans in at least 18 states have passed laws or imposed bans designed to keep discussion of racial discrimination, structural inequality and other divisive concepts out of classrooms and far away from students.
Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit.
Republicans have also moved aggressively to expand the scope of “stand your ground” laws, which erode the longstanding duty to retreat in favor of a right to use deadly force in the face of perceived danger. These laws, which have been cited to defend shooters in countless cases, such as George Zimmerman in 2013, are associated with a moderate increase in firearm homicide rates, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open. Republicans, however, say they are necessary.
“If someone tries to kill you, you should have the right to return fire and preserve your life,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, who introduced a national “stand your ground” bill this month. “It’s time to reaffirm in law what exists in our Constitution and in the hearts of our fellow Americans,” he added. “We must abolish the legal duty of retreat everywhere.”
It should be said as well that some Republicans want to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits. Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee did just that this month — after a shooting in Nashville killed six people, including three children, in March — signing a bill that gives additional protections to the gun industry.
What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.
There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
Roosevelt’s four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society — a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.
DONALD TRUMP VERDICT IS A GOOD DAY FOR JUSTICE
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find the former president sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
It’s not every day a former president of the United States is found liable of sexual abuse and defamation.
Then again, America has never experienced a former president like the norm-busting, twice impeached, criminally indicated, serial lying, race-baiting, tax dodging, insurrectionist starting, Donald J. Trump.
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find that Trump sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury of six men and three women awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
The historic civil verdict is also a significant victory for the #MeToo movement and the more than two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. The defamation finding is also a small victory for the truth. A corrective to the sea of daily lies that Trump told during his tumultuous one term as president and that he continues to spread.
Right on cue, Trump took to social media to spout his usual all-caps defense. This time, it is the verdict that’s the “GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It’s a tired line in a country that is tired of Trump’s act — at least most of the country that doesn’t watch Fox News and still believes in truth, justice, and American democracy. Sadly, Trump still has many supporters in the Republican Party and remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024.
Many Trump voters knew in 2016 they were electing someone who has little respect for women. Before going to the polls, the country had seen him call women “nasty,” “horseface” and “dog.” Trump boasted about how he could grab women by their genitals.
Indeed, Trump doubled down on his demeaning and disgusting disregard for women during his deposition in the runup to the Carroll trial. When Carroll’s attorney asked Trump about his comments about grabbing women captured on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, the former president didn’t deny it. He didn’t flinch.
“Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” Trump said. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true.” He then added, “Unfortunately or fortunately.”
Trump’s casual response while under oath underscores his belief that he is above the law. For years, he has escaped accountability for many of his misdeeds. But the law may be finally, albeit slowly, catching up to him.
The Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud last year. In April, Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on 34 counts relating to falsifying records to pay off an adult film star. This summer, a district attorney in Georgia is expected to announce if Trump will be indicted there for his role in attempting to interfere in the 2020 election results.
Meanwhile, a special counsel continues to pursue two federal criminal investigations involving Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents that were removed when he left the White House.
Trump’s current presidential campaign can also be viewed as his best legal defense strategy. If reelected, he will likely do whatever it takes to pervert justice and evade the law. Trump is already on record calling for “termination” of the Constitution. He has long criticized and attacked the Justice Department, the FBI, and the courts, and will surely take a sledgehammer to those institutions if re-elected.
As such, American democracy remains in peril and will be tested if more criminal indictments emerge. Still, with an unwavering — if small — base of supporters and Republican lawmakers willing to defend him, no matter the charge or the evidence, the courts remain the one place where the truth can win out.
For now, E. Jean Carroll’s legal win is a victory for all women who have been sexually assaulted, including those by the former president. It is a good day for justice that shows that no one is above the law.
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find the former president sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.
by The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
It’s not every day a former president of the United States is found liable of sexual abuse and defamation.
Then again, America has never experienced a former president like the norm-busting, twice impeached, criminally indicated, serial lying, race-baiting, tax dodging, insurrectionist starting, Donald J. Trump.
It only took a federal jury in Manhattan three hours to unanimously find that Trump sexually abused and defamed magazine writer E. Jean Carroll. The jury of six men and three women awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
The historic civil verdict is also a significant victory for the #MeToo movement and the more than two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. The defamation finding is also a small victory for the truth. A corrective to the sea of daily lies that Trump told during his tumultuous one term as president and that he continues to spread.
Right on cue, Trump took to social media to spout his usual all-caps defense. This time, it is the verdict that’s the “GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It’s a tired line in a country that is tired of Trump’s act — at least most of the country that doesn’t watch Fox News and still believes in truth, justice, and American democracy. Sadly, Trump still has many supporters in the Republican Party and remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024.
Many Trump voters knew in 2016 they were electing someone who has little respect for women. Before going to the polls, the country had seen him call women “nasty,” “horseface” and “dog.” Trump boasted about how he could grab women by their genitals.
Indeed, Trump doubled down on his demeaning and disgusting disregard for women during his deposition in the runup to the Carroll trial. When Carroll’s attorney asked Trump about his comments about grabbing women captured on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, the former president didn’t deny it. He didn’t flinch.
“Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” Trump said. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true.” He then added, “Unfortunately or fortunately.”
Trump’s casual response while under oath underscores his belief that he is above the law. For years, he has escaped accountability for many of his misdeeds. But the law may be finally, albeit slowly, catching up to him.
The Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud last year. In April, Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on 34 counts relating to falsifying records to pay off an adult film star. This summer, a district attorney in Georgia is expected to announce if Trump will be indicted there for his role in attempting to interfere in the 2020 election results.
Meanwhile, a special counsel continues to pursue two federal criminal investigations involving Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents that were removed when he left the White House.
Trump’s current presidential campaign can also be viewed as his best legal defense strategy. If reelected, he will likely do whatever it takes to pervert justice and evade the law. Trump is already on record calling for “termination” of the Constitution. He has long criticized and attacked the Justice Department, the FBI, and the courts, and will surely take a sledgehammer to those institutions if re-elected.
As such, American democracy remains in peril and will be tested if more criminal indictments emerge. Still, with an unwavering — if small — base of supporters and Republican lawmakers willing to defend him, no matter the charge or the evidence, the courts remain the one place where the truth can win out.
For now, E. Jean Carroll’s legal win is a victory for all women who have been sexually assaulted, including those by the former president. It is a good day for justice that shows that no one is above the law.
CLARENCE THOMAS ENTERS THE DANGER ZONE
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The matter of Clarence Thomas’s relationship with billionaire Harlan Crow has now entered new territory, treacherous for the justice and the court on which he serves.
Until Thursday’s ProPublica’s report disclosing Crow’s purchase of property owned by Thomas and his family in 2014, the story was about Thomas’s judgment, or lack thereof, in accepting large amounts of luxury travel from the Republican megadonor, and whether he had failed once again to comply with federal financial disclosure rules.
The latest revelation escalates the situation to a new and concerning level. This time, Thomas directly received money from Crow — perhaps in excess of the market value of the Chatham County, Ga., properties that Crow purchased from Thomas and his kin. This is no longer about receiving “personal hospitality.” It’s about a financial transaction between Thomas and a GOP donor who has also subsidized his vacations.
There is no doubt that the sale of personal real estate to Crow should have been reported on the justice’s financial disclosure form for 2014, and there is no excuse for failing to do so. The most logical explanation is that Thomas, whose relationship with Crow had already been the subject of unflattering news reports, wanted to keep it from public view.
Thomas’s relationship with Crow and the accuracy of his financial disclosure reports must now be fully scrutinized by the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal judiciary and may refer the matter to the Justice Department for additional action. As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. surely understands, this is a problem not just for Thomas but also for the court and its public legitimacy.
According to the ProPublica report, a company controlled by Crow bought the properties in Savannah, Ga., for $133,363 from Thomas, the family of his late brother, and his mother Leola Williams, who continued to live there.
“Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees,” ProPublica reported. “The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.”
Crow told the publication that the transaction was “at market rate.” The year before, he bought two other properties — a vacant lot and a house on the same block for $40,000. Thomas, in earlier financial disclosure forms, listed his one-third interest in “rental property” in Savannah at $15,000 or less.
Crow said his interest in the property was “to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice” and “approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”
Fine, but the real estate deal raises several questions, among them: Why didn’t Thomas report the transaction on his financial disclosure forms? And did Thomas’s mother pay Crow rent as he improved the home and paid taxes on it? ProPublica posed this question to Crow, but he did not answer.
Thomas has said that he didn’t have to disclose his Crow-paid vacations under the exemption for “personal hospitality” — a dubious defense when it comes to his use of Crow’s private jet. Thomas had reported travel at Crow’s expense before he stopped disclosing it in the wake of negative news stories.
But Thomas’s obligation to report the real estate deal couldn’t be clearer. He had reported the property as an asset. Selling it was a transaction that necessitated disclosure.
The Ethics in Government Act requires judges, like other senior officials, to file annual financial reports, and sets out the consequences for failing to comply. It further provides that the relevant party, which in the case of judges is the Judicial Conference, “shall refer to the Attorney General the name of any individual which such official or committee has reasonable cause to believe has willfully failed to file information required to be reported.” A violation can result in a fine under the criminal code.
Did Thomas act “knowingly and willfully” in failing to report the property sale? One relevant consideration: The Judicial Conference has seen this kind of nondisclosure from Thomas before.
Like other senior officials in government, justices must disclose their spouses’ sources of income, although not the dollar amounts. On his financial disclosure forms, Thomas simply marked the box labeled “NONE” for noninvestment income earned by his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. In fact, she was employed by the House Republican leadership, Hillsdale College and the Heritage Foundation, earning more than $1.6 million from those sources, according to separate records compiled by Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice.
Thomas’s explanation — a “misunderstanding” of the reporting rules — was unconvincing then, and relevant to the situation now. As the instructions for “filer’s spouse” state, “Report only the date(s) and source of earned income from any source that exceeds $1,000.”
Second, Thomas had complied with those rules for the previous decade, reporting the source of his wife’s income during his years as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, when he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, and for the first five years of his tenure on the Supreme Court.
The justice is a repeat offender. Judges aren’t eager to police their own — especially not a sitting justice. Human nature and history suggest the Judicial Conference won’t do a thing. But the Georgia real estate deal will make that dodge harder. And the law requires otherwise.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
The matter of Clarence Thomas’s relationship with billionaire Harlan Crow has now entered new territory, treacherous for the justice and the court on which he serves.
Until Thursday’s ProPublica’s report disclosing Crow’s purchase of property owned by Thomas and his family in 2014, the story was about Thomas’s judgment, or lack thereof, in accepting large amounts of luxury travel from the Republican megadonor, and whether he had failed once again to comply with federal financial disclosure rules.
The latest revelation escalates the situation to a new and concerning level. This time, Thomas directly received money from Crow — perhaps in excess of the market value of the Chatham County, Ga., properties that Crow purchased from Thomas and his kin. This is no longer about receiving “personal hospitality.” It’s about a financial transaction between Thomas and a GOP donor who has also subsidized his vacations.
There is no doubt that the sale of personal real estate to Crow should have been reported on the justice’s financial disclosure form for 2014, and there is no excuse for failing to do so. The most logical explanation is that Thomas, whose relationship with Crow had already been the subject of unflattering news reports, wanted to keep it from public view.
Thomas’s relationship with Crow and the accuracy of his financial disclosure reports must now be fully scrutinized by the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal judiciary and may refer the matter to the Justice Department for additional action. As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. surely understands, this is a problem not just for Thomas but also for the court and its public legitimacy.
According to the ProPublica report, a company controlled by Crow bought the properties in Savannah, Ga., for $133,363 from Thomas, the family of his late brother, and his mother Leola Williams, who continued to live there.
“Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees,” ProPublica reported. “The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.”
Crow told the publication that the transaction was “at market rate.” The year before, he bought two other properties — a vacant lot and a house on the same block for $40,000. Thomas, in earlier financial disclosure forms, listed his one-third interest in “rental property” in Savannah at $15,000 or less.
Crow said his interest in the property was “to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice” and “approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”
Fine, but the real estate deal raises several questions, among them: Why didn’t Thomas report the transaction on his financial disclosure forms? And did Thomas’s mother pay Crow rent as he improved the home and paid taxes on it? ProPublica posed this question to Crow, but he did not answer.
Thomas has said that he didn’t have to disclose his Crow-paid vacations under the exemption for “personal hospitality” — a dubious defense when it comes to his use of Crow’s private jet. Thomas had reported travel at Crow’s expense before he stopped disclosing it in the wake of negative news stories.
But Thomas’s obligation to report the real estate deal couldn’t be clearer. He had reported the property as an asset. Selling it was a transaction that necessitated disclosure.
The Ethics in Government Act requires judges, like other senior officials, to file annual financial reports, and sets out the consequences for failing to comply. It further provides that the relevant party, which in the case of judges is the Judicial Conference, “shall refer to the Attorney General the name of any individual which such official or committee has reasonable cause to believe has willfully failed to file information required to be reported.” A violation can result in a fine under the criminal code.
Did Thomas act “knowingly and willfully” in failing to report the property sale? One relevant consideration: The Judicial Conference has seen this kind of nondisclosure from Thomas before.
Like other senior officials in government, justices must disclose their spouses’ sources of income, although not the dollar amounts. On his financial disclosure forms, Thomas simply marked the box labeled “NONE” for noninvestment income earned by his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. In fact, she was employed by the House Republican leadership, Hillsdale College and the Heritage Foundation, earning more than $1.6 million from those sources, according to separate records compiled by Common Cause and the Alliance for Justice.
Thomas’s explanation — a “misunderstanding” of the reporting rules — was unconvincing then, and relevant to the situation now. As the instructions for “filer’s spouse” state, “Report only the date(s) and source of earned income from any source that exceeds $1,000.”
Second, Thomas had complied with those rules for the previous decade, reporting the source of his wife’s income during his years as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, when he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, and for the first five years of his tenure on the Supreme Court.
The justice is a repeat offender. Judges aren’t eager to police their own — especially not a sitting justice. Human nature and history suggest the Judicial Conference won’t do a thing. But the Georgia real estate deal will make that dodge harder. And the law requires otherwise.
CLARENCE THOMAS IS AS FREE AS EVER TO TREAT HIS SEAT LIKE A WINNING LOTTERY TICKET
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
We have Clarence Thomas to thank for the latest illustration of how the Supreme Court’s outsize power, isolation and virtual immunity from public pressure has made it a magnet for corruption and influence-peddling.
For more than 20 years, according to an investigation by ProPublica, Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts — including luxury trips to private resorts — from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of extensive support for Republican politicians, conservative media and the Federalist Society.
Under a federal law passed after Watergate, it appears that Thomas was supposed to disclose these gifts and trips to the government. He hasn’t. Instead, Thomas has lived a lavish life on the largess of his rich confidant while posing, in public, as the most humble and unassuming of the justices. In return, Crow has gotten direct access to one of the most influential and powerful men in America.
Not a bad trade.
If Thomas were an ordinary federal judge, this conduct would be an obvious — and flagrant — violation of the judiciary’s code of ethics. But that code doesn’t actually bind the nine members of the Supreme Court. For them, it is mere guidance.
For his part, Thomas denies wrongdoing.
“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in a statement. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”
And while several Democrats, most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called for investigations and even impeachment, there’s no real expectation that Thomas will even answer questions about his conduct, much less face consequences for it. He is still as free as he’s ever been to treat his seat on the court — ostensibly a public trust — like a winning lottery ticket, to redeem with the nearest friendly billionaire (who happens to have a collection of Nazi paraphernalia and Hitler-related souvenirs).
Last year, in the wake of a different Supreme Court ethics scandal — involving a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation aimed at Republican justices like Thomas and Samuel Alito — I wrote about the problem of lifetime tenure for judges and justices. The framers of the Constitution embraced service on “good behavior” because they wanted a truly independent judiciary, free from the corruption and venality of ordinary politics.
As Alexander Hamilton explains in Federalist No. 78, “That inflexible and uniform adherence to the rights of the Constitution, and of individuals, which we perceive to be indispensable in the courts of justice, can certainly not be expected from judges who hold their offices by a temporary commission.”
“Periodical appointments, however regulated,” he writes, “or by whomsoever made, would, in some way or other, be fatal to their necessary independence.”
But, I asked, “What if lifetime tenure, rather than raising the barriers to corruption, makes it easier to influence the court by giving interested parties the time and space to operate?” My answer was that it does. Nothing that has happened since makes me think any differently.
There is a second point to make here, one that harks back to arguments from the anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution.
Turning his eye to the Supreme Court, the writer who called himself Brutus blanched at the power and authority that the Philadelphia convention entrusted in such a small group of men. “Every body of men invested with office are tenacious of power,” he wrote. “The same principle will influence them to extend their power, and increase their rights” and, he continued, “enlarge the sphere of their own authority.”
Taking aim at the other source of concentrated power in the proposed new government, the Senate, the Maryland antifederalist Samuel Chase complained that “its members are too few” and that its small size leaves it vulnerable to “bribery and corruption.”
“No free people ever reposed power in so small a number,” he said.
Although I can’t say for certain, it sounds like both Brutus and Chase are channeling Machiavelli’s observation that “the few always behave in the mode of the few.” Build an exclusive, oligarchical institution, and you’ll get an exclusive, oligarchical politics.
This has always been true of the Supreme Court — a reliable friend of property, capital and class rule throughout its 234-year history, occasional bouts of decency notwithstanding — but it has become an acute problem in this era of unchecked judicial supremacy. As the court arrogates more and greater power to itself, and grows both distant from and contemptuous of public opinion, it naturally attracts flatterers and intriguers.
With his close ties to a powerful, property-owning billionaire, Thomas embodies the historic role of the Supreme Court in American politics, not as a liberator or defender of the rights of political and social minorities, but as a partner to and ally of moneyed interests.
Thomas also shows us something of the real world of corruption. The Supreme Court’s ruling in McDonnell v. United States notwithstanding, corruption is much more than a cartoonish quid pro quo, where cash changes hands and the state is used for private gain. Corruption, more often than not, looks like an ordinary relationship, even a friendship. It is perks and benefits freely given to a powerful friend. It is expensive gifts and tokens of appreciation between those friends, except that one holds office and the other wants to influence its ideological course. It is being enmeshed in networks of patronage that look innocent from the inside but suspect to those who look with clearer eyes from the outside.
The Supreme Court is not going to police itself. The only remedy to the problem of the court’s corruption — to say nothing of its power — is to subject it to the same checks and limits we associate with the other branches. The court may adjudicate disputes within the constitutional order, but it does not exist above or outside its reach. In practice, this means the Democratic Party will have to abandon its squeamishness about challenging and shaping the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Whether it’s through structural change or a simple ethics code, it is up to elected officials to remind the court that it serves the republic, and not the other way around.
We have a poor record of elite accountability in American politics. But even by our pitiful standards, we seem to be living in an era of almost total impunity for people of influence. Both the powerful and their apologists treat political authority as a grant of freedom from rules, responsibilities, duties and obligations. You see it in the case of Justice Thomas, whose defenders say he is the victim of a smear campaign. His relationship with Harlan Crow, The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes, is a “non-bombshell.”
This is not how a republic should work. Our leaders — who chose to vie for influence — should be shackled by the power they wield, not free to abuse it for their own interests and their own pleasures. And if they won’t act in the spirit of public service, then we should make them.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
We have Clarence Thomas to thank for the latest illustration of how the Supreme Court’s outsize power, isolation and virtual immunity from public pressure has made it a magnet for corruption and influence-peddling.
For more than 20 years, according to an investigation by ProPublica, Justice Thomas received lavish and expensive gifts — including luxury trips to private resorts — from Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire and real estate developer with a long record of extensive support for Republican politicians, conservative media and the Federalist Society.
Under a federal law passed after Watergate, it appears that Thomas was supposed to disclose these gifts and trips to the government. He hasn’t. Instead, Thomas has lived a lavish life on the largess of his rich confidant while posing, in public, as the most humble and unassuming of the justices. In return, Crow has gotten direct access to one of the most influential and powerful men in America.
Not a bad trade.
If Thomas were an ordinary federal judge, this conduct would be an obvious — and flagrant — violation of the judiciary’s code of ethics. But that code doesn’t actually bind the nine members of the Supreme Court. For them, it is mere guidance.
For his part, Thomas denies wrongdoing.
“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable,” Thomas said in a statement. “I have endeavored to follow that counsel throughout my tenure and have always sought to comply with the disclosure guidelines.”
And while several Democrats, most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called for investigations and even impeachment, there’s no real expectation that Thomas will even answer questions about his conduct, much less face consequences for it. He is still as free as he’s ever been to treat his seat on the court — ostensibly a public trust — like a winning lottery ticket, to redeem with the nearest friendly billionaire (who happens to have a collection of Nazi paraphernalia and Hitler-related souvenirs).
Last year, in the wake of a different Supreme Court ethics scandal — involving a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation aimed at Republican justices like Thomas and Samuel Alito — I wrote about the problem of lifetime tenure for judges and justices. The framers of the Constitution embraced service on “good behavior” because they wanted a truly independent judiciary, free from the corruption and venality of ordinary politics.
As Alexander Hamilton explains in Federalist No. 78, “That inflexible and uniform adherence to the rights of the Constitution, and of individuals, which we perceive to be indispensable in the courts of justice, can certainly not be expected from judges who hold their offices by a temporary commission.”
“Periodical appointments, however regulated,” he writes, “or by whomsoever made, would, in some way or other, be fatal to their necessary independence.”
But, I asked, “What if lifetime tenure, rather than raising the barriers to corruption, makes it easier to influence the court by giving interested parties the time and space to operate?” My answer was that it does. Nothing that has happened since makes me think any differently.
There is a second point to make here, one that harks back to arguments from the anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution.
Turning his eye to the Supreme Court, the writer who called himself Brutus blanched at the power and authority that the Philadelphia convention entrusted in such a small group of men. “Every body of men invested with office are tenacious of power,” he wrote. “The same principle will influence them to extend their power, and increase their rights” and, he continued, “enlarge the sphere of their own authority.”
Taking aim at the other source of concentrated power in the proposed new government, the Senate, the Maryland antifederalist Samuel Chase complained that “its members are too few” and that its small size leaves it vulnerable to “bribery and corruption.”
“No free people ever reposed power in so small a number,” he said.
Although I can’t say for certain, it sounds like both Brutus and Chase are channeling Machiavelli’s observation that “the few always behave in the mode of the few.” Build an exclusive, oligarchical institution, and you’ll get an exclusive, oligarchical politics.
This has always been true of the Supreme Court — a reliable friend of property, capital and class rule throughout its 234-year history, occasional bouts of decency notwithstanding — but it has become an acute problem in this era of unchecked judicial supremacy. As the court arrogates more and greater power to itself, and grows both distant from and contemptuous of public opinion, it naturally attracts flatterers and intriguers.
With his close ties to a powerful, property-owning billionaire, Thomas embodies the historic role of the Supreme Court in American politics, not as a liberator or defender of the rights of political and social minorities, but as a partner to and ally of moneyed interests.
Thomas also shows us something of the real world of corruption. The Supreme Court’s ruling in McDonnell v. United States notwithstanding, corruption is much more than a cartoonish quid pro quo, where cash changes hands and the state is used for private gain. Corruption, more often than not, looks like an ordinary relationship, even a friendship. It is perks and benefits freely given to a powerful friend. It is expensive gifts and tokens of appreciation between those friends, except that one holds office and the other wants to influence its ideological course. It is being enmeshed in networks of patronage that look innocent from the inside but suspect to those who look with clearer eyes from the outside.
The Supreme Court is not going to police itself. The only remedy to the problem of the court’s corruption — to say nothing of its power — is to subject it to the same checks and limits we associate with the other branches. The court may adjudicate disputes within the constitutional order, but it does not exist above or outside its reach. In practice, this means the Democratic Party will have to abandon its squeamishness about challenging and shaping the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Whether it’s through structural change or a simple ethics code, it is up to elected officials to remind the court that it serves the republic, and not the other way around.
We have a poor record of elite accountability in American politics. But even by our pitiful standards, we seem to be living in an era of almost total impunity for people of influence. Both the powerful and their apologists treat political authority as a grant of freedom from rules, responsibilities, duties and obligations. You see it in the case of Justice Thomas, whose defenders say he is the victim of a smear campaign. His relationship with Harlan Crow, The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes, is a “non-bombshell.”
This is not how a republic should work. Our leaders — who chose to vie for influence — should be shackled by the power they wield, not free to abuse it for their own interests and their own pleasures. And if they won’t act in the spirit of public service, then we should make them.
TRUMP IS INDICTED, AND JUSTICE IS SERVED
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg made history on Thursday, indicting a former U.S. president for the first time. The indictment is under seal. From all indications, however, former president Donald Trump was indicted for falsification of business records (a crime regularly prosecuted under New York law), beginning before the 2016 election. (The hush-money payments continued during his presidency.) If news reports are correct that Trump was indicted for a felony, Bragg will have cited another crime that Trump allegedly furthered through bookkeeping shenanigans.
Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Trump, told me, “This is the first step in true legal accountability. But it will be important to remember that the rule of law requires us to presume him innocent now that he is a criminal defendant.”
No felony is inconsequential, nor is the likely charge incidental to Trump’s sustained attack on our democracy. The scheme Trump allegedly set up to keep adult-film star Stormy Daniels quiet about an affair was intended to pull the wool over voters’ eyes, the first of other attempts to defraud them, and the coverup scheme extended into his presidency when he lied in denying the affair. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and served jail time for attempting to conceal these very payments. (Rather than ponder why Bragg prosecuted Trump for the same facts, it’s fair to wonder why the Justice Department did not prosecute Trump immediately after he left office.)
Norman Eisen, co-counsel for the House impeachment managers and author of numerous analyses on the case, told me that facts publicly known suggest this “is a clear violation of the New York books and records statute.” He further argues that if “it was done to benefit the Trump campaign — an alleged illegal contribution — it is also a felony, and because it could have affected the extremely close 2016 election, it is also a serious alleged offense against our democracy.”
Contrary to some commentators’ argument that New York law might be preempted by federal law, a Just Security report makes clear that plenty of state laws are not preempted, including “a limitation on corporate contributions to federal campaigns; a violation of consumer protection laws … and fraudulent transfers of donations from PACs ostensibly founded to support presidential campaigns.” Bragg has a strong case that Trump’s attempt to conceal hush money is precisely the sort of skulduggery that states can pursue.
Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, told me, “Trump now faces the possibility of criminal accountability for his actions in New York. And this just the beginning.” He predicted: “Before this is over, Trump may be facing four possible prosecutions and accountability in New York, Georgia and at the Justice Department.”
A few aspects of the case are worth underscoring:
1. The hue and cry has gone up that this is a ticky-tacky indictment. The complaint here seems to be that because Trump is under investigation for important federal crimes, the state cannot enforce its own laws when he violates them. But the rule of law does not require that someone under investigation for serious felonies not be arrested for, say, drunken driving or shoplifting. No suspect can avoid consequences for lesser crimes pending indictment for more serious ones.
“It’s a historic breakthrough with a clear message that no one is above the law,” said Ryan Goodman, founding co-editor in chief of Just Security.
2. Trump has already started threatening and demonizing Bragg. He has mused about death and destruction and summoned his shock troops to take back their country, just as he did in the run-up to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. After reports of the indictment, Trump posted a diatribe decrying prosecutors as “Thugs and Radical Left Monsters.” It’s noteworthy that his first complaint is that they indicted the 45th president and a 2024 presidential candidate. The rule of law is indifferent to such facts.
Any attempt to thwart our legal system with violence and chaos cannot be tolerated. The assigned New York judge should use the full array of judicial power, including a gag order, to prevent threats to the district attorney, court staff and jurors. (If Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for a defense of “selective prosecution,” he’ll most likely fail. In the criminal prosecution of the Trump Organization, Judge Juan Merchan disallowed this defense.)
Rep. Daniel S. Goldman (D-N.Y.), former counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, tweeted, “Now as a criminal defendant, Donald Trump has numerous rights to defend himself. But that defense should take place in the court of law, not in the halls of Congress or in the political sphere. The rule of law demands it.”
3. This is probably not the last indictment. Trump attorney Evan Corcoran has been compelled to testify in the Mar-a-Lago espionage and obstruction case. And former vice president Mike Pence has been ordered to testify before a grand jury in the Jan. 6 investigation. Other news reports suggest the Georgia state criminal case (focused on the phony electors) is briskly moving along.
Trump is being prosecuted not because he is a former president but because his status as a former president does not shield him from the law. “Whatever one thinks of Trump, it’s a sad day for America when a former president is indicted,” said former New Jersey Democratic representative Tom Malinowski. Also sad, he said, is the prospect that jurors in any Trump trial would need “armed protection from people a former president will be inciting to violence.”
New York state judges, unlike some right-wing, handpicked federal judges, are likely to dismiss any frivolous arguments and attempts to delay from Trump’s attorneys. Trump is about to be treated like any criminal defendant. The rule of law seems finally to have caught up to him.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg made history on Thursday, indicting a former U.S. president for the first time. The indictment is under seal. From all indications, however, former president Donald Trump was indicted for falsification of business records (a crime regularly prosecuted under New York law), beginning before the 2016 election. (The hush-money payments continued during his presidency.) If news reports are correct that Trump was indicted for a felony, Bragg will have cited another crime that Trump allegedly furthered through bookkeeping shenanigans.
Former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Trump, told me, “This is the first step in true legal accountability. But it will be important to remember that the rule of law requires us to presume him innocent now that he is a criminal defendant.”
No felony is inconsequential, nor is the likely charge incidental to Trump’s sustained attack on our democracy. The scheme Trump allegedly set up to keep adult-film star Stormy Daniels quiet about an affair was intended to pull the wool over voters’ eyes, the first of other attempts to defraud them, and the coverup scheme extended into his presidency when he lied in denying the affair. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and served jail time for attempting to conceal these very payments. (Rather than ponder why Bragg prosecuted Trump for the same facts, it’s fair to wonder why the Justice Department did not prosecute Trump immediately after he left office.)
Norman Eisen, co-counsel for the House impeachment managers and author of numerous analyses on the case, told me that facts publicly known suggest this “is a clear violation of the New York books and records statute.” He further argues that if “it was done to benefit the Trump campaign — an alleged illegal contribution — it is also a felony, and because it could have affected the extremely close 2016 election, it is also a serious alleged offense against our democracy.”
Contrary to some commentators’ argument that New York law might be preempted by federal law, a Just Security report makes clear that plenty of state laws are not preempted, including “a limitation on corporate contributions to federal campaigns; a violation of consumer protection laws … and fraudulent transfers of donations from PACs ostensibly founded to support presidential campaigns.” Bragg has a strong case that Trump’s attempt to conceal hush money is precisely the sort of skulduggery that states can pursue.
Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, told me, “Trump now faces the possibility of criminal accountability for his actions in New York. And this just the beginning.” He predicted: “Before this is over, Trump may be facing four possible prosecutions and accountability in New York, Georgia and at the Justice Department.”
A few aspects of the case are worth underscoring:
1. The hue and cry has gone up that this is a ticky-tacky indictment. The complaint here seems to be that because Trump is under investigation for important federal crimes, the state cannot enforce its own laws when he violates them. But the rule of law does not require that someone under investigation for serious felonies not be arrested for, say, drunken driving or shoplifting. No suspect can avoid consequences for lesser crimes pending indictment for more serious ones.
“It’s a historic breakthrough with a clear message that no one is above the law,” said Ryan Goodman, founding co-editor in chief of Just Security.
2. Trump has already started threatening and demonizing Bragg. He has mused about death and destruction and summoned his shock troops to take back their country, just as he did in the run-up to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. After reports of the indictment, Trump posted a diatribe decrying prosecutors as “Thugs and Radical Left Monsters.” It’s noteworthy that his first complaint is that they indicted the 45th president and a 2024 presidential candidate. The rule of law is indifferent to such facts.
Any attempt to thwart our legal system with violence and chaos cannot be tolerated. The assigned New York judge should use the full array of judicial power, including a gag order, to prevent threats to the district attorney, court staff and jurors. (If Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for a defense of “selective prosecution,” he’ll most likely fail. In the criminal prosecution of the Trump Organization, Judge Juan Merchan disallowed this defense.)
Rep. Daniel S. Goldman (D-N.Y.), former counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, tweeted, “Now as a criminal defendant, Donald Trump has numerous rights to defend himself. But that defense should take place in the court of law, not in the halls of Congress or in the political sphere. The rule of law demands it.”
3. This is probably not the last indictment. Trump attorney Evan Corcoran has been compelled to testify in the Mar-a-Lago espionage and obstruction case. And former vice president Mike Pence has been ordered to testify before a grand jury in the Jan. 6 investigation. Other news reports suggest the Georgia state criminal case (focused on the phony electors) is briskly moving along.
Trump is being prosecuted not because he is a former president but because his status as a former president does not shield him from the law. “Whatever one thinks of Trump, it’s a sad day for America when a former president is indicted,” said former New Jersey Democratic representative Tom Malinowski. Also sad, he said, is the prospect that jurors in any Trump trial would need “armed protection from people a former president will be inciting to violence.”
New York state judges, unlike some right-wing, handpicked federal judges, are likely to dismiss any frivolous arguments and attempts to delay from Trump’s attorneys. Trump is about to be treated like any criminal defendant. The rule of law seems finally to have caught up to him.
THE DANGEROUS RACE TO PUT MORE CHILDREN TO WORK
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In February, the Department of Labor announced that it had discovered 102 teenagers working in hazardous conditions for a company that cleans meatpacking equipment at factories around the country, a violation of federal standards. The minors, ages 13 to 17, were working with dangerous chemicals and cleaning brisket saws and head splitters; three of them suffered injuries, including one with caustic burns.
Ten of those children worked in Arkansas, including six at a factory owned by the state’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods. Rather than taking immediate action to tighten standards and prevent further exploitation of children, Arkansas went the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that would actually make it easier for companies to put children to work. The bill eliminated a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed, a process that required them to verify their age and get the permission of a parent or guardian.
Arkansas is at the vanguard of a concerted effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations that have been in place for decades to protect children from abuse. Echoing that philosophy, bills are moving through at least nine other state legislatures that would expand work hours for children, lift restrictions on hazardous occupations, allow them to work in locations that serve alcohol, or lower the state minimum wage for minors. The Labor Department says there has been a 69 percent increase since 2018 in the illegal employment of children.
The response in these states is not to protect those children from exploitation, but instead to make it legal. Voters in these states may support deregulation, but they may not know that businesses can use these bills to work children harder, cut their wages and put them in danger. There is time for them to persuade lawmakers to say no to these abuses.
Ms. Sanders, formerly the press secretary for President Donald Trump, made clear in her inaugural address in January the disdain for the protective role of government that is driving this effort. “As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, D.C., will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River,” she said. “We will get the overregulating, micromanaging, bureaucratic tyrants off of your backs, out of your wallets and out of your lives.”
Lawmakers in these states have been vigorously lobbied by industry groups who like the flexibility of teenage employees and say that more children are needed in the work force to make up for labor shortages. One of the principal lobbying organizations pushing these bills in several states is the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group that supports Republican candidates and has long opposed most forms of regulation, as well as the Affordable Care Act. It has issued news releases praising lawmakers for passing bills that let businesses hire more minors for longer hours, and taking credit for supporting these efforts.
The Arkansas governor’s spokesperson said in a statement that the work permit requirement was “an arbitrary burden on parents,” but opponents noted that many child workers don’t have parents or guardians to look after their interests. In the cleaning company case, several of the child workers were unaccompanied minors who recently came over the southern border, according to their lawyers. Soon, they won’t even have the state to approve their employment or working conditions.
The real target of these rollbacks is not after-school jobs at the corner hardware store; they will have a much bigger effect on a labor force that includes many unaccompanied migrant children who work long hours to make or package products sold by big companies like General Mills, J. Crew, Target, Whole Foods and PepsiCo. As a recent New York Times investigation documented, children are being widely employed across the country in exhausting and often dangerous jobs working for some of the biggest names in American retailing and manufacturing. (Several of those companies later told The Times that they would investigate any illegal practices and try to end them.)
Hundreds of children described in the Times report were working in violation of federal labor standards, which bar child workers from a long list of hazardous jobs and forbid children under 16 from working more than three hours a day or after 7 p.m. on school days unless they work on a farm. (Those under 14 are prohibited from working in all but a handful of jobs.)
Many of the minors crossed unaccompanied from Latin American countries and may not know when their employment violates the law. A 13-year-old who was burned with caustic chemicals while working for Packers Sanitation Services in Nebraska told investigators the accident occurred during a shift that lasted from 11 p.m. to 5 or 7 a.m., a direct violation of multiple federal laws. The Labor Department imposed a $1.5 million fine on the cleaning company, which is owned by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity firms.
Despite the evidence that more children are being exploited and hurt in this way, state lawmakers are passing bills that defy the federal standards. They are inviting a court challenge, and, in effect, daring the Labor Department to come after them, knowing the department often lacks the manpower to prevent violations of federal law. The Ohio Senate, which passed a bill earlier this month extending working hours for minors under 16, in violation of federal standards, also approved a resolution urging Congress to do the same.
One of the worst bills, introduced by Republicans in Iowa, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meat coolers and industrial laundries, and 15-year-olds to lift heavy items onto shelves. It is backed by, among others, the independent business federation, the Iowa Grocery Industry Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by Charles Koch, the industrialist who supported many national efforts to deregulate businesses.
If states will not perform a role that has been fundamental for a century — protecting workers from abuse — the federal government will have to increase its efforts to do so. After the Times investigation was published, the Biden administration announced a series of new efforts to crack down on illegal child labor, many of which hold promise as possible deterrents.
The Labor Department said it would intensify its investigations of business violations, not just by direct employers of children but also by the larger companies that contract with those employers, or that use children in their supply chain. In many cases, big companies use contractors or staffing agencies to hire children and then claim they had nothing to do with the abuses. Some of those agencies shut down and reopen under new names when they are fined, said Meredith Stewart, a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The companies that hire them should be held accountable. The department also has the authority to seize any products that are made using illegal child labor, even through the use of contractors. Seema Nanda, the department’s chief legal officer, said in an interview that it would use that authority aggressively, as well as every other litigation tool available.
The administration also said it would do more to coordinate the protection of children, particularly those who migrate across the border unaccompanied by a parent and then receive little supervision once they leave immigration shelters. In some cases, The Times reported, H.H.S. has lost touch with designated sponsors and the children themselves, leaving them vulnerable to sex trafficking or other criminal exploitation.
The administration lacks all the tools to do the job right. Because its budget has been held flat by Congress, the Wage and Hour Division lost 12 percent of its staff between 2010 and 2019, and Ms. Nanda’s office lost more than 100 lawyers, so the Labor Department doesn’t have enough investigators to effectively pursue illegal child labor practices. In addition, under current law, the maximum fine for a labor violation by a company is $15,138 per child — often little more than the cost of doing business for big companies.
Comprehensive immigration reform would be the best insurance that migrant children have the protections they need. If families can stay together, minors will be less vulnerable to abuse and better able to seek legal protection.
The administration has asked Congress for more enforcement money in its current budget, and for higher penalties. Neither request is likely to be granted, and immigration reform seems far in the distance. Protections against “oppressive child labor,” however, have been part of American law since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938; dismantling those safeguards now puts young lives at risk.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
In February, the Department of Labor announced that it had discovered 102 teenagers working in hazardous conditions for a company that cleans meatpacking equipment at factories around the country, a violation of federal standards. The minors, ages 13 to 17, were working with dangerous chemicals and cleaning brisket saws and head splitters; three of them suffered injuries, including one with caustic burns.
Ten of those children worked in Arkansas, including six at a factory owned by the state’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods. Rather than taking immediate action to tighten standards and prevent further exploitation of children, Arkansas went the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that would actually make it easier for companies to put children to work. The bill eliminated a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed, a process that required them to verify their age and get the permission of a parent or guardian.
Arkansas is at the vanguard of a concerted effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations that have been in place for decades to protect children from abuse. Echoing that philosophy, bills are moving through at least nine other state legislatures that would expand work hours for children, lift restrictions on hazardous occupations, allow them to work in locations that serve alcohol, or lower the state minimum wage for minors. The Labor Department says there has been a 69 percent increase since 2018 in the illegal employment of children.
The response in these states is not to protect those children from exploitation, but instead to make it legal. Voters in these states may support deregulation, but they may not know that businesses can use these bills to work children harder, cut their wages and put them in danger. There is time for them to persuade lawmakers to say no to these abuses.
Ms. Sanders, formerly the press secretary for President Donald Trump, made clear in her inaugural address in January the disdain for the protective role of government that is driving this effort. “As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, D.C., will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River,” she said. “We will get the overregulating, micromanaging, bureaucratic tyrants off of your backs, out of your wallets and out of your lives.”
Lawmakers in these states have been vigorously lobbied by industry groups who like the flexibility of teenage employees and say that more children are needed in the work force to make up for labor shortages. One of the principal lobbying organizations pushing these bills in several states is the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group that supports Republican candidates and has long opposed most forms of regulation, as well as the Affordable Care Act. It has issued news releases praising lawmakers for passing bills that let businesses hire more minors for longer hours, and taking credit for supporting these efforts.
The Arkansas governor’s spokesperson said in a statement that the work permit requirement was “an arbitrary burden on parents,” but opponents noted that many child workers don’t have parents or guardians to look after their interests. In the cleaning company case, several of the child workers were unaccompanied minors who recently came over the southern border, according to their lawyers. Soon, they won’t even have the state to approve their employment or working conditions.
The real target of these rollbacks is not after-school jobs at the corner hardware store; they will have a much bigger effect on a labor force that includes many unaccompanied migrant children who work long hours to make or package products sold by big companies like General Mills, J. Crew, Target, Whole Foods and PepsiCo. As a recent New York Times investigation documented, children are being widely employed across the country in exhausting and often dangerous jobs working for some of the biggest names in American retailing and manufacturing. (Several of those companies later told The Times that they would investigate any illegal practices and try to end them.)
Hundreds of children described in the Times report were working in violation of federal labor standards, which bar child workers from a long list of hazardous jobs and forbid children under 16 from working more than three hours a day or after 7 p.m. on school days unless they work on a farm. (Those under 14 are prohibited from working in all but a handful of jobs.)
Many of the minors crossed unaccompanied from Latin American countries and may not know when their employment violates the law. A 13-year-old who was burned with caustic chemicals while working for Packers Sanitation Services in Nebraska told investigators the accident occurred during a shift that lasted from 11 p.m. to 5 or 7 a.m., a direct violation of multiple federal laws. The Labor Department imposed a $1.5 million fine on the cleaning company, which is owned by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity firms.
Despite the evidence that more children are being exploited and hurt in this way, state lawmakers are passing bills that defy the federal standards. They are inviting a court challenge, and, in effect, daring the Labor Department to come after them, knowing the department often lacks the manpower to prevent violations of federal law. The Ohio Senate, which passed a bill earlier this month extending working hours for minors under 16, in violation of federal standards, also approved a resolution urging Congress to do the same.
One of the worst bills, introduced by Republicans in Iowa, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meat coolers and industrial laundries, and 15-year-olds to lift heavy items onto shelves. It is backed by, among others, the independent business federation, the Iowa Grocery Industry Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by Charles Koch, the industrialist who supported many national efforts to deregulate businesses.
If states will not perform a role that has been fundamental for a century — protecting workers from abuse — the federal government will have to increase its efforts to do so. After the Times investigation was published, the Biden administration announced a series of new efforts to crack down on illegal child labor, many of which hold promise as possible deterrents.
The Labor Department said it would intensify its investigations of business violations, not just by direct employers of children but also by the larger companies that contract with those employers, or that use children in their supply chain. In many cases, big companies use contractors or staffing agencies to hire children and then claim they had nothing to do with the abuses. Some of those agencies shut down and reopen under new names when they are fined, said Meredith Stewart, a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The companies that hire them should be held accountable. The department also has the authority to seize any products that are made using illegal child labor, even through the use of contractors. Seema Nanda, the department’s chief legal officer, said in an interview that it would use that authority aggressively, as well as every other litigation tool available.
The administration also said it would do more to coordinate the protection of children, particularly those who migrate across the border unaccompanied by a parent and then receive little supervision once they leave immigration shelters. In some cases, The Times reported, H.H.S. has lost touch with designated sponsors and the children themselves, leaving them vulnerable to sex trafficking or other criminal exploitation.
The administration lacks all the tools to do the job right. Because its budget has been held flat by Congress, the Wage and Hour Division lost 12 percent of its staff between 2010 and 2019, and Ms. Nanda’s office lost more than 100 lawyers, so the Labor Department doesn’t have enough investigators to effectively pursue illegal child labor practices. In addition, under current law, the maximum fine for a labor violation by a company is $15,138 per child — often little more than the cost of doing business for big companies.
Comprehensive immigration reform would be the best insurance that migrant children have the protections they need. If families can stay together, minors will be less vulnerable to abuse and better able to seek legal protection.
The administration has asked Congress for more enforcement money in its current budget, and for higher penalties. Neither request is likely to be granted, and immigration reform seems far in the distance. Protections against “oppressive child labor,” however, have been part of American law since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938; dismantling those safeguards now puts young lives at risk.
PARENTS’ RIGHTS? HOW ABOUT A ‘PARENTS’ BILL OF RESPONSIBILITIES’ INSTEAD?
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
By Petula Dvorak, The Washington Post
How to say you’ve been totally asleep at the switch of your children’s life without saying it?
Support the “Parents Bill of Rights Act!”
This toxic bill, introduced into Congress this month and debated on Capitol Hill this week, attacks an entire profession and scorches thousands of dedicated educators under the guise of empowering parents.
Baloney. It’s no secret that this nationwide “movement” is simply politics and began right here in the DMV, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin capitalized on parents’ frustrations with education during the pandemic, turning the once-snoozy, county board of education meetings into screamfests.
It’s a cheap device to divide Americans politically with culture-war scare tactics, with lies about curriculum and education. It pushes a preposterously shortsighted idea of what children need to be informed citizens in a contemporary world, disproportionately targeting accurate history about discrimination and anything LGBTQ-related.
A cottage industry of groups sprung up to foment outrage and harness grievances: Parents should be in charge of what children learn, Moms for Liberty began arguing in Brevard County, Fla., before taking their message nationwide, building a network of civically-engaged conservative voters.
There are options these folks might consider — home schooling or parochial or private schools.
Amid the shouting, there are things we’re not spending enough time talking about. The movement largely ignores the real problems of equity in education and the alarming, nationwide drop in math and reading competency across all ages.
Our teachers are quitting in droves, burned out and afraid.
And where have these parents been in all this? Complicit. They’re weaponizing fear against the folks in the classrooms, who are already making not nearly enough to deal with very big problems — the consequences of poor parenting among them.
They’re somehow everywhere and nowhere, busy revving up outrage online while simultaneously confused by what’s been withheld from them. Maybe a little less Facebook and a little more focus — you know — talking to teachers and asking about homework would’ve told them what kids were learning.
Glenda the Good Witch could’ve told these parents they’ve had the power all along to know what’s in the school library, in their kids’ classrooms and on the curriculums. It’s called involvement. I’ve never met a teacher who has said “no” to any of my questions or requests for meetings.
Just yesterday, after we failed to connect on Zoom and in person for parent-teacher conferences several times (most of the misses my fault), my son’s public school Spanish teacher tracked me down and made sure we had a chat because I asked him for a meeting to see how my little hombre was doing.
Teachers want to hear from you.
For centuries, we have been asking the impossible of teachers. We want them to be educated and qualified, then we question their qualifications. We want them to discipline and inform our children, then we repeatedly challenge them. And when parents have been involved, have shown up to the meetings and conferences, asked the questions and met the teachers, most teachers respond to their concerns.
Instead, parents blindsided by curriculum (because they read out-of-context excerpts on a conservative blog), are advocating censorship and squaring off with teachers.
“This us-versus-them mind-set hurts students [and] disregards educators’ professionalism,” Marc Egan, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, wrote in a letter to Congress.
Perhaps nowhere is this more absurd than in the surging ban on books. A PEN America review found that from June 21 to July 22, book bans were imposed in 138 school districts in 32 states, affecting nearly 4 million students in more than 5,000 schools. That staggering number has probably increased in the past seven months, and it will only get worse if Congress soon decides to join forces with book ban proponents, according to an NEA report.
“The concern is if this bill passes, God forbid it ever became law, that it would have a chilling impact on schools, on libraries,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), in a hearing on the bill held by the House Committee on Rules Wednesday.
McGovern read aloud parts of a banned book — the Rosa Parks story. It was a straightforward narrative of her famous bus protest. He asked the woman testifying on behalf of the bill, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), what could have been deemed offensive in the book.
“I have no idea,” Foxx responded, shrugging.
Republicans are advancing a bill that makes it easier to ban books. So last night at our Rules Committee hearing, I read an amazing book about Rosa Parks that was pulled off the shelves & asked a simple question: should it be banned?
But let’s be honest, how often are parents more interested in their jobs than what their kids are reading?
How about a Parents’ Bill of Responsibilities?
Parents are responsible for being informed about their teachers, the curriculum, the library. It’s all public and available to anyone who asks.
They are responsible for managing the biggest influencer in their kids’ lives — the digital world in the palm of their hand. There’s stuff on there far more scarring than a book about a gay penguin and more provocative than any work by Toni Morrison — the main targets of the Bill-of-Rights parenting crew.
Parents are responsible for teaching their kids respect and tolerance. For championing a solid work ethic and an open mind.
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
By Petula Dvorak, The Washington Post
How to say you’ve been totally asleep at the switch of your children’s life without saying it?
Support the “Parents Bill of Rights Act!”
This toxic bill, introduced into Congress this month and debated on Capitol Hill this week, attacks an entire profession and scorches thousands of dedicated educators under the guise of empowering parents.
Baloney. It’s no secret that this nationwide “movement” is simply politics and began right here in the DMV, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin capitalized on parents’ frustrations with education during the pandemic, turning the once-snoozy, county board of education meetings into screamfests.
It’s a cheap device to divide Americans politically with culture-war scare tactics, with lies about curriculum and education. It pushes a preposterously shortsighted idea of what children need to be informed citizens in a contemporary world, disproportionately targeting accurate history about discrimination and anything LGBTQ-related.
A cottage industry of groups sprung up to foment outrage and harness grievances: Parents should be in charge of what children learn, Moms for Liberty began arguing in Brevard County, Fla., before taking their message nationwide, building a network of civically-engaged conservative voters.
There are options these folks might consider — home schooling or parochial or private schools.
Amid the shouting, there are things we’re not spending enough time talking about. The movement largely ignores the real problems of equity in education and the alarming, nationwide drop in math and reading competency across all ages.
Our teachers are quitting in droves, burned out and afraid.
And where have these parents been in all this? Complicit. They’re weaponizing fear against the folks in the classrooms, who are already making not nearly enough to deal with very big problems — the consequences of poor parenting among them.
They’re somehow everywhere and nowhere, busy revving up outrage online while simultaneously confused by what’s been withheld from them. Maybe a little less Facebook and a little more focus — you know — talking to teachers and asking about homework would’ve told them what kids were learning.
Glenda the Good Witch could’ve told these parents they’ve had the power all along to know what’s in the school library, in their kids’ classrooms and on the curriculums. It’s called involvement. I’ve never met a teacher who has said “no” to any of my questions or requests for meetings.
Just yesterday, after we failed to connect on Zoom and in person for parent-teacher conferences several times (most of the misses my fault), my son’s public school Spanish teacher tracked me down and made sure we had a chat because I asked him for a meeting to see how my little hombre was doing.
Teachers want to hear from you.
For centuries, we have been asking the impossible of teachers. We want them to be educated and qualified, then we question their qualifications. We want them to discipline and inform our children, then we repeatedly challenge them. And when parents have been involved, have shown up to the meetings and conferences, asked the questions and met the teachers, most teachers respond to their concerns.
Instead, parents blindsided by curriculum (because they read out-of-context excerpts on a conservative blog), are advocating censorship and squaring off with teachers.
“This us-versus-them mind-set hurts students [and] disregards educators’ professionalism,” Marc Egan, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, wrote in a letter to Congress.
Perhaps nowhere is this more absurd than in the surging ban on books. A PEN America review found that from June 21 to July 22, book bans were imposed in 138 school districts in 32 states, affecting nearly 4 million students in more than 5,000 schools. That staggering number has probably increased in the past seven months, and it will only get worse if Congress soon decides to join forces with book ban proponents, according to an NEA report.
“The concern is if this bill passes, God forbid it ever became law, that it would have a chilling impact on schools, on libraries,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), in a hearing on the bill held by the House Committee on Rules Wednesday.
McGovern read aloud parts of a banned book — the Rosa Parks story. It was a straightforward narrative of her famous bus protest. He asked the woman testifying on behalf of the bill, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), what could have been deemed offensive in the book.
“I have no idea,” Foxx responded, shrugging.
Republicans are advancing a bill that makes it easier to ban books. So last night at our Rules Committee hearing, I read an amazing book about Rosa Parks that was pulled off the shelves & asked a simple question: should it be banned?
But let’s be honest, how often are parents more interested in their jobs than what their kids are reading?
How about a Parents’ Bill of Responsibilities?
Parents are responsible for being informed about their teachers, the curriculum, the library. It’s all public and available to anyone who asks.
They are responsible for managing the biggest influencer in their kids’ lives — the digital world in the palm of their hand. There’s stuff on there far more scarring than a book about a gay penguin and more provocative than any work by Toni Morrison — the main targets of the Bill-of-Rights parenting crew.
Parents are responsible for teaching their kids respect and tolerance. For championing a solid work ethic and an open mind.
You want teachers to teach the basics? Then stop leaving the parenting to them.
THE PRE-PEARL HARBOR GOP IS BACK
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Florida has been widely and rightly criticized — including by prominent members of his own party — for dismissing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” of little concern to the United States. Yet, while he says that countering Russia is not a “vital national interest,” he claims that “checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party” is one. DeSantis worries that U.S. aid to Ukraine could draw us into “a hot war” with a nuclear-armed state, but he expresses no such concern about U.S. aid to Taiwan — even though, in the event of Chinese military action against Taiwan, U.S. forces would be far more likely to fight China directly.
This distinction — U.S. aid to Ukraine bad, U.S. aid to Taiwan good — makes little strategic sense: Both Ukraine and Taiwan are worth supporting, and both Europe and Asia matter to the United States. But it’s a dichotomy rooted in a century of Republican foreign policy thinking.
In the 1930s, Republicans were isolationist when it came to Nazi Germany but were more sympathetic to sanctioning Japan and supporting Nationalist China, as political scientist Colin Dueck noted in his history of GOP foreign policy. The “America Firsters” saw support for Britain as a plot by the Eastern Establishment, international bankers and Jews to embroil America in another world war, but they romanticized “Free China” as a fertile ground for Christianity and capitalism. Even during World War II, some Republicans criticized Franklin D. Roosevelt for prioritizing the defeat of Germany over Japan.
In the early years of the Cold War, Republicans such as Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio were opposed to joining NATO or sending U.S. troops to Europe, but, during the Korean War, they supported Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s desire to wage war on “Red China” with the help of Taiwan.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory over Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination vanquished the “Asia First” wing of the GOP and made Republicans a firmly Atlanticist party. Just watch Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, which was a tribute not only to the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” but also to “a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.”
Now the pre-Eisenhower GOP is back with a vengeance, thanks to former president Donald Trump, who reveres Vladimir Putin while reviling China. DeSantis, who as recently as 2015 supported arming Ukraine, is following his lead.
Admittedly today, as Dueck pointed out to me, “the Asia First argument actually has more validity” than in 1940s or 1950s. But, if China is now America’s top threat, Russia is a close second — and it has far more nuclear weapons. Moreover, China and Russia are partners, and Russia’s difficulties in conquering Ukraine may discourage China from trying to conquer Taiwan.
A few analysts, including former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby, argue that the United States cannot afford to support both Ukraine and Taiwan. But America’s billions in aid to Ukraine are only a tiny portion of a defense budget that is approaching $1 trillion. “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment,” argues the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Aside from Stinger and Javelin missiles, there is little overlap between the weapons systems needed to fight Russia and China: Ukraine is experiencing a land war, while a battle over Taiwan would be a naval and air war. The United States isn’t dispatching aircraft carriers, submarines or F-35’s to help Kyiv. In fact, as conservative analyst Gabriel Scheinmann argued in The Post, aid to Ukraine will increase U.S. capacity to fight China, because it is reviving America’s decaying defense industrial base.
But it’s safe to say that DeSantis’s turn against Ukraine is motivated by politics, not principles or a thought-out foreign policy. Today, 40 percent of Republicans say that the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine — the view espoused by Tucker Carlson and Trump. Meanwhile, 76 percent of Republicans cite China as America’s greatest enemy.
Why are so many Republicans soft on Russia and tough on China? 1. China is an economic threat; Russia isn’t. (Both parties blame China for the loss of U.S. jobs while ignoring all the jobs created by U.S.-China trade.) 2. China is nominally a Communist country; Russia isn’t. (In practice, however, both combine capitalism with authoritarianism.) 3. Putin has made a play for right-wing support by posing as a defender of Christianity and traditional values. 4. There is growing anti-Asian racism in America. 5. Many Republicans will oppose anything Democrats support (and vice versa), and Democrats are backing Ukraine.
Whatever the explanations, the return of so many Republicans to a quasi-isolationist, Asia First foreign policy is an ominous development. If the GOP succeeds in blocking further U.S. aid to Ukraine, it could allow Putin to win the war despite his battlefield blunders, and that would make him a greater threat to NATO. If Trump were to return to office, of course, he would be likely to pull out of NATO altogether. DeSantis might not be too far behind. And then we would be back to the pre-Pearl Harbor world.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Florida has been widely and rightly criticized — including by prominent members of his own party — for dismissing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” of little concern to the United States. Yet, while he says that countering Russia is not a “vital national interest,” he claims that “checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party” is one. DeSantis worries that U.S. aid to Ukraine could draw us into “a hot war” with a nuclear-armed state, but he expresses no such concern about U.S. aid to Taiwan — even though, in the event of Chinese military action against Taiwan, U.S. forces would be far more likely to fight China directly.
This distinction — U.S. aid to Ukraine bad, U.S. aid to Taiwan good — makes little strategic sense: Both Ukraine and Taiwan are worth supporting, and both Europe and Asia matter to the United States. But it’s a dichotomy rooted in a century of Republican foreign policy thinking.
In the 1930s, Republicans were isolationist when it came to Nazi Germany but were more sympathetic to sanctioning Japan and supporting Nationalist China, as political scientist Colin Dueck noted in his history of GOP foreign policy. The “America Firsters” saw support for Britain as a plot by the Eastern Establishment, international bankers and Jews to embroil America in another world war, but they romanticized “Free China” as a fertile ground for Christianity and capitalism. Even during World War II, some Republicans criticized Franklin D. Roosevelt for prioritizing the defeat of Germany over Japan.
In the early years of the Cold War, Republicans such as Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio were opposed to joining NATO or sending U.S. troops to Europe, but, during the Korean War, they supported Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s desire to wage war on “Red China” with the help of Taiwan.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory over Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination vanquished the “Asia First” wing of the GOP and made Republicans a firmly Atlanticist party. Just watch Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, which was a tribute not only to the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” but also to “a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.”
Now the pre-Eisenhower GOP is back with a vengeance, thanks to former president Donald Trump, who reveres Vladimir Putin while reviling China. DeSantis, who as recently as 2015 supported arming Ukraine, is following his lead.
Admittedly today, as Dueck pointed out to me, “the Asia First argument actually has more validity” than in 1940s or 1950s. But, if China is now America’s top threat, Russia is a close second — and it has far more nuclear weapons. Moreover, China and Russia are partners, and Russia’s difficulties in conquering Ukraine may discourage China from trying to conquer Taiwan.
A few analysts, including former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby, argue that the United States cannot afford to support both Ukraine and Taiwan. But America’s billions in aid to Ukraine are only a tiny portion of a defense budget that is approaching $1 trillion. “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment,” argues the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Aside from Stinger and Javelin missiles, there is little overlap between the weapons systems needed to fight Russia and China: Ukraine is experiencing a land war, while a battle over Taiwan would be a naval and air war. The United States isn’t dispatching aircraft carriers, submarines or F-35’s to help Kyiv. In fact, as conservative analyst Gabriel Scheinmann argued in The Post, aid to Ukraine will increase U.S. capacity to fight China, because it is reviving America’s decaying defense industrial base.
But it’s safe to say that DeSantis’s turn against Ukraine is motivated by politics, not principles or a thought-out foreign policy. Today, 40 percent of Republicans say that the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine — the view espoused by Tucker Carlson and Trump. Meanwhile, 76 percent of Republicans cite China as America’s greatest enemy.
Why are so many Republicans soft on Russia and tough on China? 1. China is an economic threat; Russia isn’t. (Both parties blame China for the loss of U.S. jobs while ignoring all the jobs created by U.S.-China trade.) 2. China is nominally a Communist country; Russia isn’t. (In practice, however, both combine capitalism with authoritarianism.) 3. Putin has made a play for right-wing support by posing as a defender of Christianity and traditional values. 4. There is growing anti-Asian racism in America. 5. Many Republicans will oppose anything Democrats support (and vice versa), and Democrats are backing Ukraine.
Whatever the explanations, the return of so many Republicans to a quasi-isolationist, Asia First foreign policy is an ominous development. If the GOP succeeds in blocking further U.S. aid to Ukraine, it could allow Putin to win the war despite his battlefield blunders, and that would make him a greater threat to NATO. If Trump were to return to office, of course, he would be likely to pull out of NATO altogether. DeSantis might not be too far behind. And then we would be back to the pre-Pearl Harbor world.
WHY WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS ARE IN SUCH A PANIC
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
You might find it strange that a large segment of the Republican base thinks Whites are the true victims of racism and that Christians are under attack. After all, America’s biggest racial group is still Whites; the most common religious affiliation remains Christianity. Whites and Christians dominate elected office at all levels, the judiciary and corporate America. What’s the problem?
Well, there is a straightforward reason for the freak-out, and an explanation for why former president Donald Trump developed such a close bond with white Christian nationalists.
This group feels besieged because they are losing ground. “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated,” writes Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute. “As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.
The group that has declined the most is at the core of the MAGA movement, the group most devoted to Christian nationalism. “White evangelical Protestants have experienced the steepest decline. As recently as 2006, white evangelical Protestants comprised nearly one-quarter of Americans (23%). By the time of Trump’s rise to power, their numbers had dipped to 16.8%,” Jones explains. “Today, white evangelical Protestants comprise only 13.6% of Americans.”
And that decline may yet accelerate, because they skew older than the population as a whole. Put differently, there are far more baby boomers in this group than Generation Z members. White evangelicals are “losing” people with each successive generation. (“White Christian subgroups have each lost approximately half their market share just across the generations who are alive today,” according to Jones.) If your business had lost half its market share, you would be panicking, too.
With those kind of numbers, the responsible thing to do would be to think about “fixing” what’s wrong by adapting to a changing market. Instead, many in this cohort have doubled down, becoming the foot soldiers in the red-hatted MAGA movement. The decline isn’t going to be reversed by angry, gray-haired folks demanding abortion bans and “don’t say gay” bills.
Instead, White evangelicals might look at former “customers” who are abandoning organized religion in droves. “Nearly four in ten Americans ages 18-29 (38%) are religiously unaffiliated, an increase from 34% in 2021," the PRRI census said. "As the cohorts age, the growth in religiously unaffiliated Americans has started to show up more in the 30-49 age category, which is up to 32% unaffiliated from 26% in 2016.”
In some sense, White evangelicals’ desperate efforts to cling to political power and demand adherence to a set of outdated cultural norms only make the problem worse. Not many 20-year-olds (part of the most diverse, inclusive generation in history, one steeped in climate science and tech) would leap at the prospect of living in a state where abortion is unattainable, gays are ostracized and secularism is bashed.
If Christian evangelicals really want to slow their decline, they might consider getting out of the unpopular political ideas market (e.g., abortion bans) and stressing values that could win back alienated young people (e.g., reverence for conserving the planet, ministering to the poor and the weak). That might put more seats in the pews, although it likely wouldn’t do much for the aging, mostly White, reactionary GOP.
The reality is that the convergence of the declining population of White Christians with the rise of Trump has been bad for both evangelicalism and American politics. Trump came along, telling the shrinking band of white Christian nationalists that they are victims. He reveled in nostalgia for a time when they dominated (demographically and politically) and blamed immigrants, elites and “wokeness” for their ills. They were the group most susceptible to a message that reinforces their feeling they have “lost” something or something has been “taken away.”
That “something” they felt had been stolen may have been as concrete as the 2020 election, or as all-encompassing as white Christian supremacy. However they define that sense of loss, it fuels their anger and binds them to Trump.
But the demographic clock cannot be turned back. No one can claim to be patriotic defenders of democracy when they decide their declining numbers justify anti-democratic voter suppression or even violence. In short, MAGA White Christians have painted themselves into a corner where the majority rejects their outlook and anti-majoritarian tactics cannot keep them in power forever.
A dramatic transformation would need to happen for this movement to return to pluralistic politics. The MAGA crowd would have to recognize America’s complete history, reflecting our full experience, not just the story of people like them. And most important, they would need to rediscover the principles on which the United States was founded. (“All men are created equal...”) They would have to abandon the myth that America is the domain of one race or religion.
Unimaginable? Maybe so, but what other choice is there? To thrive in the future, they eventually must appeal to America as it is, not as they imagine it was in the past.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
You might find it strange that a large segment of the Republican base thinks Whites are the true victims of racism and that Christians are under attack. After all, America’s biggest racial group is still Whites; the most common religious affiliation remains Christianity. Whites and Christians dominate elected office at all levels, the judiciary and corporate America. What’s the problem?
Well, there is a straightforward reason for the freak-out, and an explanation for why former president Donald Trump developed such a close bond with white Christian nationalists.
This group feels besieged because they are losing ground. “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated,” writes Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute. “As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.
The group that has declined the most is at the core of the MAGA movement, the group most devoted to Christian nationalism. “White evangelical Protestants have experienced the steepest decline. As recently as 2006, white evangelical Protestants comprised nearly one-quarter of Americans (23%). By the time of Trump’s rise to power, their numbers had dipped to 16.8%,” Jones explains. “Today, white evangelical Protestants comprise only 13.6% of Americans.”
And that decline may yet accelerate, because they skew older than the population as a whole. Put differently, there are far more baby boomers in this group than Generation Z members. White evangelicals are “losing” people with each successive generation. (“White Christian subgroups have each lost approximately half their market share just across the generations who are alive today,” according to Jones.) If your business had lost half its market share, you would be panicking, too.
With those kind of numbers, the responsible thing to do would be to think about “fixing” what’s wrong by adapting to a changing market. Instead, many in this cohort have doubled down, becoming the foot soldiers in the red-hatted MAGA movement. The decline isn’t going to be reversed by angry, gray-haired folks demanding abortion bans and “don’t say gay” bills.
Instead, White evangelicals might look at former “customers” who are abandoning organized religion in droves. “Nearly four in ten Americans ages 18-29 (38%) are religiously unaffiliated, an increase from 34% in 2021," the PRRI census said. "As the cohorts age, the growth in religiously unaffiliated Americans has started to show up more in the 30-49 age category, which is up to 32% unaffiliated from 26% in 2016.”
In some sense, White evangelicals’ desperate efforts to cling to political power and demand adherence to a set of outdated cultural norms only make the problem worse. Not many 20-year-olds (part of the most diverse, inclusive generation in history, one steeped in climate science and tech) would leap at the prospect of living in a state where abortion is unattainable, gays are ostracized and secularism is bashed.
If Christian evangelicals really want to slow their decline, they might consider getting out of the unpopular political ideas market (e.g., abortion bans) and stressing values that could win back alienated young people (e.g., reverence for conserving the planet, ministering to the poor and the weak). That might put more seats in the pews, although it likely wouldn’t do much for the aging, mostly White, reactionary GOP.
The reality is that the convergence of the declining population of White Christians with the rise of Trump has been bad for both evangelicalism and American politics. Trump came along, telling the shrinking band of white Christian nationalists that they are victims. He reveled in nostalgia for a time when they dominated (demographically and politically) and blamed immigrants, elites and “wokeness” for their ills. They were the group most susceptible to a message that reinforces their feeling they have “lost” something or something has been “taken away.”
That “something” they felt had been stolen may have been as concrete as the 2020 election, or as all-encompassing as white Christian supremacy. However they define that sense of loss, it fuels their anger and binds them to Trump.
But the demographic clock cannot be turned back. No one can claim to be patriotic defenders of democracy when they decide their declining numbers justify anti-democratic voter suppression or even violence. In short, MAGA White Christians have painted themselves into a corner where the majority rejects their outlook and anti-majoritarian tactics cannot keep them in power forever.
A dramatic transformation would need to happen for this movement to return to pluralistic politics. The MAGA crowd would have to recognize America’s complete history, reflecting our full experience, not just the story of people like them. And most important, they would need to rediscover the principles on which the United States was founded. (“All men are created equal...”) They would have to abandon the myth that America is the domain of one race or religion.
Unimaginable? Maybe so, but what other choice is there? To thrive in the future, they eventually must appeal to America as it is, not as they imagine it was in the past.
ICC ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR PUTIN OVER WAR CRIMES IN UKRAINE
By Claire Parker, The Washington Post
Judges from the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued on Friday the court’s first arrest warrants related to the war in Ukraine, for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.
The two bear individual responsibility for the war crimes of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine after Russia invaded the country last year, the judges alleged.
Russia, like the United States, does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction. But the warrants carry symbolic weight and could make it difficult for those named to travel to countries that cooperate with the court.
Putin issued a decree last May to make it easy for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children, and Ukrainian officials said in November that at least 10,000 Ukrainian children were reported to have been deported by Russia without their parents. Lvova-Belova, who reports to Putin directly and openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities, has been the official face of this effort.
The court’s move comes more than a year after its top prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced the opening of a probe into possible violations of international humanitarian law committed during the conflict in Ukraine. While Kyiv is not a party to the court, it had previously accepted the court’s jurisdiction over its territory, and more than three dozen countries referred alleged crimes there to the court for investigation. Khan has traveled to Ukraine on multiple occasions as part of that probe.
International law experts say it’s unlikely, barring major political change in Russia, for Putin to end up in front of the court.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said on Telegram Friday. “Russia does not cooperate with this body, and possible ‘recipes’ for arrest coming from the International Court will be legally null and void for us.”
By Claire Parker, The Washington Post
Judges from the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued on Friday the court’s first arrest warrants related to the war in Ukraine, for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.
The two bear individual responsibility for the war crimes of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from occupied areas of Ukraine after Russia invaded the country last year, the judges alleged.
Russia, like the United States, does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction. But the warrants carry symbolic weight and could make it difficult for those named to travel to countries that cooperate with the court.
Putin issued a decree last May to make it easy for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children, and Ukrainian officials said in November that at least 10,000 Ukrainian children were reported to have been deported by Russia without their parents. Lvova-Belova, who reports to Putin directly and openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities, has been the official face of this effort.
The court’s move comes more than a year after its top prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced the opening of a probe into possible violations of international humanitarian law committed during the conflict in Ukraine. While Kyiv is not a party to the court, it had previously accepted the court’s jurisdiction over its territory, and more than three dozen countries referred alleged crimes there to the court for investigation. Khan has traveled to Ukraine on multiple occasions as part of that probe.
International law experts say it’s unlikely, barring major political change in Russia, for Putin to end up in front of the court.
“The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view,” Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, said on Telegram Friday. “Russia does not cooperate with this body, and possible ‘recipes’ for arrest coming from the International Court will be legally null and void for us.”
TRUMP CAN BE SUED BY POLICE OVER JAN. 6 RIOT, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SAYS
Two U.S. Capitol Police officers and 11 Democratic House members are seeking to hold Donald Trump liable for injuries they suffered during the riot.
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump can be held liable in court for the actions of the mob that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Justice Department said Thursday.
“Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the Presidency, and the outer perimeter of the President’s Office includes a vast realm of such speech,” attorneys for the Justice Department’s Civil Division wrote. “But that traditional function is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence.”
Two officers with the U.S. Capitol Police, joined by 11 Democratic House members, are seeking to hold Trump liable for physical and psychological injuries they suffered during the riot. Trump has argued he is protected from the lawsuit by the absolute immunity conferred on a president performing his official duties.
The lawsuit was filed under a statute, written after the Civil War in response to the Ku Klux Klan, that allows for damages when force, threats or intimidation are used to prevent government officials from carrying out their duties.
An appeals court in December debated whether Trump was doing his job when he drew thousands of supporters to Washington with falsehoods and told them they had to “fight like hell” to keep Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. Undecided, it asked the Justice Department to offer an opinion.
The response took many months to craft — twice, the Justice Department asked for another month.
Now it has. “Presidents may at times use strong rhetoric. And some who hear that rhetoric may overreact, or even respond with violence,” the Justice Department attorneys said, referencing a concern raised at oral argument. They suggested looking to another Klan-inspired court case — the 1969 ruling that speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or “likely to incite or produce such action” is not protected by the First Amendment.
“Just as denying First Amendment protection to incitement does not unduly chill speech in general, denying absolute immunity to incitement of imminent private violence should not unduly chill the President in the performance of his traditional function of speaking to the public on matters of public concern,” the attorneys wrote.
The district court that first heard this suit already ruled that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s conduct.
A dozen former White House and Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations previously urged the court to deny Trump’s claim of immunity, calling this case the “rare but clear circumstance in which a President broke the law while acting well beyond any official capacity.”
The lawsuit is still at a preliminary stage, and the Justice Department emphasized that it was not saying the allegation that Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot is true — only that the “plausibly allege[d]” claims describe conduct outside the scope of a president’s official duties.
Controversially, the Justice Department under President Biden has continued to defend Trump’s claim of absolute immunity in a defamation case brought by a woman who accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s. The former president responded by saying “it never happened,” and “she’s not my type.”
Though the administration did not view Trump’s language as “appropriate,” an attorney for the Justice Department said at oral argument in January that Trump was answering a reporter’s question as part of a president’s responsibility “to be responsive to the media and public.”
A different D.C. court is weighing whether that lawsuit against Trump can go forward.
Other Capitol Police officers have sued Trump in separate cases, as have members of the D.C police. The longtime partner of Brian D. Sicknick, who died after battling rioters, has sued Trump along with two members of the mob who deployed chemical spray. D.C.'s attorney general has sued far-right groups whose members were involved in the violent attack.
Trump also faces possible criminal prosecution by the Justice Department for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.
Two U.S. Capitol Police officers and 11 Democratic House members are seeking to hold Donald Trump liable for injuries they suffered during the riot.
By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump can be held liable in court for the actions of the mob that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Justice Department said Thursday.
“Speaking to the public on matters of public concern is a traditional function of the Presidency, and the outer perimeter of the President’s Office includes a vast realm of such speech,” attorneys for the Justice Department’s Civil Division wrote. “But that traditional function is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence.”
Two officers with the U.S. Capitol Police, joined by 11 Democratic House members, are seeking to hold Trump liable for physical and psychological injuries they suffered during the riot. Trump has argued he is protected from the lawsuit by the absolute immunity conferred on a president performing his official duties.
The lawsuit was filed under a statute, written after the Civil War in response to the Ku Klux Klan, that allows for damages when force, threats or intimidation are used to prevent government officials from carrying out their duties.
An appeals court in December debated whether Trump was doing his job when he drew thousands of supporters to Washington with falsehoods and told them they had to “fight like hell” to keep Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. Undecided, it asked the Justice Department to offer an opinion.
The response took many months to craft — twice, the Justice Department asked for another month.
Now it has. “Presidents may at times use strong rhetoric. And some who hear that rhetoric may overreact, or even respond with violence,” the Justice Department attorneys said, referencing a concern raised at oral argument. They suggested looking to another Klan-inspired court case — the 1969 ruling that speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or “likely to incite or produce such action” is not protected by the First Amendment.
“Just as denying First Amendment protection to incitement does not unduly chill speech in general, denying absolute immunity to incitement of imminent private violence should not unduly chill the President in the performance of his traditional function of speaking to the public on matters of public concern,” the attorneys wrote.
The district court that first heard this suit already ruled that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s conduct.
A dozen former White House and Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations previously urged the court to deny Trump’s claim of immunity, calling this case the “rare but clear circumstance in which a President broke the law while acting well beyond any official capacity.”
The lawsuit is still at a preliminary stage, and the Justice Department emphasized that it was not saying the allegation that Trump incited the Jan. 6 riot is true — only that the “plausibly allege[d]” claims describe conduct outside the scope of a president’s official duties.
Controversially, the Justice Department under President Biden has continued to defend Trump’s claim of absolute immunity in a defamation case brought by a woman who accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s. The former president responded by saying “it never happened,” and “she’s not my type.”
Though the administration did not view Trump’s language as “appropriate,” an attorney for the Justice Department said at oral argument in January that Trump was answering a reporter’s question as part of a president’s responsibility “to be responsive to the media and public.”
A different D.C. court is weighing whether that lawsuit against Trump can go forward.
Other Capitol Police officers have sued Trump in separate cases, as have members of the D.C police. The longtime partner of Brian D. Sicknick, who died after battling rioters, has sued Trump along with two members of the mob who deployed chemical spray. D.C.'s attorney general has sued far-right groups whose members were involved in the violent attack.
Trump also faces possible criminal prosecution by the Justice Department for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race.
CONSERVATIVES FACE A RUDE FISCAL AWOKENING
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republican response to President Biden’s suggestion that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security has been basically that of the Monty Python knights to the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog: “Run away, run away!” But many in the party still appear to hope that they can make big spending cuts without hurting anyone they care about.
Many House Republicans are reportedly listening to Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s former budget director, who has a new think tank and has been circulating a budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” which purports to show a way to balance the budget without touching Medicare and Social Security. The document uses the word “woke” 77 times, and — weirdly for a fiscal blueprint — also manages to mention critical race theory 16 times.
Anyway, the proposal relies in part on magical thinking — the assertion that conservative economic policies will cause a burst of economic growth that in turn increases tax receipts. Such claims have, of course, never — and I mean never — worked in practice. But it’s difficult to get politicians to understand something when their careers depend on their not understanding it.
More interesting, however, is the idea that we can achieve major spending cuts by taking on wokeness. What this means in practice is huge cuts to means-tested social insurance programs: Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies and food stamps (or, to use the official term, SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
So now we know what many conservatives mean by being woke: It means showing any concern for, and offering any help to, Americans who are victims of adverse circumstances.
But if Republicans get anywhere close to carrying out the ideas in Vought’s blueprint, they’re going to get an education in both political and economic reality. The beneficiaries of the programs they want to gut aren’t whom they imagine, and the effects of slashing these programs would be far worse than they realize.
What’s going on in proposals like Vought’s, I believe, is that many conservatives are still stuck in a vision of American society that’s many decades out of date. (I keep thinking about the Florida officials who wanted to know whether the Advanced Placement course in African American history was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.”) When they hear about means-tested programs, they think “welfare,” and when they think about welfare, they imagine that the beneficiaries are inner-city Black people.
In modern America, however, some of the biggest beneficiaries of means-tested programs are rural white people — who also happen to be the core of the Republican base.
Consider Owsley County, Ky. Eastern Kentucky is at the epicenter of the “Eastern Heartland,” a region that has been left stranded by the rise of the knowledge economy and the migration of jobs to highly educated metropolitan areas. The county is almost entirely non-Hispanic white; 88 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2020.
And 52 percent of its population is covered by Medicaid, while more than 40 percent are SNAP recipients.
Realities like this may explain why Medicaid appears to be highly popular, even among Republicans, and why large majorities of voters in states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid appear to favor expansion. It’s true that politicians like Ron DeSantis who continue to block expansion haven’t paid any obvious political price. But as we saw in the political backlash against Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare, there’s a big difference between obstructing an expansion of social insurance and taking away benefits that have become an integral part of people’s lives.
Furthermore, although it may not matter much for the politics, it’s important to be aware that “woke” social insurance programs almost surely have important benefits beyond the financial support they provide.
First, the beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately children. Medicaid covers 39 percent of all American children under 18; in West Virginia, another almost all-white and very Trumpy part of the Eastern Heartland, the number is 46 percent. More than 65 percent of SNAP recipients are families with children.
Why does this matter? Partly for moral reasons. Even if you’re one of those people who blame the poor for their own plight, children didn’t choose to be born into low-income households, so why should they be the prime targets of fiscal pain?
There are also practical reasons to provide aid to children, because today’s children are tomorrow’s adults — and they’ll be more productive adults if they have adequate nutrition and health care in their formative years.
This isn’t a speculative assertion. Both SNAP and Medicaid were rolled out gradually across the United States, creating a series of “natural experiments” — situations in which some children had early access to these programs and some otherwise similar children didn’t. And the evidence is clear: Childhood safety net programs lead to improved outcomes in adulthood, including better health and greater economic self-sufficiency.
Actually, the evidence for long-run economic payoffs to investing in children is a lot more solid than the evidence for payoffs to investing in infrastructure, even though the latter has bipartisan support while the former doesn’t.
So if you’re concerned about America’s future, which advocates of big budget cuts claim to be, slashing benefits for children is a really bad way to address your concerns.
And there’s another benefit to Medicaid, in particular: It helps keep rural hospitals alive. America has a growing crisis in simple availability of medical care in rural areas, presumably tied to the growing geographic divergence that has stranded places like eastern Kentucky. But the crisis is significantly worse in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. That is, Medicaid doesn’t just help its direct recipients; it helps anyone seeking medical care, by helping to keep hospitals afloat.
Now think about what would happen if Congress slashed overall Medicaid funding. One likely result is that the rural-hospital crisis would go national.
So conservatives who think that targeting “woke” spending provides an easy way out of their dilemma — they want to shrink the government, but the big-money government programs are highly popular — are deluding themselves. If they get anywhere near actually realizing their plans, they’re going to face a rude awokening.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republican response to President Biden’s suggestion that they want to cut Medicare and Social Security has been basically that of the Monty Python knights to the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog: “Run away, run away!” But many in the party still appear to hope that they can make big spending cuts without hurting anyone they care about.
Many House Republicans are reportedly listening to Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s former budget director, who has a new think tank and has been circulating a budget proposal titled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” which purports to show a way to balance the budget without touching Medicare and Social Security. The document uses the word “woke” 77 times, and — weirdly for a fiscal blueprint — also manages to mention critical race theory 16 times.
Anyway, the proposal relies in part on magical thinking — the assertion that conservative economic policies will cause a burst of economic growth that in turn increases tax receipts. Such claims have, of course, never — and I mean never — worked in practice. But it’s difficult to get politicians to understand something when their careers depend on their not understanding it.
More interesting, however, is the idea that we can achieve major spending cuts by taking on wokeness. What this means in practice is huge cuts to means-tested social insurance programs: Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies and food stamps (or, to use the official term, SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
So now we know what many conservatives mean by being woke: It means showing any concern for, and offering any help to, Americans who are victims of adverse circumstances.
But if Republicans get anywhere close to carrying out the ideas in Vought’s blueprint, they’re going to get an education in both political and economic reality. The beneficiaries of the programs they want to gut aren’t whom they imagine, and the effects of slashing these programs would be far worse than they realize.
What’s going on in proposals like Vought’s, I believe, is that many conservatives are still stuck in a vision of American society that’s many decades out of date. (I keep thinking about the Florida officials who wanted to know whether the Advanced Placement course in African American history was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.”) When they hear about means-tested programs, they think “welfare,” and when they think about welfare, they imagine that the beneficiaries are inner-city Black people.
In modern America, however, some of the biggest beneficiaries of means-tested programs are rural white people — who also happen to be the core of the Republican base.
Consider Owsley County, Ky. Eastern Kentucky is at the epicenter of the “Eastern Heartland,” a region that has been left stranded by the rise of the knowledge economy and the migration of jobs to highly educated metropolitan areas. The county is almost entirely non-Hispanic white; 88 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2020.
And 52 percent of its population is covered by Medicaid, while more than 40 percent are SNAP recipients.
Realities like this may explain why Medicaid appears to be highly popular, even among Republicans, and why large majorities of voters in states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid appear to favor expansion. It’s true that politicians like Ron DeSantis who continue to block expansion haven’t paid any obvious political price. But as we saw in the political backlash against Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare, there’s a big difference between obstructing an expansion of social insurance and taking away benefits that have become an integral part of people’s lives.
Furthermore, although it may not matter much for the politics, it’s important to be aware that “woke” social insurance programs almost surely have important benefits beyond the financial support they provide.
First, the beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately children. Medicaid covers 39 percent of all American children under 18; in West Virginia, another almost all-white and very Trumpy part of the Eastern Heartland, the number is 46 percent. More than 65 percent of SNAP recipients are families with children.
Why does this matter? Partly for moral reasons. Even if you’re one of those people who blame the poor for their own plight, children didn’t choose to be born into low-income households, so why should they be the prime targets of fiscal pain?
There are also practical reasons to provide aid to children, because today’s children are tomorrow’s adults — and they’ll be more productive adults if they have adequate nutrition and health care in their formative years.
This isn’t a speculative assertion. Both SNAP and Medicaid were rolled out gradually across the United States, creating a series of “natural experiments” — situations in which some children had early access to these programs and some otherwise similar children didn’t. And the evidence is clear: Childhood safety net programs lead to improved outcomes in adulthood, including better health and greater economic self-sufficiency.
Actually, the evidence for long-run economic payoffs to investing in children is a lot more solid than the evidence for payoffs to investing in infrastructure, even though the latter has bipartisan support while the former doesn’t.
So if you’re concerned about America’s future, which advocates of big budget cuts claim to be, slashing benefits for children is a really bad way to address your concerns.
And there’s another benefit to Medicaid, in particular: It helps keep rural hospitals alive. America has a growing crisis in simple availability of medical care in rural areas, presumably tied to the growing geographic divergence that has stranded places like eastern Kentucky. But the crisis is significantly worse in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. That is, Medicaid doesn’t just help its direct recipients; it helps anyone seeking medical care, by helping to keep hospitals afloat.
Now think about what would happen if Congress slashed overall Medicaid funding. One likely result is that the rural-hospital crisis would go national.
So conservatives who think that targeting “woke” spending provides an easy way out of their dilemma — they want to shrink the government, but the big-money government programs are highly popular — are deluding themselves. If they get anywhere near actually realizing their plans, they’re going to face a rude awokening.
PUTIN AND THE RIGHT’S TOUGH-GUY PROBLEM
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
A democracy — imperfect, as all nations are, but aspiring to be part of the free world — is invaded by its much larger neighbor, a vicious dictatorship that commits mass atrocities. Defying the odds, the democracy beats back an attack most people expected to succeed in a matter of days, then holds the line and even regains ground over the months of brutal fighting that follow.
How can any American, a citizen of a nation that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom, not be rooting for Ukraine in this war?
Yet there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose Western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win. And my question, on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, is what lies behind right-wing support for Vladimir Putin?
Now, Putin isn’t the only foreign autocrat America’s right likes. Viktor Orban of Hungary has become a conservative icon, a featured speaker at meetings of the Conservative Political Action Committee, which even held one of its conferences in Budapest.
But conservative admiration for Orban, I’m sorry to say, makes rational sense, given the right’s goals. If you want your nation to become a bastion of white nationalism and social illiberalism, a democracy on paper but a one-party state in practice, Orban’s transformation of Hungary offers a road map. And that is, of course, what much of the modern Republican Party wants.
Yet Orban is not, as far as I can tell, the subject of a right-wing cult of personality; how many American conservatives even know what he looks like?
Putin, by contrast, very much is the subject of a personality cult not just in Russia but also on the American right and has been for years. And it’s a fairly creepy cult at that. For example, back in 2014 a National Review columnist contrasted Putin’s bare-chested horseback riding with President Barack Obama’s “metrosexual golf get-ups.”
Until the invasion of Ukraine, Putinphilia also went hand in hand with extravagant praise for Russia’s supposed military effectiveness. Most famously, in 2021 Ted Cruz circulated a video contrasting a Russian military recruitment ad featuring a muscular man doing manly stuff with a U.S. ad highlighting the diversity of Army recruits. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military isn’t the best idea,” Cruz declared.
What was the basis for this worship of Putinism? I’d argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger. Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that this worldview was all wrong. National power in the modern world rests mainly on economic strength and technological capacity, not military prowess.
But then came the invasion, and it turned out that Putin’s not-woke, unemasculated Russia isn’t even very good at waging war.
Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence (in both the military and the ordinary senses) — things, it turns out, that Russia does badly and Ukraine does surprisingly well. (It’s not just Western weapons, although these have been awesomely effective; the Ukrainians have also shown a real talent for MacGyvering solutions to their military needs.)
Just to be clear, wars are still hell and can’t be won, even with superior weapons, without immense courage and endurance. But these are also qualities Ukrainians — men and women — turn out to have in remarkable abundance.
Speaking of courage, am I the only one struck by the contrast between President Biden’s daring visit to Kyiv and the way President Donald Trump retreated to the White House bunker in the face of unarmed protesters in Lafayette Park?
But back to the war. The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.
This explains why leading Putinists in the United States keep insisting that Ukraine is actually losing. Putin is “winning the war in Ukraine,” declared Tucker Carlson on Aug. 29, just days before several Ukrainian victories. There’s still a lot of hype about a huge Russian offensive this winter; the truth, however, is that this offensive is already underway, but as one Ukrainian official put it, it has achieved so little “that not everyone even sees it.”
None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
A democracy — imperfect, as all nations are, but aspiring to be part of the free world — is invaded by its much larger neighbor, a vicious dictatorship that commits mass atrocities. Defying the odds, the democracy beats back an attack most people expected to succeed in a matter of days, then holds the line and even regains ground over the months of brutal fighting that follow.
How can any American, a citizen of a nation that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom, not be rooting for Ukraine in this war?
Yet there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose Western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win. And my question, on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, is what lies behind right-wing support for Vladimir Putin?
Now, Putin isn’t the only foreign autocrat America’s right likes. Viktor Orban of Hungary has become a conservative icon, a featured speaker at meetings of the Conservative Political Action Committee, which even held one of its conferences in Budapest.
But conservative admiration for Orban, I’m sorry to say, makes rational sense, given the right’s goals. If you want your nation to become a bastion of white nationalism and social illiberalism, a democracy on paper but a one-party state in practice, Orban’s transformation of Hungary offers a road map. And that is, of course, what much of the modern Republican Party wants.
Yet Orban is not, as far as I can tell, the subject of a right-wing cult of personality; how many American conservatives even know what he looks like?
Putin, by contrast, very much is the subject of a personality cult not just in Russia but also on the American right and has been for years. And it’s a fairly creepy cult at that. For example, back in 2014 a National Review columnist contrasted Putin’s bare-chested horseback riding with President Barack Obama’s “metrosexual golf get-ups.”
Until the invasion of Ukraine, Putinphilia also went hand in hand with extravagant praise for Russia’s supposed military effectiveness. Most famously, in 2021 Ted Cruz circulated a video contrasting a Russian military recruitment ad featuring a muscular man doing manly stuff with a U.S. ad highlighting the diversity of Army recruits. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military isn’t the best idea,” Cruz declared.
What was the basis for this worship of Putinism? I’d argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger. Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that this worldview was all wrong. National power in the modern world rests mainly on economic strength and technological capacity, not military prowess.
But then came the invasion, and it turned out that Putin’s not-woke, unemasculated Russia isn’t even very good at waging war.
Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence (in both the military and the ordinary senses) — things, it turns out, that Russia does badly and Ukraine does surprisingly well. (It’s not just Western weapons, although these have been awesomely effective; the Ukrainians have also shown a real talent for MacGyvering solutions to their military needs.)
Just to be clear, wars are still hell and can’t be won, even with superior weapons, without immense courage and endurance. But these are also qualities Ukrainians — men and women — turn out to have in remarkable abundance.
Speaking of courage, am I the only one struck by the contrast between President Biden’s daring visit to Kyiv and the way President Donald Trump retreated to the White House bunker in the face of unarmed protesters in Lafayette Park?
But back to the war. The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.
This explains why leading Putinists in the United States keep insisting that Ukraine is actually losing. Putin is “winning the war in Ukraine,” declared Tucker Carlson on Aug. 29, just days before several Ukrainian victories. There’s still a lot of hype about a huge Russian offensive this winter; the truth, however, is that this offensive is already underway, but as one Ukrainian official put it, it has achieved so little “that not everyone even sees it.”
None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.
THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO REIN IN REPUBLICAN JUDGES: SHAMING THEM.
By Perry Bacon Jr., The Washington Post
The confirmation of several of President Biden’s nominees for district and circuit judgeships has now put the total number of federal judges that he has appointed at over 100. Under Biden, the Senate is confirming judges at a faster pace than it did under Presidents Donald Trump or Barack Obama, an achievement Democratic officials are celebrating.
But these appointments don’t come close to addressing the problem: America’s judiciary is dominated by conservatives issuing an endless stream of rulings that help corporations, the rich and the bigoted while hurting working-class people, women and minorities in particular. Biden’s lower-court appointees must follow the precedents set by the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court or their rulings will be overturned. Meanwhile, the high court usually allows very-right-wing opinions issued by lower-level conservative judges to remain in place.
So at least in the short term, there is only one real option to rein in America’s overly conservative judiciary: shame.
Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.
There are a ton of people and institutions looking to rein in Republican-appointed judges. But many proposed reforms, while useful, are too small-bore: a code of ethics that Supreme Court justices must follow; more appointments of progressives to lower-court judgeships; limitations on the Supreme Court’s use of its so-called shadow docket. More ambitious ideas have no chance of being adopted right now: term limits for Supreme Court justices; “court-packing” that increases the number of left-leaning justices; limitations on federal judges’ ability to invalidate legislation.
With little ability to formally limit the power of conservative judges, there are only informal means left.
So when lower-court Republican-appointed judges suspended Biden’s student loan cancellation policy, the president should have immediately brought some people struggling with college debt to the White House for a news conference where both he and the college debtors would blast those judges by name (Ralph R. Erickson, L. Steven Grasz, Mark T. Pittman and Bobby E. Shepherd, all appointed by Republican presidents).
He should do the same to the Trump appointees (Kurt D. Engelhardt, Don R. Willett, Cory T. Wilson) who last year issued a ruling, which is being appealed, that would cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the three judges who recently decided that people under restraining orders because of domestic violence accusations should have the right to buy guns. (The three judges include Wilson and Trump appointees James Ho and Reagan-appointee Edith Jones.)
There will be arguments that such high-profile criticism would put judges in physical danger. I obviously oppose violence. But judges are powerful figures setting policy — they should get as much scrutiny as elected officials. No one argues that Biden is imperiling the life of Florida Republican Rick Scott, even though the president has repeatedly named Scott while criticizing the senator’s Social Security proposals.
While the president should highlight the worst rulings, he doesn’t have time to attack them all. So there should be a high-profile Democratic politician in a safe seat (perhaps House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York) who each week holds a news conference to slam the most extreme rulings by GOP judges.
And Senate Democrats should hold hearings on the judiciary in the mold of the Jan. 6 commission, with compelling witnesses and videos. Republican-appointed judges have been just as damaging to American democracy as Trump has been (if not more so), just in a less obvious way. That needs to be explained to the American public.
The criticism of these judges should be plain-spoken. We should end the veneer that judges are somehow separate from partisanship. So it’s important to say, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican,” not “conservative-leaning Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.” or “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican appointee. (This is an idea from legal writer Jay Willis of the website Balls and Strikes.)
We should describe the impact of Republican judicial rulings in straightforward terms. For example, “The Republican judges are making it easier to discriminate against gay and lesbian people” (what the judges describe as protecting religious freedom).
And there is no need to wait until the rulings are issued to start the criticism. The Supreme Court seems poised to rule against affirmative action policies this summer. So, Democratic politicians should be holding events at college campuses, with a message along the lines of “I want this to be a diverse school, with sufficient numbers of Black and Latino students. Samuel A. Alito Jr., Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, John G. Roberts Jr. and Clarence Thomas, why don’t you want that, too? What’s wrong with you?”
There is a group of judges, mostly appointed by Trump, who regularly issue extreme rulings.
For example, conservative activists constantly steer cases to Texas-based Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, knowing he will always take the Republican position. People on the left should make judges such as Kacsmaryk as infamous as, say, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). After all, these judges have way more power than the Georgia congresswoman does.
These tactics would (1) drive news coverage and therefore public attention to the right-wing tendencies of Republican-appointed judges; (2) bring particular focus to the worst rulings and judges; (3) establish a clear case for judicial reform.
But the real goal is to make Republican judges less conservative in their rulings right now. Why would that happen? Because many judges care deeply about their reputations. They want to be seen more as umpires than politicians. I’m not guessing — several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have complained about being cast as Republican partisans.
This kind of shaming has already been shown to work. After intense criticism from liberals about the court’s usage of the shadow docket to issue conservative rulings without even hearing arguments, the court has stopped using the practice as often. Many of the opinions of Kavanaugh, who is now the court’s swing justice, seem almost intentionally written to minimize public blowback. He seems to want to be respected by people across the political spectrum as a fair-minded judge. People on the left need to make clear he won’t get that respect if all he does is issue opinions that align with what the Republican Party wants.
I understand these judges just struck down Roe v. Wade. I am not expecting conservative judges to become moderates. Could this strategy backfire and push them to be even more right-wing? I don’t really find that believable. They just overturned Roe — it’s not clear they can get much worse.
In their thinking about the judiciary, Democrats should be more like Trump. While in office, Trump criticized a ruling he didn’t like by casting the judge who wrote it as an “Obama judge.” Roberts then issued a sanctimonious statement, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
But at least right now, Trump is right. Roberts and his colleagues are acting like Republicans, not judges — and Democrats should say that loudly and often.
By Perry Bacon Jr., The Washington Post
The confirmation of several of President Biden’s nominees for district and circuit judgeships has now put the total number of federal judges that he has appointed at over 100. Under Biden, the Senate is confirming judges at a faster pace than it did under Presidents Donald Trump or Barack Obama, an achievement Democratic officials are celebrating.
But these appointments don’t come close to addressing the problem: America’s judiciary is dominated by conservatives issuing an endless stream of rulings that help corporations, the rich and the bigoted while hurting working-class people, women and minorities in particular. Biden’s lower-court appointees must follow the precedents set by the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court or their rulings will be overturned. Meanwhile, the high court usually allows very-right-wing opinions issued by lower-level conservative judges to remain in place.
So at least in the short term, there is only one real option to rein in America’s overly conservative judiciary: shame.
Democratic politicians, left-leaning activist groups, newspaper editorial boards and other influential people and institutions need to start relentlessly blasting Republican-appointed judges. A sustained campaign of condemnation isn’t going to push these judges to write liberal opinions, but it could chasten them toward more moderate ones.
There are a ton of people and institutions looking to rein in Republican-appointed judges. But many proposed reforms, while useful, are too small-bore: a code of ethics that Supreme Court justices must follow; more appointments of progressives to lower-court judgeships; limitations on the Supreme Court’s use of its so-called shadow docket. More ambitious ideas have no chance of being adopted right now: term limits for Supreme Court justices; “court-packing” that increases the number of left-leaning justices; limitations on federal judges’ ability to invalidate legislation.
With little ability to formally limit the power of conservative judges, there are only informal means left.
So when lower-court Republican-appointed judges suspended Biden’s student loan cancellation policy, the president should have immediately brought some people struggling with college debt to the White House for a news conference where both he and the college debtors would blast those judges by name (Ralph R. Erickson, L. Steven Grasz, Mark T. Pittman and Bobby E. Shepherd, all appointed by Republican presidents).
He should do the same to the Trump appointees (Kurt D. Engelhardt, Don R. Willett, Cory T. Wilson) who last year issued a ruling, which is being appealed, that would cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the three judges who recently decided that people under restraining orders because of domestic violence accusations should have the right to buy guns. (The three judges include Wilson and Trump appointees James Ho and Reagan-appointee Edith Jones.)
There will be arguments that such high-profile criticism would put judges in physical danger. I obviously oppose violence. But judges are powerful figures setting policy — they should get as much scrutiny as elected officials. No one argues that Biden is imperiling the life of Florida Republican Rick Scott, even though the president has repeatedly named Scott while criticizing the senator’s Social Security proposals.
While the president should highlight the worst rulings, he doesn’t have time to attack them all. So there should be a high-profile Democratic politician in a safe seat (perhaps House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York) who each week holds a news conference to slam the most extreme rulings by GOP judges.
And Senate Democrats should hold hearings on the judiciary in the mold of the Jan. 6 commission, with compelling witnesses and videos. Republican-appointed judges have been just as damaging to American democracy as Trump has been (if not more so), just in a less obvious way. That needs to be explained to the American public.
The criticism of these judges should be plain-spoken. We should end the veneer that judges are somehow separate from partisanship. So it’s important to say, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican,” not “conservative-leaning Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.” or “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican appointee. (This is an idea from legal writer Jay Willis of the website Balls and Strikes.)
We should describe the impact of Republican judicial rulings in straightforward terms. For example, “The Republican judges are making it easier to discriminate against gay and lesbian people” (what the judges describe as protecting religious freedom).
And there is no need to wait until the rulings are issued to start the criticism. The Supreme Court seems poised to rule against affirmative action policies this summer. So, Democratic politicians should be holding events at college campuses, with a message along the lines of “I want this to be a diverse school, with sufficient numbers of Black and Latino students. Samuel A. Alito Jr., Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, John G. Roberts Jr. and Clarence Thomas, why don’t you want that, too? What’s wrong with you?”
There is a group of judges, mostly appointed by Trump, who regularly issue extreme rulings.
For example, conservative activists constantly steer cases to Texas-based Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, knowing he will always take the Republican position. People on the left should make judges such as Kacsmaryk as infamous as, say, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). After all, these judges have way more power than the Georgia congresswoman does.
These tactics would (1) drive news coverage and therefore public attention to the right-wing tendencies of Republican-appointed judges; (2) bring particular focus to the worst rulings and judges; (3) establish a clear case for judicial reform.
But the real goal is to make Republican judges less conservative in their rulings right now. Why would that happen? Because many judges care deeply about their reputations. They want to be seen more as umpires than politicians. I’m not guessing — several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have complained about being cast as Republican partisans.
This kind of shaming has already been shown to work. After intense criticism from liberals about the court’s usage of the shadow docket to issue conservative rulings without even hearing arguments, the court has stopped using the practice as often. Many of the opinions of Kavanaugh, who is now the court’s swing justice, seem almost intentionally written to minimize public blowback. He seems to want to be respected by people across the political spectrum as a fair-minded judge. People on the left need to make clear he won’t get that respect if all he does is issue opinions that align with what the Republican Party wants.
I understand these judges just struck down Roe v. Wade. I am not expecting conservative judges to become moderates. Could this strategy backfire and push them to be even more right-wing? I don’t really find that believable. They just overturned Roe — it’s not clear they can get much worse.
In their thinking about the judiciary, Democrats should be more like Trump. While in office, Trump criticized a ruling he didn’t like by casting the judge who wrote it as an “Obama judge.” Roberts then issued a sanctimonious statement, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
But at least right now, Trump is right. Roberts and his colleagues are acting like Republicans, not judges — and Democrats should say that loudly and often.
THERE’S NOTHING FAIR ABOUT REPUBLICANS’ FAIRTAX PROPOSAL
By Natasha Sarin, The Washington Post
Republicans are talking tough on the deficit. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has threatened default unless Democrats come to the negotiating table, proclaiming, “We must return Washington to a basic truth: Debt matters.”
But it’s hard to take Republicans seriously when weeks into the 118th Congress, they’ve already proposed tax policies that would add trillions to the deficit.
Their first bill out of the gate sought to defund the IRS, decreasing the agency’s ability to pursue tax evasion by the wealthy, and is estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to increase the deficit.
For some Republicans, defunding the tax police doesn’t go far enough. Their next proposal, the so-called FairTax, would replace our current tax system with a single, 30 percent sales tax — and eliminate the IRS altogether.
FairTax would add trillions more to the deficit if ever enacted. Although official scorekeepers have not assessed its revenue effects, economist Bill Gale in 2005 estimated a 10-year revenue loss of at least $7 trillion — easily more than $1 trillion per year today.
What explains the constant drumbeat for policies that grow — rather than shrink — the deficit?
For House Republicans, tax policy appears to be less about raising revenue and more about satisfying wealthy donors.
Let’s start with the IRS. The logic is easy to follow: For most Americans earning a paycheck, most of their tax liability is automatically withheld. But wealthy evaders don’t earn their incomes this way and therefore benefit from a system in which the IRS doesn’t have the wherewithal to pursue them. While at the Treasury Department, I worked on the IRS funding provision included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Since it became law, millions of dollars have been poured into anti-IRS campaigns to rescind that funding — and preserve tax cheats’ evasion advantage. That’s why, even though doing so would ultimately expand the deficit, gutting the agency is high on the list of proposed Republican negotiations around the debt ceiling.
FairTax, too, is rooted in the interests of the most privileged. In fact, it is the brainchild of three Houston entrepreneurs — Leo Linbeck Jr., Jack Trotter and Bob McNair, the former owner of the National Football League’s Houston Texans. The trio, who have all now passed away, raised millions in the late 1990s— much of it their own seed funding — to build a grass-roots movement for their policy.
FairTax proponents say it would simplify the system by eliminating income taxes and allowing Americans to keep everything in their paychecks. In reality, replacing the income tax system with a national sales tax shifts the tax burden to lower-income households and benefits higher-income ones.
The economics are simple: Wealthier households spend a smaller share of their income than poorer households do, which means lower- and middle-income taxpayers would take on more of the overall tax burden. If Treasury Department estimates from 2005 — old, but directionally still accurate — reflected the distribution of taxes today, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers would pay more than twice as much tax this year — roughly an extra $220 billion — under FairTax. The top 1 percent would pay about $320 billion less.
FairTax won’t die, despite its legion of detractors. Since 1999, it has been introduced in every Congress. And although most mainstream Republicans have moved away from public support of FairTax in recent years, it actually has some renewed momentum: It is on track for its first-ever floor vote, has spent weeks atop the list of most viewed bills this Congress, and could well be a campaign issue for Republicans in the 2024 cycle, given that many potential presidential nominees — including Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence — are past champions.
These proposals illustrate the hypocrisy of House Republicans’ dangerous debt limit tactics.
Reasonable people can disagree with Democrats’ approach to tax policy. But last week, President Biden called for raising hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes from high-earners and corporations. He has promised a budget that will raise enough to cut the deficit by $2 trillion.
If Republicans truly cared about budget deficits, perhaps they could take a page out of his book: by proposing tax changes that would raise, rather than lose, money.
By Natasha Sarin, The Washington Post
Republicans are talking tough on the deficit. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has threatened default unless Democrats come to the negotiating table, proclaiming, “We must return Washington to a basic truth: Debt matters.”
But it’s hard to take Republicans seriously when weeks into the 118th Congress, they’ve already proposed tax policies that would add trillions to the deficit.
Their first bill out of the gate sought to defund the IRS, decreasing the agency’s ability to pursue tax evasion by the wealthy, and is estimated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to increase the deficit.
For some Republicans, defunding the tax police doesn’t go far enough. Their next proposal, the so-called FairTax, would replace our current tax system with a single, 30 percent sales tax — and eliminate the IRS altogether.
FairTax would add trillions more to the deficit if ever enacted. Although official scorekeepers have not assessed its revenue effects, economist Bill Gale in 2005 estimated a 10-year revenue loss of at least $7 trillion — easily more than $1 trillion per year today.
What explains the constant drumbeat for policies that grow — rather than shrink — the deficit?
For House Republicans, tax policy appears to be less about raising revenue and more about satisfying wealthy donors.
Let’s start with the IRS. The logic is easy to follow: For most Americans earning a paycheck, most of their tax liability is automatically withheld. But wealthy evaders don’t earn their incomes this way and therefore benefit from a system in which the IRS doesn’t have the wherewithal to pursue them. While at the Treasury Department, I worked on the IRS funding provision included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Since it became law, millions of dollars have been poured into anti-IRS campaigns to rescind that funding — and preserve tax cheats’ evasion advantage. That’s why, even though doing so would ultimately expand the deficit, gutting the agency is high on the list of proposed Republican negotiations around the debt ceiling.
FairTax, too, is rooted in the interests of the most privileged. In fact, it is the brainchild of three Houston entrepreneurs — Leo Linbeck Jr., Jack Trotter and Bob McNair, the former owner of the National Football League’s Houston Texans. The trio, who have all now passed away, raised millions in the late 1990s— much of it their own seed funding — to build a grass-roots movement for their policy.
FairTax proponents say it would simplify the system by eliminating income taxes and allowing Americans to keep everything in their paychecks. In reality, replacing the income tax system with a national sales tax shifts the tax burden to lower-income households and benefits higher-income ones.
The economics are simple: Wealthier households spend a smaller share of their income than poorer households do, which means lower- and middle-income taxpayers would take on more of the overall tax burden. If Treasury Department estimates from 2005 — old, but directionally still accurate — reflected the distribution of taxes today, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers would pay more than twice as much tax this year — roughly an extra $220 billion — under FairTax. The top 1 percent would pay about $320 billion less.
FairTax won’t die, despite its legion of detractors. Since 1999, it has been introduced in every Congress. And although most mainstream Republicans have moved away from public support of FairTax in recent years, it actually has some renewed momentum: It is on track for its first-ever floor vote, has spent weeks atop the list of most viewed bills this Congress, and could well be a campaign issue for Republicans in the 2024 cycle, given that many potential presidential nominees — including Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence — are past champions.
These proposals illustrate the hypocrisy of House Republicans’ dangerous debt limit tactics.
Reasonable people can disagree with Democrats’ approach to tax policy. But last week, President Biden called for raising hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes from high-earners and corporations. He has promised a budget that will raise enough to cut the deficit by $2 trillion.
If Republicans truly cared about budget deficits, perhaps they could take a page out of his book: by proposing tax changes that would raise, rather than lose, money.
SORRY, REPUBLICANS, NO ONE SHOULD TRUST YOUR WORD ON SOCIAL SECURITY
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
“I know that a lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare,” President Biden said during a speech in Tampa on Thursday. “If that’s your dream, I’m your nightmare.”
After Republicans’ heckling of Biden on this topic at the State of the Union, the White House clearly thinks it has struck political gold and has sent the president out to keep up this drumbeat.
When Biden, referring to a plan released last year by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), told Congress and the nation that “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset” — then emphasized, “I’m not saying it’s the majority” — Republicans erupted in catcalls, fist-shaking and cries of “Liar!”
Their rage was powerful enough to make you suspect it might be sincere. And if their claim is that no more than a few Republicans agree with Scott’s suggestion to have every federal program disappear every five years unless it is reauthorized by Congress, they’re right.
But if Republicans want the public to believe that their passion for defending those popular safety-net programs should be beyond doubt, they are on shaky ground.
Even if Biden might sometimes exaggerate what his opponents believe, this debate carries with it a history and a context that make it hard for Republicans to claim they are being unfairly maligned.
This dates all the way back to the beginning of Social Security during the New Deal era, and Medicare (along with Medicaid) as part of the Great Society. All these programs were opposed by conservatives; one Republican senator thundered, before the bill passed in 1935, that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.” Likewise, Republicans fought Medicare relentlessly; Ronald Reagan said in the early 1960s that if the government were to give seniors health coverage, their grandchildren would have to be instructed about the bygone time “when men were free.”
In the decades since, Republicans have periodically attempted to limit, cut, restrict or privatize all these programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush wanted to shift younger workers into private accounts rather than traditional Social Security. It was a bad policy idea for multiple reasons, but politically it was a disaster; after the public recoiled, Republicans in Congress refused to get behind the plan.
For years, as the GOP’s chief budget advocate in the House, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) proposed plans to move Medicare toward privatization. Though his ideas never became law, many Republicans supported his proposals, including some considering a run for president in 2024.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the most prominent potential GOP contender, voted as a member of Congress to limit cost-of-living increases for Social Security, privatize Medicare by turning it into a “premium support” program, and raise the retirement age for both. DeSantis also made comments supporting partial privatization of Social Security.
And after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans mounted a campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have done away with the law’s expansion of Medicaid that had extended coverage to more than 20 million people. They failed by a single vote.
The most positive spin Republicans can put on this record is that, over and over, many of them have tried to undermine these programs, but the party as a whole usually gets cold feet in the end because political self-preservation wins out over ideology.
But their ideological perspective is clear: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the embodiment of Big Government, massive programs that provide individual benefits and encourage people to rely on Washington. It’s no mystery why conservatives don’t like them.
Yes, it’s true that Trump, who has few real policy convictions, repeatedly said as a candidate that he would never cut Social Security or Medicare. And just recently he warned Republicans not to advocate cuts to the programs.
But Trump tried to do exactly that as president. And in a recent speech to an industry group, his former vice president, Mike Pence, revived the idea of prodding private Americans toward privatized Social Security accounts, which Pence described as replacing “the New Deal with a better deal.”
Today, House Republicans are circling the idea of cuts to Social Security and Medicare as they look for ways to slash government spending.
Republicans will ask that we put aside their historical opposition and ideological hostility toward these programs, and focus instead on what they’re saying now. The last part isn’t an unfair demand; once they figure out what they actually want to do, their proposal should be taken seriously.
The trouble is, Republicans haven’t earned a whole lot of trust when it comes to programs that were created by Democrats, and that have been sustained and defended by Democrats in the face of decades of Republican attacks. It’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they keep working at it, maybe one day we’ll be able to believe they love the safety net as much as they claim they do.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
“I know that a lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare,” President Biden said during a speech in Tampa on Thursday. “If that’s your dream, I’m your nightmare.”
After Republicans’ heckling of Biden on this topic at the State of the Union, the White House clearly thinks it has struck political gold and has sent the president out to keep up this drumbeat.
When Biden, referring to a plan released last year by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), told Congress and the nation that “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset” — then emphasized, “I’m not saying it’s the majority” — Republicans erupted in catcalls, fist-shaking and cries of “Liar!”
Their rage was powerful enough to make you suspect it might be sincere. And if their claim is that no more than a few Republicans agree with Scott’s suggestion to have every federal program disappear every five years unless it is reauthorized by Congress, they’re right.
But if Republicans want the public to believe that their passion for defending those popular safety-net programs should be beyond doubt, they are on shaky ground.
Even if Biden might sometimes exaggerate what his opponents believe, this debate carries with it a history and a context that make it hard for Republicans to claim they are being unfairly maligned.
This dates all the way back to the beginning of Social Security during the New Deal era, and Medicare (along with Medicaid) as part of the Great Society. All these programs were opposed by conservatives; one Republican senator thundered, before the bill passed in 1935, that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.” Likewise, Republicans fought Medicare relentlessly; Ronald Reagan said in the early 1960s that if the government were to give seniors health coverage, their grandchildren would have to be instructed about the bygone time “when men were free.”
In the decades since, Republicans have periodically attempted to limit, cut, restrict or privatize all these programs. In 2005, President George W. Bush wanted to shift younger workers into private accounts rather than traditional Social Security. It was a bad policy idea for multiple reasons, but politically it was a disaster; after the public recoiled, Republicans in Congress refused to get behind the plan.
For years, as the GOP’s chief budget advocate in the House, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) proposed plans to move Medicare toward privatization. Though his ideas never became law, many Republicans supported his proposals, including some considering a run for president in 2024.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the most prominent potential GOP contender, voted as a member of Congress to limit cost-of-living increases for Social Security, privatize Medicare by turning it into a “premium support” program, and raise the retirement age for both. DeSantis also made comments supporting partial privatization of Social Security.
And after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans mounted a campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have done away with the law’s expansion of Medicaid that had extended coverage to more than 20 million people. They failed by a single vote.
The most positive spin Republicans can put on this record is that, over and over, many of them have tried to undermine these programs, but the party as a whole usually gets cold feet in the end because political self-preservation wins out over ideology.
But their ideological perspective is clear: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the embodiment of Big Government, massive programs that provide individual benefits and encourage people to rely on Washington. It’s no mystery why conservatives don’t like them.
Yes, it’s true that Trump, who has few real policy convictions, repeatedly said as a candidate that he would never cut Social Security or Medicare. And just recently he warned Republicans not to advocate cuts to the programs.
But Trump tried to do exactly that as president. And in a recent speech to an industry group, his former vice president, Mike Pence, revived the idea of prodding private Americans toward privatized Social Security accounts, which Pence described as replacing “the New Deal with a better deal.”
Today, House Republicans are circling the idea of cuts to Social Security and Medicare as they look for ways to slash government spending.
Republicans will ask that we put aside their historical opposition and ideological hostility toward these programs, and focus instead on what they’re saying now. The last part isn’t an unfair demand; once they figure out what they actually want to do, their proposal should be taken seriously.
The trouble is, Republicans haven’t earned a whole lot of trust when it comes to programs that were created by Democrats, and that have been sustained and defended by Democrats in the face of decades of Republican attacks. It’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if they keep working at it, maybe one day we’ll be able to believe they love the safety net as much as they claim they do.
AT LONG LAST, AN EQUITABLE RULING ON SCHOOL FUNDING. CHANGE MUST NOW FOLLOW SWIFTLY.
Gov. Josh Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
A Commonwealth Court judge found what many have long said about the way Pennsylvania pays for K-12 public education: The state’s method of funding schools is unfair and inadequate. Even more egregious, it is unconstitutional.
Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s landmark 786-page decision is a long-overdue victory for students across the state — especially those in poorer rural and urban districts. It is also a triumph for justice, equality, and the rule of law.
However, when real change will come remains unclear.
After all, the lawsuit was first filed in 2014 and did not go to trial until November 2021. After three months of arguments, the ruling came a year later. The decision will likely be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
That process could take another year or so. If the Supreme Court upholds the decision, it will be left to the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro to determine how to properly fund the schools, as the judge’s ruling did not prescribe a remedy.
Kudos to the attorneys at the Education Law Center, the Public Interest Law Center, and the private firm of O’Melveny & Myers for their tenacity throughout the long legal process. They shined a light on the state’s inability to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for all children, as the Pennsylvania Constitution’s education clause requires.
Hurdles remain, but Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”
The price, though, will not be cheap. A Penn State professor’s analysis provided at the trial found it would take an additional $4.6 billion invested over time to adequately fund the schools. The entire state budget for 2022-23 is $45.2 billion.
In effect, to properly fund the schools, lawmakers would have to increase revenues by roughly 10%. Those revenues mainly come from three sources: sales taxes, personal income taxes, and corporate income taxes.
Republican lawmakers in Harrisburg will surely oppose tax increases and instead use the ruling to call for more school choice, which has failed to solve the state’s education woes.
The good news is Democrats control the state House, and Shapiro supports increasing education funding and making it more equitable for students in every zip code.
As state attorney general, Shapiro filed an amicus brief supporting the legal challenge to the current funding method. Shapiro’s brief said the “Commonwealth’s most fundamental need is an intelligent and informed citizenry, which will support our democratic institutions, grow our economy, and strengthen the foundations of our shared civic life.”
That cuts to the heart of the matter.
Pennsylvania does a good job of investing in the elderly. The state funds nursing homes, offers seniors property tax rebates, and earmarks lottery proceeds for a variety of programs that benefit senior citizens.
Now, Pennsylvania must also invest in its future.
Research shows that states with well-educated workers have stronger economies. One study found increasing student achievement to basic mastery levels across the country would increase the nation’s gross domestic product by $32 trillion, or 14.6%.
There is also a clear correlation that shows investing in education lowers crime. Pennsylvania spends more than $42,000 a year, per inmate, to house people in prison. The state would be better off investing in education, thus reducing prison costs and the number of incarcerated individuals.
Pennsylvania has long lagged behind other states in terms of funding public schools and job growth. Students in poorer school districts especially lack many basic resources, including books, libraries, counselors, and even enough teachers.
The state’s uneven funding was underscored during the pandemic, when schools in poorer districts lacked resources to transition to online learning, leaving kids to fall further behind.
Republicans in Harrisburg have long ignored education as an investment. More than a decade ago, then-Gov. Tom Corbett slashed education funding statewide by $1 billion and crippled Philadelphia’s schools.
Doug Mastriano, last year’s Republican nominee for governor, wanted to eliminate property taxes and give parents vouchers for $9,000, which would have effectively cut education funding by a third. Voters ensured that disaster was averted.
But Republicans in Washington have also been hostile to public education for more than a generation. Former President Ronald Reagan promised to kill the U.S. Department of Education in 1980. Donald Trump repeatedly proposed cutting billions in funding meant for after-school programs, teacher training, and grants.
Starving education is a losing policy on many levels. Public education is a public good. Pennsylvania students have already waited too long for state leaders to do what is right.
Gov. Josh Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
A Commonwealth Court judge found what many have long said about the way Pennsylvania pays for K-12 public education: The state’s method of funding schools is unfair and inadequate. Even more egregious, it is unconstitutional.
Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer’s landmark 786-page decision is a long-overdue victory for students across the state — especially those in poorer rural and urban districts. It is also a triumph for justice, equality, and the rule of law.
However, when real change will come remains unclear.
After all, the lawsuit was first filed in 2014 and did not go to trial until November 2021. After three months of arguments, the ruling came a year later. The decision will likely be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
That process could take another year or so. If the Supreme Court upholds the decision, it will be left to the General Assembly and Gov. Josh Shapiro to determine how to properly fund the schools, as the judge’s ruling did not prescribe a remedy.
Kudos to the attorneys at the Education Law Center, the Public Interest Law Center, and the private firm of O’Melveny & Myers for their tenacity throughout the long legal process. They shined a light on the state’s inability to provide a “thorough and efficient” education for all children, as the Pennsylvania Constitution’s education clause requires.
Hurdles remain, but Shapiro and state lawmakers do not have to wait for the courts to tell them what is obvious to everyone: It is past time to properly fund public education for all students. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”
The price, though, will not be cheap. A Penn State professor’s analysis provided at the trial found it would take an additional $4.6 billion invested over time to adequately fund the schools. The entire state budget for 2022-23 is $45.2 billion.
In effect, to properly fund the schools, lawmakers would have to increase revenues by roughly 10%. Those revenues mainly come from three sources: sales taxes, personal income taxes, and corporate income taxes.
Republican lawmakers in Harrisburg will surely oppose tax increases and instead use the ruling to call for more school choice, which has failed to solve the state’s education woes.
The good news is Democrats control the state House, and Shapiro supports increasing education funding and making it more equitable for students in every zip code.
As state attorney general, Shapiro filed an amicus brief supporting the legal challenge to the current funding method. Shapiro’s brief said the “Commonwealth’s most fundamental need is an intelligent and informed citizenry, which will support our democratic institutions, grow our economy, and strengthen the foundations of our shared civic life.”
That cuts to the heart of the matter.
Pennsylvania does a good job of investing in the elderly. The state funds nursing homes, offers seniors property tax rebates, and earmarks lottery proceeds for a variety of programs that benefit senior citizens.
Now, Pennsylvania must also invest in its future.
Research shows that states with well-educated workers have stronger economies. One study found increasing student achievement to basic mastery levels across the country would increase the nation’s gross domestic product by $32 trillion, or 14.6%.
There is also a clear correlation that shows investing in education lowers crime. Pennsylvania spends more than $42,000 a year, per inmate, to house people in prison. The state would be better off investing in education, thus reducing prison costs and the number of incarcerated individuals.
Pennsylvania has long lagged behind other states in terms of funding public schools and job growth. Students in poorer school districts especially lack many basic resources, including books, libraries, counselors, and even enough teachers.
The state’s uneven funding was underscored during the pandemic, when schools in poorer districts lacked resources to transition to online learning, leaving kids to fall further behind.
Republicans in Harrisburg have long ignored education as an investment. More than a decade ago, then-Gov. Tom Corbett slashed education funding statewide by $1 billion and crippled Philadelphia’s schools.
Doug Mastriano, last year’s Republican nominee for governor, wanted to eliminate property taxes and give parents vouchers for $9,000, which would have effectively cut education funding by a third. Voters ensured that disaster was averted.
But Republicans in Washington have also been hostile to public education for more than a generation. Former President Ronald Reagan promised to kill the U.S. Department of Education in 1980. Donald Trump repeatedly proposed cutting billions in funding meant for after-school programs, teacher training, and grants.
Starving education is a losing policy on many levels. Public education is a public good. Pennsylvania students have already waited too long for state leaders to do what is right.
A NEW POLL GIVES US INSIGHT INTO A TROUBLING ANTI-AMERICAN MOVEMENT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.
“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones explained in a news release on the survey of more than 6,000 Americans. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.”The poll used the following beliefs to gauge how deeply respondents embraced Christian nationalism:
PRRI found that 10 percent (“adherents”) of American adults believe in these ideas overwhelmingly or completely; 19 percent agree but not completely (“sympathizers”); 39 percent disagree (“skeptics”) but not completely; and 29 percent disagree completely (“rejecters”).
Who are these people? “Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” Thirty-five percent of all Whites are adherents. Put differently, Christian nationalist adherents are a minority but when combined with sympathizers still comprise a stunning 29 percent of Americans — many tens of millions.
Christian nationalists also make up the base of the Republican Party. “Most Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%), while at least three-quarters of both independents (46% skeptics and 29% rejecters) and Democrats (36% skeptics and 47% rejecters) lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism.” In total, “Republicans (21%) are about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be adherents of Christian nationalism.” Some promising news: There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.
Christian nationalist adherents are emphatically out of synch with the pluralist majority. “Americans overall are much more likely to express a preference for the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a variety of religions (73%).” They also are much more likely to hold authoritarian and racist views.
“Adherents of Christian nationalism are nearly seven times as likely as rejecters to agree that ‘true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country’ (40% vs. 16%),” the news release said. In addition, “While only about 3 in 10 Americans (28%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set thing right,’ half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers (38%) support the idea of an authoritarian leader.”
There is also a strong racist/white grievance element:
Around four in ten Americans (41%) agree that discrimination against white Americans is as big of a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities, compared to 58% who disagree. Approximately two-thirds of Christian nationalism sympathizers (66%) and more than three-quarters of Christian nationalism adherents (77%) agree with this statement. Among Christian nationalism sympathizers and adherents who are white, agreement with this sentiment rises to 73% and 85%, respectively.
Moreover, a stunning 83 percent of adherents think “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” Two-thirds of Americans overall reject this explicitly racist statement
More than 70 percent of adherents embrace replacement theory, nearly one-quarter harbor the antisemitic view that Jews hold too many positions of power and 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, the poll found. More than 65 percent think Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”
If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”
The findings highlight challenges to those who cherish the American creed that “All men are created equal” and who embrace the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment. And because Christian nationalists adopt their views as articles of religious faith, they might be far less willing to reexamine them. The task of inculcating American values of inclusion, democracy and rule of law will have to come, in all likelihood, from within church communities.
The survey also confirms that Christian nationalism is not tied to any specific candidate. Rather, a vast number of like-minded Americans could be receptive to an authoritarian, racist, dogmatic message donning the cloak of Christianity. Defeating a single candidate won’t end this movement.
Given their numbers and potential staying power, the response to this threat to pluralistic democracy must be cross-partisan. And it will have to go beyond politics. To counteract Christian nationalism we will need a positive, optimistic message that celebrates an inclusive, diverse democracy in which no American is more “real” than another.
What makes us unique — or “exceptional” as the right likes to say — is that America isn’t defined by race or religion. Believers in American values have their work cut out for them.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.
“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones explained in a news release on the survey of more than 6,000 Americans. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.”The poll used the following beliefs to gauge how deeply respondents embraced Christian nationalism:
- “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”
- “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.”
- “If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”
- “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”
- “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”
PRRI found that 10 percent (“adherents”) of American adults believe in these ideas overwhelmingly or completely; 19 percent agree but not completely (“sympathizers”); 39 percent disagree (“skeptics”) but not completely; and 29 percent disagree completely (“rejecters”).
Who are these people? “Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” Thirty-five percent of all Whites are adherents. Put differently, Christian nationalist adherents are a minority but when combined with sympathizers still comprise a stunning 29 percent of Americans — many tens of millions.
Christian nationalists also make up the base of the Republican Party. “Most Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%), while at least three-quarters of both independents (46% skeptics and 29% rejecters) and Democrats (36% skeptics and 47% rejecters) lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism.” In total, “Republicans (21%) are about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be adherents of Christian nationalism.” Some promising news: There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.
Christian nationalist adherents are emphatically out of synch with the pluralist majority. “Americans overall are much more likely to express a preference for the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a variety of religions (73%).” They also are much more likely to hold authoritarian and racist views.
“Adherents of Christian nationalism are nearly seven times as likely as rejecters to agree that ‘true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country’ (40% vs. 16%),” the news release said. In addition, “While only about 3 in 10 Americans (28%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set thing right,’ half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers (38%) support the idea of an authoritarian leader.”
There is also a strong racist/white grievance element:
Around four in ten Americans (41%) agree that discrimination against white Americans is as big of a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities, compared to 58% who disagree. Approximately two-thirds of Christian nationalism sympathizers (66%) and more than three-quarters of Christian nationalism adherents (77%) agree with this statement. Among Christian nationalism sympathizers and adherents who are white, agreement with this sentiment rises to 73% and 85%, respectively.
Moreover, a stunning 83 percent of adherents think “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” Two-thirds of Americans overall reject this explicitly racist statement
More than 70 percent of adherents embrace replacement theory, nearly one-quarter harbor the antisemitic view that Jews hold too many positions of power and 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, the poll found. More than 65 percent think Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”
If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”
The findings highlight challenges to those who cherish the American creed that “All men are created equal” and who embrace the anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment. And because Christian nationalists adopt their views as articles of religious faith, they might be far less willing to reexamine them. The task of inculcating American values of inclusion, democracy and rule of law will have to come, in all likelihood, from within church communities.
The survey also confirms that Christian nationalism is not tied to any specific candidate. Rather, a vast number of like-minded Americans could be receptive to an authoritarian, racist, dogmatic message donning the cloak of Christianity. Defeating a single candidate won’t end this movement.
Given their numbers and potential staying power, the response to this threat to pluralistic democracy must be cross-partisan. And it will have to go beyond politics. To counteract Christian nationalism we will need a positive, optimistic message that celebrates an inclusive, diverse democracy in which no American is more “real” than another.
What makes us unique — or “exceptional” as the right likes to say — is that America isn’t defined by race or religion. Believers in American values have their work cut out for them.
AR-15 LAPEL PIN IS A PERFECT SYMBOL FOR A GOP THAT’S BECOME A DEATH CULT
A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving.
By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The backward walk of devolution that is the modern Republican Party, and the near-death experience of American governing, can be best told through the story of two adjacent Long Island congressional districts that, over the course of one generation, sent two radically different kinds of human beings to Capitol Hill.
In 1993, a stunning act of violence turned an everyday citizen into a political activist who tried to change the world for the better — by getting elected to Congress. Carolyn McCarthy was shocked when her husband was murdered and her son wounded when a rage-addled madman boarded a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and began firing a Ruger 9mm pistol, killing six and wounding 19. A nurse by training, she ran for Congress in New York’s 4th Congressional District as a Democrat three years later and won an upset victory, largely on her promise to Long Islanders that she would be “the fiercest gun-control advocate.”
McCarthy’s storyline had an almost Frank Capra-esque feel, albeit tinged with sadness. But her tenure overlapped with the rise of a far-right Republican Party that fetishized firearms ownership and thus ensured there would be no Jimmy Stewart-style satisfying ending to her crusade for justice for the gun attack on her family. In fact, McCarthy was a House member in 2004 when her colleagues allowed a ban on assault weapons to expire, triggering a rise in mass shootings like the one that shattered that LIRR commuter car.
She retired in 2014, eight years before voters next door in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, covering Long Island’s North Shore and parts of Queens, elected a GOP grifter and con man who called himself George Santos. While McCarthy had gone to Washington to get something done on guns, the cash-strapped Santos reportedly confided to friends he wanted to cash in on the lucrative congressional pension and free health care.
In winning election on a completely made-up resume, Santos is the final downward spiral for a Republican Party that has become 100% about the performance and 0% about the policy. So when his new GOP colleague from Georgia handed Santos a lapel pin in the shape of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the New Yorker did what any outrageous showman would do. He pinned it on.
The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.
It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketing them to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.
And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that back in Luna’s home state four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Newtown — grows longer and longer.
Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Club Q in Colorado Springs, or a bus in Charlottesville — is any different, really?
Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.
A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.
But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s, and that for its true believers gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.
For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Blacks, women, the LGBTQ community and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.
At the start of 2023, Clyde, Santos and Luna are the avatars of what some have called “the Seinfeld Congress” with the House back under Republican control — a show about “nothing.” The next two years are indeed likely to see little more than a surge of Fox News-friendly stunts around protecting gas stoves or banning drag shows, but the GOP’s lack of interest in policy is worse than inertia. Americans are dying from do-nothing government.
It’s not only the hundreds who’ve been needlessly killed since 2004 in the surge of mass shootings by AR-15-style weapons and large-capacity magazines that Congress had banned in the 1990s only to let that successful law expire. And it’s not just the rejection of 99% of the world’s top climate scientists by a political party screaming “drill, baby, drill!” in the face of growing wildfires and 1000-year floods that are destroying homes and lives.
Today, the leading candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and our ex-president Donald Trump — seem locked in a bidding war for who can most dissuade the public from using the COVID-19 vaccines that both men once touted before vaccine denial was swept into the jet stream of conservative nihilism. DeSantis has even launched a criminal probe of the vaccine’s production — pretending that research hasn’t shown that the shots have been highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. As the pandemic nears its third anniversary, some 400 to 500 Americans are still dying every day — many, needlessly.
And things could get worse. In recent days, health experts are increasingly alarmed about newer H5N1 strains of the so-called bird flu that seem to spread more easily among mammals, which is highly worrisome because human infections with the bird flu have been much more deadly than COVID-19. In other words, a major outbreak of bird flu would require exactly the type of communal response — both in terms of government spending and action, and public cooperation — that today’s nihilistic Republican Party is built to prevent.
So when the next pandemic strikes, our first line of defense will be the Andrew Clydes and George Santoses waving the silly millimeters of their do-nothing death cult’s AR-15 lapel pins against the lethal threat they can’t see and don’t understand. God save the United States of America.
A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving.
By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The backward walk of devolution that is the modern Republican Party, and the near-death experience of American governing, can be best told through the story of two adjacent Long Island congressional districts that, over the course of one generation, sent two radically different kinds of human beings to Capitol Hill.
In 1993, a stunning act of violence turned an everyday citizen into a political activist who tried to change the world for the better — by getting elected to Congress. Carolyn McCarthy was shocked when her husband was murdered and her son wounded when a rage-addled madman boarded a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and began firing a Ruger 9mm pistol, killing six and wounding 19. A nurse by training, she ran for Congress in New York’s 4th Congressional District as a Democrat three years later and won an upset victory, largely on her promise to Long Islanders that she would be “the fiercest gun-control advocate.”
McCarthy’s storyline had an almost Frank Capra-esque feel, albeit tinged with sadness. But her tenure overlapped with the rise of a far-right Republican Party that fetishized firearms ownership and thus ensured there would be no Jimmy Stewart-style satisfying ending to her crusade for justice for the gun attack on her family. In fact, McCarthy was a House member in 2004 when her colleagues allowed a ban on assault weapons to expire, triggering a rise in mass shootings like the one that shattered that LIRR commuter car.
She retired in 2014, eight years before voters next door in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, covering Long Island’s North Shore and parts of Queens, elected a GOP grifter and con man who called himself George Santos. While McCarthy had gone to Washington to get something done on guns, the cash-strapped Santos reportedly confided to friends he wanted to cash in on the lucrative congressional pension and free health care.
In winning election on a completely made-up resume, Santos is the final downward spiral for a Republican Party that has become 100% about the performance and 0% about the policy. So when his new GOP colleague from Georgia handed Santos a lapel pin in the shape of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the New Yorker did what any outrageous showman would do. He pinned it on.
The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.
It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketing them to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.
And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that back in Luna’s home state four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Newtown — grows longer and longer.
Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Club Q in Colorado Springs, or a bus in Charlottesville — is any different, really?
Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.
A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.
But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s, and that for its true believers gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.
For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Blacks, women, the LGBTQ community and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.
At the start of 2023, Clyde, Santos and Luna are the avatars of what some have called “the Seinfeld Congress” with the House back under Republican control — a show about “nothing.” The next two years are indeed likely to see little more than a surge of Fox News-friendly stunts around protecting gas stoves or banning drag shows, but the GOP’s lack of interest in policy is worse than inertia. Americans are dying from do-nothing government.
It’s not only the hundreds who’ve been needlessly killed since 2004 in the surge of mass shootings by AR-15-style weapons and large-capacity magazines that Congress had banned in the 1990s only to let that successful law expire. And it’s not just the rejection of 99% of the world’s top climate scientists by a political party screaming “drill, baby, drill!” in the face of growing wildfires and 1000-year floods that are destroying homes and lives.
Today, the leading candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and our ex-president Donald Trump — seem locked in a bidding war for who can most dissuade the public from using the COVID-19 vaccines that both men once touted before vaccine denial was swept into the jet stream of conservative nihilism. DeSantis has even launched a criminal probe of the vaccine’s production — pretending that research hasn’t shown that the shots have been highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. As the pandemic nears its third anniversary, some 400 to 500 Americans are still dying every day — many, needlessly.
And things could get worse. In recent days, health experts are increasingly alarmed about newer H5N1 strains of the so-called bird flu that seem to spread more easily among mammals, which is highly worrisome because human infections with the bird flu have been much more deadly than COVID-19. In other words, a major outbreak of bird flu would require exactly the type of communal response — both in terms of government spending and action, and public cooperation — that today’s nihilistic Republican Party is built to prevent.
So when the next pandemic strikes, our first line of defense will be the Andrew Clydes and George Santoses waving the silly millimeters of their do-nothing death cult’s AR-15 lapel pins against the lethal threat they can’t see and don’t understand. God save the United States of America.
WHEN REPUBLICANS RANT ABOUT ‘SOCIALISM,’ REMEMBER THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
One of the greatest government success stories in a generation rarely gets much attention. That is the story of the Affordable Care Act.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently reported a “nearly 50% increase in HealthCare.gov of since President Biden took office.” In addition, “3.6 million people signed up for health care coverage on the Marketplaces for the first time this year.” Altogether, that resulted in a record-breaking 16.3 million people who selected a plan on the ACA marketplaces during the most recent open enrollment period (Nov. 1 to Jan. 15).
CMS also reported that families who purchased insurance in the marketplace saved an average of $800 in premiums in 2022. More than 90 percent of purchasers had choices from three or more providers.
The administration also has consistently strengthened the ACA in recent years. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded and extended ACA premium support, which the Inflation Reduction Act further extended through 2025.
Biden also eliminated the ACA’s “family glitch,” which based an employee’s eligibility for ACA subsidies on his or her individual rate, even if that person was paying for far more expensive family coverage. That left many families paying exorbitant rates to cover their entire household. Claire Heyison of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained that when the administration’s fix to the family glitch went into effect at the end of 2022, millions of people gained eligibility to buy ACA coverage. Almost half of them were in “families of low-income workers (those earning between 100-250 percent of the federal poverty level, or between $28,000-$70,000 a year for a family of four).”
In the midterms, almost no Republican — other than Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — talked about repealing the ACA. That might be because the ACA is widely used in red states. Nine of the 10 states with the highest enrollment rates are led by Republicans. In other words, red states are getting a ride on the federal program their political leaders have long lambasted.
All of this amounts to a historic achievement. Not only did the ACA survive multiple attempts by Republicans to repeal the law and reduce outreach, but it also managed to drive down uninsured rate to a record low of 8 percent last year. That’s in large part because of the Biden administration’s competent management of the program and extension of subsidies over united GOP opposition.
The next time Republicans rant about “socialism,” Democrats should remind them and all Americans about the Affordable Care Act. For years, Republicans denounced the law as “socialist,” yet red-state Americans have been using it at higher rates than blue-state residents. Watch red-state Americans similarly benefit from other government programs that Republican politicians whine about, such as government price controls on prescription drugs and subsidies to help transition to green energy.
Indeed, Democrats should highlight their successes where Republicans have fought against expanding access to health care. Florida, for example, has refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA, leading to its 12 percent uninsured rate.
And that’s about to get even worse: Once the federal government’s covid-19 national emergency ends, so too will pandemic-era policies designed to keep people enrolled in Medicaid continuously. So unless governors act, more people will lose Medicaid coverage. While other governors are scrambling to minimize coverage losses, Florida’s Ron DeSantis has a plan that could kick as many as 1.75 million residents off Medicaid. No wonder DeSantis wants to talk about “wokeism”; his actual record on issues people care most about is putrid.
The lesson of the ACA is clear: With competent leaders, government policies can help Americans. As Republicans vote against these measures and scream “socialism!” — all while claiming the banner of economic populism — Democrats would do well to remind the country which party actually helps ordinary people.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
One of the greatest government success stories in a generation rarely gets much attention. That is the story of the Affordable Care Act.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently reported a “nearly 50% increase in HealthCare.gov of since President Biden took office.” In addition, “3.6 million people signed up for health care coverage on the Marketplaces for the first time this year.” Altogether, that resulted in a record-breaking 16.3 million people who selected a plan on the ACA marketplaces during the most recent open enrollment period (Nov. 1 to Jan. 15).
CMS also reported that families who purchased insurance in the marketplace saved an average of $800 in premiums in 2022. More than 90 percent of purchasers had choices from three or more providers.
The administration also has consistently strengthened the ACA in recent years. The American Rescue Plan Act expanded and extended ACA premium support, which the Inflation Reduction Act further extended through 2025.
Biden also eliminated the ACA’s “family glitch,” which based an employee’s eligibility for ACA subsidies on his or her individual rate, even if that person was paying for far more expensive family coverage. That left many families paying exorbitant rates to cover their entire household. Claire Heyison of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained that when the administration’s fix to the family glitch went into effect at the end of 2022, millions of people gained eligibility to buy ACA coverage. Almost half of them were in “families of low-income workers (those earning between 100-250 percent of the federal poverty level, or between $28,000-$70,000 a year for a family of four).”
In the midterms, almost no Republican — other than Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — talked about repealing the ACA. That might be because the ACA is widely used in red states. Nine of the 10 states with the highest enrollment rates are led by Republicans. In other words, red states are getting a ride on the federal program their political leaders have long lambasted.
All of this amounts to a historic achievement. Not only did the ACA survive multiple attempts by Republicans to repeal the law and reduce outreach, but it also managed to drive down uninsured rate to a record low of 8 percent last year. That’s in large part because of the Biden administration’s competent management of the program and extension of subsidies over united GOP opposition.
The next time Republicans rant about “socialism,” Democrats should remind them and all Americans about the Affordable Care Act. For years, Republicans denounced the law as “socialist,” yet red-state Americans have been using it at higher rates than blue-state residents. Watch red-state Americans similarly benefit from other government programs that Republican politicians whine about, such as government price controls on prescription drugs and subsidies to help transition to green energy.
Indeed, Democrats should highlight their successes where Republicans have fought against expanding access to health care. Florida, for example, has refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA, leading to its 12 percent uninsured rate.
And that’s about to get even worse: Once the federal government’s covid-19 national emergency ends, so too will pandemic-era policies designed to keep people enrolled in Medicaid continuously. So unless governors act, more people will lose Medicaid coverage. While other governors are scrambling to minimize coverage losses, Florida’s Ron DeSantis has a plan that could kick as many as 1.75 million residents off Medicaid. No wonder DeSantis wants to talk about “wokeism”; his actual record on issues people care most about is putrid.
The lesson of the ACA is clear: With competent leaders, government policies can help Americans. As Republicans vote against these measures and scream “socialism!” — all while claiming the banner of economic populism — Democrats would do well to remind the country which party actually helps ordinary people.
YE OLD SUPREME COURT? YOUR ORIGINALISM IS MAKING AMERICA UNSAFE.
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to gun ownership, it emphasized the ability “of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” When it expanded that decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court noted that “ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense.”
Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Tex. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.
Or, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit put it in vacating Rahimi’s conviction for illegal gun possession, “Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”
This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.
The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.
Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional.
Those cases are just making their way to the appellate level, and Thursday’s ruling by the Fifth Circuit is one of the earliest to be decided. The court may be the most conservative — and most dangerous — in the country. The ruling in Rahimi’s case, written by one Trump-appointed judge, Cory T. Wilson, and joined by Trump appointee James C. Ho and Reagan appointee Edith H. Jones, shows why.
When Arlington police searched Rahimi’s home, they found multiple guns — and a domestic violence restraining order imposed after Rahimi allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Federal law prohibits those subject to such orders from possessing guns, and Rahimi was indicted by a federal grand jury.
Before Bruen, the Fifth Circuit had upheld such charges against constitutional challenge, and it had previously rejected Rahimi’s claim that the law violated his Second Amendment rights. But on Thursday, it did an about-face.
“We know the increased risk women in abusive relationships face when the abuser has a gun, and the Fifth Circuit just essentially greenlighted arming domestic abusers,” Adam Skaggs, vice president of the Giffords Law Center, told me. “As a matter of public safety, this is a horrendous decision.”
Wilson, who was a fervent opponent of gun regulation as a Mississippi state legislator, strained to read the Supreme Court’s language about law-abiding citizens out of the precedents. That was just “shorthand,” he insisted, and “read in context, the Court’s phrasing does not add an implied gloss that constricts the Second Amendment’s reach.”
This is simply wrong. As the Justice Department argued, the court in Bruen emphasized that “nothing in our analysis” threatened licensing laws in 43 states, which, the court said, “are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” Such as, say, Texas, which prohibits those subject to domestic violence protective orders from obtaining licenses.
Wilson was having none of it. Under the government’s approach, he asked, “Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”
Seriously? This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about a man accused of dragging his girlfriend into his car, shooting at a witness who saw him assault her, and warning the girlfriend that he would shoot her if she told anyone what had happened.
As to historical analogues, Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”
But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”
As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.
All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.
And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?
By Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to gun ownership, it emphasized the ability “of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” When it expanded that decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court noted that “ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense.”
Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Tex. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.
Or, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit put it in vacating Rahimi’s conviction for illegal gun possession, “Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”
This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.
The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.
Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional.
Those cases are just making their way to the appellate level, and Thursday’s ruling by the Fifth Circuit is one of the earliest to be decided. The court may be the most conservative — and most dangerous — in the country. The ruling in Rahimi’s case, written by one Trump-appointed judge, Cory T. Wilson, and joined by Trump appointee James C. Ho and Reagan appointee Edith H. Jones, shows why.
When Arlington police searched Rahimi’s home, they found multiple guns — and a domestic violence restraining order imposed after Rahimi allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Federal law prohibits those subject to such orders from possessing guns, and Rahimi was indicted by a federal grand jury.
Before Bruen, the Fifth Circuit had upheld such charges against constitutional challenge, and it had previously rejected Rahimi’s claim that the law violated his Second Amendment rights. But on Thursday, it did an about-face.
“We know the increased risk women in abusive relationships face when the abuser has a gun, and the Fifth Circuit just essentially greenlighted arming domestic abusers,” Adam Skaggs, vice president of the Giffords Law Center, told me. “As a matter of public safety, this is a horrendous decision.”
Wilson, who was a fervent opponent of gun regulation as a Mississippi state legislator, strained to read the Supreme Court’s language about law-abiding citizens out of the precedents. That was just “shorthand,” he insisted, and “read in context, the Court’s phrasing does not add an implied gloss that constricts the Second Amendment’s reach.”
This is simply wrong. As the Justice Department argued, the court in Bruen emphasized that “nothing in our analysis” threatened licensing laws in 43 states, which, the court said, “are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” Such as, say, Texas, which prohibits those subject to domestic violence protective orders from obtaining licenses.
Wilson was having none of it. Under the government’s approach, he asked, “Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”
Seriously? This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about a man accused of dragging his girlfriend into his car, shooting at a witness who saw him assault her, and warning the girlfriend that he would shoot her if she told anyone what had happened.
As to historical analogues, Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”
But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”
As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.
All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.
And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?
2016 TRUMP CAMPAIGN TO PAY $450,000 TO SETTLE NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS SUIT
The settlement with a former campaign aide who says she was the target of sexual discrimination effectively invalidates agreements hundreds of 2016 Trump campaign officials signed.
By Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign will pay $450,000 as part of a settlement of a long court fight over its use of nondisclosure agreements, according to documents filed on Friday in a New York federal court.
The proposed settlement with Jessica Denson, a former campaign aide whom the campaign tried to silence as she claimed she was the target of abusive treatment and sexual discrimination by another campaign member, effectively invalidates the nondisclosure agreements that hundreds of officials from Mr. Trump’s first presidential run signed.
Ms. Denson is set to receive $25,000, the filings show, and the rest will cover legal fees and other costs. The judge in the case, who has not yet approved the settlement, pushed back on efforts by the campaign to keep the paperwork sealed. The details were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
“We think that this N.D.A. was entirely unreasonable from the beginning,” said David K. Bowles, one of the lawyers for Ms. Denson, who initially represented herself in the case. “No attorney should have ever drafted it, and no campaign worker should have ever been compelled to sign it. We think the unwinding of the N.D.A. is a triumph for free speech, for democracy and for Jessica Denson, in particular, and we are very proud of our accomplishment tonight.”
A representative for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mr. Trump has made broad use of nondisclosure agreements throughout his business career and, later, his political career. The agreements have generally sought to keep people from disclosing information about Mr. Trump, but he has also used them as a cudgel against a wide variety of aides. In Ms. Denson’s case, her lawyers argued the agreement was overly broad, among other flaws.
Ms. Denson had been trying to make the suit a certified class action shortly before the matter was settled. She has a separate case pending related to her claim that she was sexually discriminated against by a superior on the campaign.
The settlement with a former campaign aide who says she was the target of sexual discrimination effectively invalidates agreements hundreds of 2016 Trump campaign officials signed.
By Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign will pay $450,000 as part of a settlement of a long court fight over its use of nondisclosure agreements, according to documents filed on Friday in a New York federal court.
The proposed settlement with Jessica Denson, a former campaign aide whom the campaign tried to silence as she claimed she was the target of abusive treatment and sexual discrimination by another campaign member, effectively invalidates the nondisclosure agreements that hundreds of officials from Mr. Trump’s first presidential run signed.
Ms. Denson is set to receive $25,000, the filings show, and the rest will cover legal fees and other costs. The judge in the case, who has not yet approved the settlement, pushed back on efforts by the campaign to keep the paperwork sealed. The details were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.
“We think that this N.D.A. was entirely unreasonable from the beginning,” said David K. Bowles, one of the lawyers for Ms. Denson, who initially represented herself in the case. “No attorney should have ever drafted it, and no campaign worker should have ever been compelled to sign it. We think the unwinding of the N.D.A. is a triumph for free speech, for democracy and for Jessica Denson, in particular, and we are very proud of our accomplishment tonight.”
A representative for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mr. Trump has made broad use of nondisclosure agreements throughout his business career and, later, his political career. The agreements have generally sought to keep people from disclosing information about Mr. Trump, but he has also used them as a cudgel against a wide variety of aides. In Ms. Denson’s case, her lawyers argued the agreement was overly broad, among other flaws.
Ms. Denson had been trying to make the suit a certified class action shortly before the matter was settled. She has a separate case pending related to her claim that she was sexually discriminated against by a superior on the campaign.
THE GOP TAX PLAN IS TO LET THE RICH PAY LESS AND MAKE YOU PAY MORE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden, consistent with his idea of building an economy from “the bottom up and the middle out,” has tried to get the rich and big corporations to pay more taxes. The MAGA GOP, abandoning all pretense of populism, has a scheme to junk the progressive tax code and replace it with a national sales tax, with devastating results for the middle class.
That tells you a lot about the contrasting visions of the two parties. One still fights for the little guy in practical, concrete terms while the other proposes one harebrained scheme after another with no regard to the needs of average Americans.
Biden’s American Rescue Plan expanded the child tax credit for a year and permanently made it fully refundable, meaning that parents receive the money regardless of how much they owe in taxes. Keeping his promises not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year and to get businesses to pay more, Biden raised $300 billion in revenue in the Inflation Reduction Act by placing a new tax on stock buybacks and enacting a minimum tax on big corporations. To the chagrin of tax cheats (and their sympathetic Republican politicians), the law also boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax evaders.
None of these were radical changes in the code. More far-reaching plans to increase the individual top marginal tax rate, to boost the corporate tax rate, to equalize tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income for those making more than $400,000, and to eliminate the step-up basis for the estate tax never passed.
The principle underlying all of these measures, which would be comparatively small adjustments that would not hit the vast majority of Americans, was simple: The rich have made out very well and should pay more taxes; working- and middle-class taxpayers shouldn’t.
“Over the past 40 years, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, and too many corporations have lost their sense of responsibility to their workers, their communities and the country,” Biden said in a speech in September 2021. “CEOs used to make about 20 times the average worker in the company that they ran. Today, they make more than 350 times what the average worker in their corporation makes.” He added, “Since the pandemic began, billionaires have seen their wealth go up by $1.8 trillion. That is, everyone who was a billionaire before the pandemic began, the total accumulated wealth beyond the billions they already had has gone up by $1.8 trillion.”
That grotesque widening of income inequality offends most Americans, who consistently tell pollsters the rich should pay more.
GOP politicians and their wealthy donors see things differently. The first tax measure proposed by the MAGA House was to try to take back funding for the IRS to chase down tax cheats.
“The debate should focus on one accurate and alarming number: the IRS has 2,284 fewer skilled auditors to handle the sophisticated returns of wealthy taxpayers than it did in 1954,” Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote. “The decade-long, House Republican-driven budget cuts have created dysfunction at the IRS, where relatively few millionaires are now audited.”
But allowing tax cheats to avoid paying what they legally owe is not the sum total of the GOP thinking on taxes. “As part of his deal to become House speaker,” Semafor reported, “Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax.”
A mammoth 30 percent sales tax would be grossly regressive, socking it to the same working- and middle-class families Republicans ostensibly worry are paying more at the pump and grocery store because of inflation.
You know the idea is rotten when Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, blasted the move. He told Semafor: “This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats.” Even Norquist knows that because the poor and middle class spend a much higher percentage of their income on necessities such as food and clothing, the impact would be devastating.
Unsurprisingly Democrats leaped at the chance to blast the scheme. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted:
Hold on: House Republicans want a national 30% sales tax on everything from groceries to gasoline? They want to raise taxes on working-class & middle-class families while slashing them for millionaires & billionaires? Are they TRYING to show exactly how out of touch they are? — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 19, 2023
Biden also hammered Republicans: “National sales tax, that’s a great idea. It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.”
The GOP plan boils down to this: Let rich tax cheats get away with not paying what they owe while redoing the entire tax system so the overwhelming burden will fall on those less able to pay. Genius! Well, if you are a Democrat running in 2024.
The plan is unlikely even to get a vote. But it is indicative of the utter lack of seriousness that pervades the GOP. They throw out one boneheaded idea after another, hoping to please some segment of their base or donors, with nary a care in the world for the needs of their constituents nor for the actual challenges we face.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
President Biden, consistent with his idea of building an economy from “the bottom up and the middle out,” has tried to get the rich and big corporations to pay more taxes. The MAGA GOP, abandoning all pretense of populism, has a scheme to junk the progressive tax code and replace it with a national sales tax, with devastating results for the middle class.
That tells you a lot about the contrasting visions of the two parties. One still fights for the little guy in practical, concrete terms while the other proposes one harebrained scheme after another with no regard to the needs of average Americans.
Biden’s American Rescue Plan expanded the child tax credit for a year and permanently made it fully refundable, meaning that parents receive the money regardless of how much they owe in taxes. Keeping his promises not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year and to get businesses to pay more, Biden raised $300 billion in revenue in the Inflation Reduction Act by placing a new tax on stock buybacks and enacting a minimum tax on big corporations. To the chagrin of tax cheats (and their sympathetic Republican politicians), the law also boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax evaders.
None of these were radical changes in the code. More far-reaching plans to increase the individual top marginal tax rate, to boost the corporate tax rate, to equalize tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income for those making more than $400,000, and to eliminate the step-up basis for the estate tax never passed.
The principle underlying all of these measures, which would be comparatively small adjustments that would not hit the vast majority of Americans, was simple: The rich have made out very well and should pay more taxes; working- and middle-class taxpayers shouldn’t.
“Over the past 40 years, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, and too many corporations have lost their sense of responsibility to their workers, their communities and the country,” Biden said in a speech in September 2021. “CEOs used to make about 20 times the average worker in the company that they ran. Today, they make more than 350 times what the average worker in their corporation makes.” He added, “Since the pandemic began, billionaires have seen their wealth go up by $1.8 trillion. That is, everyone who was a billionaire before the pandemic began, the total accumulated wealth beyond the billions they already had has gone up by $1.8 trillion.”
That grotesque widening of income inequality offends most Americans, who consistently tell pollsters the rich should pay more.
GOP politicians and their wealthy donors see things differently. The first tax measure proposed by the MAGA House was to try to take back funding for the IRS to chase down tax cheats.
“The debate should focus on one accurate and alarming number: the IRS has 2,284 fewer skilled auditors to handle the sophisticated returns of wealthy taxpayers than it did in 1954,” Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote. “The decade-long, House Republican-driven budget cuts have created dysfunction at the IRS, where relatively few millionaires are now audited.”
But allowing tax cheats to avoid paying what they legally owe is not the sum total of the GOP thinking on taxes. “As part of his deal to become House speaker,” Semafor reported, “Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax.”
A mammoth 30 percent sales tax would be grossly regressive, socking it to the same working- and middle-class families Republicans ostensibly worry are paying more at the pump and grocery store because of inflation.
You know the idea is rotten when Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, blasted the move. He told Semafor: “This is a political gift to Biden and the Democrats.” Even Norquist knows that because the poor and middle class spend a much higher percentage of their income on necessities such as food and clothing, the impact would be devastating.
Unsurprisingly Democrats leaped at the chance to blast the scheme. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted:
Hold on: House Republicans want a national 30% sales tax on everything from groceries to gasoline? They want to raise taxes on working-class & middle-class families while slashing them for millionaires & billionaires? Are they TRYING to show exactly how out of touch they are? — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 19, 2023
Biden also hammered Republicans: “National sales tax, that’s a great idea. It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.”
The GOP plan boils down to this: Let rich tax cheats get away with not paying what they owe while redoing the entire tax system so the overwhelming burden will fall on those less able to pay. Genius! Well, if you are a Democrat running in 2024.
The plan is unlikely even to get a vote. But it is indicative of the utter lack of seriousness that pervades the GOP. They throw out one boneheaded idea after another, hoping to please some segment of their base or donors, with nary a care in the world for the needs of their constituents nor for the actual challenges we face.
TRUMP FINED NEARLY $1M FOR ‘REVENGE’ LAWSUIT AGAINST HILLARY CLINTON, OTHERS
By Adela Suliman, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba, have been fined almost $1 million by a federal judge in Florida for what was ruled a frivolous lawsuit brought against his 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton and others.
Trump is a “prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” wrote U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks in his searing 46-page judgment published late Thursday.
“He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions,” said Middlebrooks. “As such, I find that sanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba.”
Trump — who has announced his bid for the presidency in 2024 — Habba, and the Habba Madaio & Associates law firm are jointly liable for $937,989.39, the court found.
The suit was filed in March 2022, with Trump alleging that Clinton and others had orchestrated “a malicious conspiracy” to spread false information that his campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race that he won.
It was dismissed in September by Middlebrooks, who said there were “substantive defects” in the case and grievances for which a court was “not the appropriate forum.” Despite this, the judge said in his Thursday ruling that Habba had been “undeterred” after the case’s dismissal and continued to advance the claims, leading to the fine.
“Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote, decrying what he called “abusive litigation tactics.”
In a blistering judgment, he said the case was “intended for a political purpose” and showed a “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers,” undermining the rule of law and diverting resources. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” he added.
Representatives for Trump and Habba did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment from The Washington Post.
Along with former secretary of state Clinton, Middlebrooks said 30 individuals and entities were “needlessly harmed” by the case in a bid to “advance a political narrative.” Among them were former FBI director James B. Comey, the Democratic National Committee and Christopher Steele, a former British spy hired by an opposition research firm working for the Clinton campaign who compiled a now-infamous dossier alleging ties between Trump and Russia.
Middlebrooks described the legal complaint as “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” One example he cited was the alleged collusion between Comey and Clinton, a claim he said not only lacked substance, but was “categorically absurd” given the impact Comey’s announcements about the investigation into Clinton’s emails had on her 2016 campaign.
The judge also said Trump’s suit misrepresented the 2019 report by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III by saying it had exonerated him. Mueller said only that his team had made no determination on “collusion” with the Russian government, and that it had not found sufficient evidence to charge any member of Trump’s campaign with criminal conspiracy.
“The Plaintiff consistently misrepresented and cherry-picked portions of public reports and filings to support a false factual narrative,” Thursday’s judgment found. “It happened too often to be accidental; its purpose was political, not legal.”
The September dismissal was a victory for Clinton, who in April had asked the judge to dismiss the case. David E. Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, issued a one-sentence statement at the time, noting that “the court’s opinion meticulously and comprehensively devastates Trump’s allegations.”
Trump’s team had previously unsuccessfully filed a motion to dismiss Middlebrooks, who was appointed to the bench in 1997 by President Bill Clinton.
The judgment also referenced Trump’s other lawsuits, saying they demonstrated “a pattern of abuse of the courts.” Among them were legal complaints against Twitter, CNN, New York Attorney General Letitia James and the Pulitzer Prize board for a 2018 award given jointly to The Post and the New York Times for coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In a brief document filed Friday morning with Middlebrooks, Trump withdrew his lawsuit against James in Florida.
“Plaintiff, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, by and through his undersigned counsel and pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i), hereby voluntarily dismisses his claims in this action against Defendant, LETITIA JAMES, without prejudice,” according to the document filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida.
James has a $250 million lawsuit against Trump over a decade’s worth of allegedly fraudulent business practices.
By Adela Suliman, The Washington Post
Former president Donald Trump and his lawyer, Alina Habba, have been fined almost $1 million by a federal judge in Florida for what was ruled a frivolous lawsuit brought against his 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton and others.
Trump is a “prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” wrote U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks in his searing 46-page judgment published late Thursday.
“He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions,” said Middlebrooks. “As such, I find that sanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba.”
Trump — who has announced his bid for the presidency in 2024 — Habba, and the Habba Madaio & Associates law firm are jointly liable for $937,989.39, the court found.
The suit was filed in March 2022, with Trump alleging that Clinton and others had orchestrated “a malicious conspiracy” to spread false information that his campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race that he won.
It was dismissed in September by Middlebrooks, who said there were “substantive defects” in the case and grievances for which a court was “not the appropriate forum.” Despite this, the judge said in his Thursday ruling that Habba had been “undeterred” after the case’s dismissal and continued to advance the claims, leading to the fine.
“Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,” Middlebrooks wrote, decrying what he called “abusive litigation tactics.”
In a blistering judgment, he said the case was “intended for a political purpose” and showed a “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers,” undermining the rule of law and diverting resources. “No reasonable lawyer would have filed it,” he added.
Representatives for Trump and Habba did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment from The Washington Post.
Along with former secretary of state Clinton, Middlebrooks said 30 individuals and entities were “needlessly harmed” by the case in a bid to “advance a political narrative.” Among them were former FBI director James B. Comey, the Democratic National Committee and Christopher Steele, a former British spy hired by an opposition research firm working for the Clinton campaign who compiled a now-infamous dossier alleging ties between Trump and Russia.
Middlebrooks described the legal complaint as “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” One example he cited was the alleged collusion between Comey and Clinton, a claim he said not only lacked substance, but was “categorically absurd” given the impact Comey’s announcements about the investigation into Clinton’s emails had on her 2016 campaign.
The judge also said Trump’s suit misrepresented the 2019 report by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III by saying it had exonerated him. Mueller said only that his team had made no determination on “collusion” with the Russian government, and that it had not found sufficient evidence to charge any member of Trump’s campaign with criminal conspiracy.
“The Plaintiff consistently misrepresented and cherry-picked portions of public reports and filings to support a false factual narrative,” Thursday’s judgment found. “It happened too often to be accidental; its purpose was political, not legal.”
The September dismissal was a victory for Clinton, who in April had asked the judge to dismiss the case. David E. Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, issued a one-sentence statement at the time, noting that “the court’s opinion meticulously and comprehensively devastates Trump’s allegations.”
Trump’s team had previously unsuccessfully filed a motion to dismiss Middlebrooks, who was appointed to the bench in 1997 by President Bill Clinton.
The judgment also referenced Trump’s other lawsuits, saying they demonstrated “a pattern of abuse of the courts.” Among them were legal complaints against Twitter, CNN, New York Attorney General Letitia James and the Pulitzer Prize board for a 2018 award given jointly to The Post and the New York Times for coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In a brief document filed Friday morning with Middlebrooks, Trump withdrew his lawsuit against James in Florida.
“Plaintiff, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, by and through his undersigned counsel and pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i), hereby voluntarily dismisses his claims in this action against Defendant, LETITIA JAMES, without prejudice,” according to the document filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida.
James has a $250 million lawsuit against Trump over a decade’s worth of allegedly fraudulent business practices.
WE NEED A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY. TEACHING MEDIA LITERACY CAN HELP.
New Jersey will now require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students, helping them discern fact from fiction. Pennsylvania should follow the Garden State’s lead.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
While the internet has increased access to information and has often been a force for good, it has also contributed to making many people misinformed, uninformed, and even radicalized.
That’s why it is welcome news to see New Jersey become the first state in the country to require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students. Other states, including Pennsylvania, should follow the Garden State’s lead.
Students raised on mobile phones have a world of information — and disinformation — at their fingertips. Studies show many teens get their news from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, barely regulated spaces where most anything goes. That is all the more reason why it’s essential for schools to teach students how to discern fact from fiction.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education found that 96% of high school students surveyed failed to see how a website’s ties to fossil fuel companies could affect its credibility on information regarding climate change. Two-thirds of students couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and advertising, even if it was labeled as “sponsored content.” And 52% of students believed a grainy video on Facebook claiming to capture ballot stuffing constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud.
Sadly, many adults given the same survey may not fare much better.
Alexander Pope, the 18th-century poet and satirist, famously wrote that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” That danger turned all too real when an angry mob of Donald Trump supporters staged a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, fueled by misinformation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
For months, Trump and his allies promoted the so-called “Big Lie” about election fraud. Two years later, the spread of misinformation remains a threat to democracy here and abroad.
That was underscored by the recent coup attempt in Brazil, which was also driven by lies and conspiracy theories pushed by its ousted far-right president — who received advice from Trump allies.
It is not just political misinformation that is dumbing down America. The pandemic fueled a range of conspiracies and an assault on science. Much of the misinformation was spread through social media and “news” outlets that put profits above the truth.
The result was a separate pandemic of misinformation, which cost lives and money. One study found falsehoods surrounding COVID-19 vaccines contributed to one-third of U.S. pandemic deaths, while another study put the cost between $50 million and $300 million each day.
Much of the bogus information is spread through social media and conservative news outlets. Many people claim they “do their own research.” But just because something is on the internet doesn’t make it real.
The firehose of information distributed on social media is especially pernicious. One study found fake news spreads faster on Twitter than real news. The same goes for Facebook, where a study found misinformation received six times more engagement than factual news.
The spread of misleading information has also increased political polarization and reduced trust in institutions such as the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.
Adding to the polarization and spread of falsehoods are reckless sites such as Infowars. A jury recently ordered founder Alex Jones to pay $473 million for promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It is a rare case of accountability — one which came a decade and countless fabricated stories later.
But it’s not just fringe sites that are the problem. One study found that watching Fox News — the top-rated cable news network — resulted in decreased knowledge about science and society. Exhibit A is host Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly promotes misinformation about the pandemic along with a long list of other bogus claims.
The peril goes way beyond any political divide. Society can’t function well, or tackle critical issues such as climate change, when half the public is armed with facts and the other half traffics in lies and conspiracies.
It’s troubling enough when a small percentage of the population wrongly believes the moon landing was staged. But it is a whole other level of danger when 147 members of Congress vote to overturn the 2020 election. Or when lawmakers such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene promote off-the-wall conspiracies from QAnon, a group that believes the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
A well-informed public is key to a functioning democracy and a civil society. Teaching media literacy is one way to not only inoculate future generations from falling for misinformation but to also help solve the problems left behind by today’s leaders.
New Jersey will now require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students, helping them discern fact from fiction. Pennsylvania should follow the Garden State’s lead.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
While the internet has increased access to information and has often been a force for good, it has also contributed to making many people misinformed, uninformed, and even radicalized.
That’s why it is welcome news to see New Jersey become the first state in the country to require schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students. Other states, including Pennsylvania, should follow the Garden State’s lead.
Students raised on mobile phones have a world of information — and disinformation — at their fingertips. Studies show many teens get their news from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, barely regulated spaces where most anything goes. That is all the more reason why it’s essential for schools to teach students how to discern fact from fiction.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education found that 96% of high school students surveyed failed to see how a website’s ties to fossil fuel companies could affect its credibility on information regarding climate change. Two-thirds of students couldn’t tell the difference between news stories and advertising, even if it was labeled as “sponsored content.” And 52% of students believed a grainy video on Facebook claiming to capture ballot stuffing constituted “strong evidence” of voter fraud.
Sadly, many adults given the same survey may not fare much better.
Alexander Pope, the 18th-century poet and satirist, famously wrote that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” That danger turned all too real when an angry mob of Donald Trump supporters staged a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, fueled by misinformation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
For months, Trump and his allies promoted the so-called “Big Lie” about election fraud. Two years later, the spread of misinformation remains a threat to democracy here and abroad.
That was underscored by the recent coup attempt in Brazil, which was also driven by lies and conspiracy theories pushed by its ousted far-right president — who received advice from Trump allies.
It is not just political misinformation that is dumbing down America. The pandemic fueled a range of conspiracies and an assault on science. Much of the misinformation was spread through social media and “news” outlets that put profits above the truth.
The result was a separate pandemic of misinformation, which cost lives and money. One study found falsehoods surrounding COVID-19 vaccines contributed to one-third of U.S. pandemic deaths, while another study put the cost between $50 million and $300 million each day.
Much of the bogus information is spread through social media and conservative news outlets. Many people claim they “do their own research.” But just because something is on the internet doesn’t make it real.
The firehose of information distributed on social media is especially pernicious. One study found fake news spreads faster on Twitter than real news. The same goes for Facebook, where a study found misinformation received six times more engagement than factual news.
The spread of misleading information has also increased political polarization and reduced trust in institutions such as the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.
Adding to the polarization and spread of falsehoods are reckless sites such as Infowars. A jury recently ordered founder Alex Jones to pay $473 million for promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It is a rare case of accountability — one which came a decade and countless fabricated stories later.
But it’s not just fringe sites that are the problem. One study found that watching Fox News — the top-rated cable news network — resulted in decreased knowledge about science and society. Exhibit A is host Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly promotes misinformation about the pandemic along with a long list of other bogus claims.
The peril goes way beyond any political divide. Society can’t function well, or tackle critical issues such as climate change, when half the public is armed with facts and the other half traffics in lies and conspiracies.
It’s troubling enough when a small percentage of the population wrongly believes the moon landing was staged. But it is a whole other level of danger when 147 members of Congress vote to overturn the 2020 election. Or when lawmakers such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene promote off-the-wall conspiracies from QAnon, a group that believes the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
A well-informed public is key to a functioning democracy and a civil society. Teaching media literacy is one way to not only inoculate future generations from falling for misinformation but to also help solve the problems left behind by today’s leaders.
WHY REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS STILL HATE MEDICARE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republicans who now control the House will soon try to slash Social Security and Medicare. They plan to achieve this by holding the economy hostage, threatening to create a financial crisis by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling. The interesting questions are why they want to do this, given that it appears politically suicidal, and how Democrats will respond.
Before I get into the puzzles, let me start by pointing out that the plot against the social safety net isn’t a conspiracy theory. The general shape of the scheme has been widely reported for months. The arithmetic is also clear: It isn’t possible to achieve huge reductions in the budget deficit, while at the same time depriving the I.R.S. of the resources it needs to go after tax cheats, without deep cuts in popular social programs.
And beyond all that, we now have it in black and white — well, blue on blue. CNN has obtained a screenshot of a slide presented at a closed-door Republican meeting on Tuesday. The first bullet point calls for balancing the budget within 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The second calls for reforms to “mandatory spending” — which is budget-speak for those same programs. And the final point calls for refusing to raise the debt limit unless these demands are met.
So the plan isn’t a mystery. I would add only that if Republicans try to assure currently retired Americans that their benefits wouldn’t be affected, this promise isn’t feasible — not if they’re serious about balancing the budget within a decade.
But where is this determination to gut programs that are crucial to well over 100 million Americans coming from? These programs are, after all, extremely popular — even among Republican voters.
It’s true that self-identified Republicans say that they are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when an Economist/YouGov poll asked them which programs they considered socialistic, none of the big-ticket items made the cut. Social Security? Not socialism. Medicare — which is, by the way, a single-payer national health insurance program, which we’re often told Americans would never accept — also isn’t socialism.
Unfortunately, that poll didn’t ask about Medicaid, a program targeted at lower-income Americans that many Republicans consider a form of “welfare.” Even so, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found far more Republicans approving of Medicaid than disapproving.
One reason even Republicans support major social programs may be that G.O.P. support comes disproportionately from older voters — and most of America’s social spending goes to seniors. This is obviously true for Social Security and Medicare, which kick in primarily when you reach a minimum age. But it’s even true for Medicaid: Most of Medicaid’s beneficiaries are relatively young, but almost two-thirds of the spending goes to seniors and the disabled, many in nursing homes.
The attitude of the Republican rank and file, then, seems to be that big government is bad — but when we get down to specifics, don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree. Which means that the priorities of the new House majority are wildly out of line with those of its own voters, let alone those of the electorate as a whole.
And history says that attacks on the safety net come with a heavy political price. George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 surely played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006; Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi regain the speakership in 2018.
So where is the push to gut Social Security and Medicare coming from? Ronald Reagan left the White House 34 years ago. The modern G.O.P. seems much less animated by small-government ideology than by the desire to wage culture war. And there’s no necessary connection between culture war and right-wing economics. For example, France’s anti-immigrant National Rally has, in effect, staked out an economic position somewhat to the left of the Macron government.
Put it this way: Advocating a welfare state for white people might well be politically effective. But in America, it’s a road not taken.
Here’s what I think is going on: Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class.
And the culture warriors go along because they basically aren’t interested in policy substance.
I’m not completely sure that this analysis is right. But all indications are that at some point this year the Biden administration will have to deal with a full-scale effort at economic blackmail, a threat to blow up the economy unless the safety net is shredded. And I worry that Democrats still aren’t taking that threat seriously enough.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
The Republicans who now control the House will soon try to slash Social Security and Medicare. They plan to achieve this by holding the economy hostage, threatening to create a financial crisis by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling. The interesting questions are why they want to do this, given that it appears politically suicidal, and how Democrats will respond.
Before I get into the puzzles, let me start by pointing out that the plot against the social safety net isn’t a conspiracy theory. The general shape of the scheme has been widely reported for months. The arithmetic is also clear: It isn’t possible to achieve huge reductions in the budget deficit, while at the same time depriving the I.R.S. of the resources it needs to go after tax cheats, without deep cuts in popular social programs.
And beyond all that, we now have it in black and white — well, blue on blue. CNN has obtained a screenshot of a slide presented at a closed-door Republican meeting on Tuesday. The first bullet point calls for balancing the budget within 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The second calls for reforms to “mandatory spending” — which is budget-speak for those same programs. And the final point calls for refusing to raise the debt limit unless these demands are met.
So the plan isn’t a mystery. I would add only that if Republicans try to assure currently retired Americans that their benefits wouldn’t be affected, this promise isn’t feasible — not if they’re serious about balancing the budget within a decade.
But where is this determination to gut programs that are crucial to well over 100 million Americans coming from? These programs are, after all, extremely popular — even among Republican voters.
It’s true that self-identified Republicans say that they are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when an Economist/YouGov poll asked them which programs they considered socialistic, none of the big-ticket items made the cut. Social Security? Not socialism. Medicare — which is, by the way, a single-payer national health insurance program, which we’re often told Americans would never accept — also isn’t socialism.
Unfortunately, that poll didn’t ask about Medicaid, a program targeted at lower-income Americans that many Republicans consider a form of “welfare.” Even so, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found far more Republicans approving of Medicaid than disapproving.
One reason even Republicans support major social programs may be that G.O.P. support comes disproportionately from older voters — and most of America’s social spending goes to seniors. This is obviously true for Social Security and Medicare, which kick in primarily when you reach a minimum age. But it’s even true for Medicaid: Most of Medicaid’s beneficiaries are relatively young, but almost two-thirds of the spending goes to seniors and the disabled, many in nursing homes.
The attitude of the Republican rank and file, then, seems to be that big government is bad — but when we get down to specifics, don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree. Which means that the priorities of the new House majority are wildly out of line with those of its own voters, let alone those of the electorate as a whole.
And history says that attacks on the safety net come with a heavy political price. George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 surely played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006; Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi regain the speakership in 2018.
So where is the push to gut Social Security and Medicare coming from? Ronald Reagan left the White House 34 years ago. The modern G.O.P. seems much less animated by small-government ideology than by the desire to wage culture war. And there’s no necessary connection between culture war and right-wing economics. For example, France’s anti-immigrant National Rally has, in effect, staked out an economic position somewhat to the left of the Macron government.
Put it this way: Advocating a welfare state for white people might well be politically effective. But in America, it’s a road not taken.
Here’s what I think is going on: Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class.
And the culture warriors go along because they basically aren’t interested in policy substance.
I’m not completely sure that this analysis is right. But all indications are that at some point this year the Biden administration will have to deal with a full-scale effort at economic blackmail, a threat to blow up the economy unless the safety net is shredded. And I worry that Democrats still aren’t taking that threat seriously enough.
WHOOPS! THE GOP ACCIDENTALLY ADMITS TAX CUTS DON’T PAY FOR THEMSELVES.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
At long last, Republicans have admitted the obvious: Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. Also: Republicans don’t actually care whether tax cuts pay for themselves.
The House rules package recently passed by the newly GOP-controlled House included some notable, occasionally troubling things. For example, one set of measures would kneecap congressional ethics probes. Another provision would make it harder to swiftly raise the debt ceiling.
But also tucked into the rules package, and attracting somewhat less attention, was a change to how lawmakers treat changes to tax law.
Specifically, they’ve rigged the system so that tax cuts will be much easier to pass, and tax rate increases harder to pass. On the other hand, investments in the poor and various other kinds of spending increases — on so-called mandatory programs, such as Medicare or food stamps — would be more challenging to get through.
Congress sets rules for what kinds of budgetary changes it can pass under what circumstances, including what kinds of programs must be “paid for” by nipping and tucking elsewhere in the budget. Often, lawmakers want to change the law in a way that would cost money (i.e., increase deficits), either by reducing tax revenue or increasing spending. In recent Congresses, when lawmakers made that kind of change, they were generally supposed to find something to offset the cost so that long-term deficits didn’t grow.
For example, if Congress wanted to cut Tax A, it was supposed to cut Spending Program B or else raise Tax C by at least as much (with some exceptions, of course).
This GOP-led House has done something a bit different.
Under the new rules package, the budgetary requirements are more one-sided — in favor of tax cuts. Going forward, tax cuts do not need to be offset with any sort of savings elsewhere in the budget. They can add trillions to the debt. No problem.
But this is not true of spending programs. Spending program increases still have to be paid for.
Not only that, but the savings to offset expansions of mandatory programs have to come from cuts to other spending programs. They cannot be offset by tax revenue increases. In practical terms: An expansion of food stamps can’t be paid for by raising taxes on the rich — only by cutting, say, Medicaid or disability benefits. So basically any attempt to provide more support for poor or middle-income people is likely to come from other programs that help those same groups.
House Republicans can theoretically choose to waive their own rule, though getting the votes to do so might be a bit rocky since they passed this big new rules package so recently and after much haggling.
Republicans have found other ways to stack the deck against raising taxes. A separate portion of the House’s rules package says that any increase in tax rates would require a three-fifths vote (rather than a simple majority, as in years past).
Additionally, in a side deal that Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made as part of his concessions to get the speaker’s job, the House will also substantially cut spending for so-called discretionary spending programs, too. (Mandatory programs, such as Social Security, are generally set by formula, automatically expanding or shrinking based on how many people qualify; a specific dollar amount is appropriated for discretionary programs.)
There are a couple of big takeaways from these technicalities.
First is that, if you read between the lines, you’ll learn that even Republicans don’t believe their own long-standing promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. After all, if the GOP genuinely believed this, they wouldn’t need to make it easier to pass tax cuts that don’t pay for themselves. Because such tax cuts … would not exist.
Second is who and what they care about.
“This is fundamentally about who pays for what, what are we investing in, and who’s left behind,” said Joel Friedman, a researcher for the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities. “It puts up barriers to the type of investments and public services that will help people through health care, education, supporting kids.”
As a result, we can expect more kids and poor families to face hardship, particularly if there is a downturn this year; and perhaps (even more) tax cuts for the rich.
Already, House Republicans have voted to effectively decrease the tax burden on the wealthy in all but name. They did so not by cutting tax rates, per se, but by voting to defund the Internal Revenue Service. Last year, Democrats gave an extra $80 billion to the IRS, largely to go after wealthy tax cheats whom the agency has struggled to audit because of insufficient resources; Republicans are now trying to undo this investment.
Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are, President Biden often says. Well, Republicans have shown us: a lower tax burden on the rich, less help for the poor and the middle class.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
At long last, Republicans have admitted the obvious: Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. Also: Republicans don’t actually care whether tax cuts pay for themselves.
The House rules package recently passed by the newly GOP-controlled House included some notable, occasionally troubling things. For example, one set of measures would kneecap congressional ethics probes. Another provision would make it harder to swiftly raise the debt ceiling.
But also tucked into the rules package, and attracting somewhat less attention, was a change to how lawmakers treat changes to tax law.
Specifically, they’ve rigged the system so that tax cuts will be much easier to pass, and tax rate increases harder to pass. On the other hand, investments in the poor and various other kinds of spending increases — on so-called mandatory programs, such as Medicare or food stamps — would be more challenging to get through.
Congress sets rules for what kinds of budgetary changes it can pass under what circumstances, including what kinds of programs must be “paid for” by nipping and tucking elsewhere in the budget. Often, lawmakers want to change the law in a way that would cost money (i.e., increase deficits), either by reducing tax revenue or increasing spending. In recent Congresses, when lawmakers made that kind of change, they were generally supposed to find something to offset the cost so that long-term deficits didn’t grow.
For example, if Congress wanted to cut Tax A, it was supposed to cut Spending Program B or else raise Tax C by at least as much (with some exceptions, of course).
This GOP-led House has done something a bit different.
Under the new rules package, the budgetary requirements are more one-sided — in favor of tax cuts. Going forward, tax cuts do not need to be offset with any sort of savings elsewhere in the budget. They can add trillions to the debt. No problem.
But this is not true of spending programs. Spending program increases still have to be paid for.
Not only that, but the savings to offset expansions of mandatory programs have to come from cuts to other spending programs. They cannot be offset by tax revenue increases. In practical terms: An expansion of food stamps can’t be paid for by raising taxes on the rich — only by cutting, say, Medicaid or disability benefits. So basically any attempt to provide more support for poor or middle-income people is likely to come from other programs that help those same groups.
House Republicans can theoretically choose to waive their own rule, though getting the votes to do so might be a bit rocky since they passed this big new rules package so recently and after much haggling.
Republicans have found other ways to stack the deck against raising taxes. A separate portion of the House’s rules package says that any increase in tax rates would require a three-fifths vote (rather than a simple majority, as in years past).
Additionally, in a side deal that Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made as part of his concessions to get the speaker’s job, the House will also substantially cut spending for so-called discretionary spending programs, too. (Mandatory programs, such as Social Security, are generally set by formula, automatically expanding or shrinking based on how many people qualify; a specific dollar amount is appropriated for discretionary programs.)
There are a couple of big takeaways from these technicalities.
First is that, if you read between the lines, you’ll learn that even Republicans don’t believe their own long-standing promise that tax cuts will pay for themselves. After all, if the GOP genuinely believed this, they wouldn’t need to make it easier to pass tax cuts that don’t pay for themselves. Because such tax cuts … would not exist.
Second is who and what they care about.
“This is fundamentally about who pays for what, what are we investing in, and who’s left behind,” said Joel Friedman, a researcher for the Center on Budget Policies and Priorities. “It puts up barriers to the type of investments and public services that will help people through health care, education, supporting kids.”
As a result, we can expect more kids and poor families to face hardship, particularly if there is a downturn this year; and perhaps (even more) tax cuts for the rich.
Already, House Republicans have voted to effectively decrease the tax burden on the wealthy in all but name. They did so not by cutting tax rates, per se, but by voting to defund the Internal Revenue Service. Last year, Democrats gave an extra $80 billion to the IRS, largely to go after wealthy tax cheats whom the agency has struggled to audit because of insufficient resources; Republicans are now trying to undo this investment.
Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are, President Biden often says. Well, Republicans have shown us: a lower tax burden on the rich, less help for the poor and the middle class.
TRUMP’S COMPANY GETS MAXIMUM PUNISHMENT FOR EVADING TAXES
The Trump Organization must pay $1.6 million for giving executive off-the-books benefits and pay.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum, The New York Times
Former president Donald J. Trump’s family real estate business was ordered on Friday to pay a $1.6 million criminal penalty for its conviction on tax fraud and other charges, a stinging rebuke and the maximum possible punishment.
The sentence, handed down by a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, caps a lengthy legal ordeal for Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, which was convicted in December of doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. One of the executives who orchestrated the scheme, Allen H. Weisselberg, pleaded guilty and testified at the company’s trial. He was sentenced on Tuesday to serve five months at the notorious Rikers Island jail complex.
The financial penalty is a pittance to the company, and the former president, who collected hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year while in office. But the verdict branded the company a felon, exposed a culture that nurtured illegality for years and handed political ammunition to Mr. Trump’s opponents. Prosecutors also continue to press a criminal investigation against the man himself.
The Trump Organization’s lawyers on Friday sought a smaller penalty, pinning the blame on Mr. Weisselberg, who they say carried out the scheme without intending to benefit the Trump Organization. But Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which led the case against the Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg, argued that the company carried out “a multi-dimensional scheme to defraud the tax authorities.”
“To avoid detection, they simply falsified the records,” he explained. “This conduct can only be described as egregious,” adding that although the maximum fines “may have limited impact on a multibillion corporation, this court should nonetheless impose such fines.”
And the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, agreed, imposing the maximum $1.61 million.
The Trump Organization must pay $1.6 million for giving executive off-the-books benefits and pay.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum, The New York Times
Former president Donald J. Trump’s family real estate business was ordered on Friday to pay a $1.6 million criminal penalty for its conviction on tax fraud and other charges, a stinging rebuke and the maximum possible punishment.
The sentence, handed down by a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, caps a lengthy legal ordeal for Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, which was convicted in December of doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. One of the executives who orchestrated the scheme, Allen H. Weisselberg, pleaded guilty and testified at the company’s trial. He was sentenced on Tuesday to serve five months at the notorious Rikers Island jail complex.
The financial penalty is a pittance to the company, and the former president, who collected hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year while in office. But the verdict branded the company a felon, exposed a culture that nurtured illegality for years and handed political ammunition to Mr. Trump’s opponents. Prosecutors also continue to press a criminal investigation against the man himself.
The Trump Organization’s lawyers on Friday sought a smaller penalty, pinning the blame on Mr. Weisselberg, who they say carried out the scheme without intending to benefit the Trump Organization. But Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which led the case against the Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg, argued that the company carried out “a multi-dimensional scheme to defraud the tax authorities.”
“To avoid detection, they simply falsified the records,” he explained. “This conduct can only be described as egregious,” adding that although the maximum fines “may have limited impact on a multibillion corporation, this court should nonetheless impose such fines.”
And the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, agreed, imposing the maximum $1.61 million.
THE IRS HAS PROBLEMS. THEY AREN’T THE ONES REPUBLICANS COMPLAIN ABOUT.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
For the past three years, the IRS has failed to do its most basic job: processing tax returns in a timely manner. There are many reasons. The pandemic upended almost everything for a while. Years of staffing and budget cuts left the agency shorthanded. Ancient computer systems hampered operations. And Congress kept asking the IRS to do more: implement the sweeping 2017 GOP tax code overhaul, then send stimulus checks — three times — to the vast majority of Americans during the pandemic. Any one of these issues would have been tough to manage. Together, they nearly sunk an agency that is critical to funding the U.S. government.
Yet House Republicans made it their first priority this year to pass legislation slashing IRS funding, which would worsen the agency’s problems — and the service it provides Americans.
House Republicans know better; they have heard from desperate constituents who have failed repeatedly to reach the IRS. Calling is almost impossible. The IRS answered just 13 percent of calls last year and 11 percent in 2021. Mailing documents to the IRS is also often unavailing. Millions of unprocessed paper tax returns and correspondence about problems with tax returns sit unopened in IRS facilities. At an IRS processing center in Austin, the situation was so dire that IRS officials took over the entire cafeteria to store boxes of unprocessed mail, Post columnist Catherine Rampell reported last year.
Now the nation is days away from the start of another tax-filing season, yet about 9 million unprocessed returns remain from prior years, according to the latest update from the National Taxpayer Advocate. That’s actually an improvement from the end of 2021, when there were 16 million unprocessed returns, but it underscores the deep processing problems that the IRS still faces.
Congress’s priority should be modernizing the IRS and getting it back to full functionality. That’s why Democrats passed $80 billion in extra funding for the agency over the next decade as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. But House Republicans moved Monday to strip the IRS of $71 billion of the new funding and thwart the agency’s auditing process. They falsely claimed that money would fund 87,000 new auditors. In reality, that figure is an estimate of overall hiring needed at the IRS, not just for auditors. About half of the $80 billion is for bringing IT systems into the current century and hiring more people to answer phones and process returns.
Yes, some of the money is for hiring more auditors. But that also addresses a glaring need. “The IRS has fewer front-line, experienced examiners in the field than at any time since World War II, and fewer employees than at any time since the 1970s,” former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote in August. Put another way, the IRS has about 6,500 agents to audit 178 million tax returns. Millionaires are benefiting from this short-staffing. There were only 7,710 agent audits of tax returns listing over $1 million in income last year, down from 40,965 a decade ago. The IRS isn’t planning to use extra auditors to scrutinize more American families earning under $400,000 a year, as Mr. Rettig, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and many others have tried to explain to House Republicans. The IRS needs extra staff to review the increasingly complex audits of large businesses and superwealthy families, ensuring they follow the rules. That is in the interest of everyday, law-abiding taxpayers who should not have to make up the difference for tax cheats.
Looking at recent IRS history is telling: In fiscal 2010, the IRS processed 152 million returns with just over 94,000 staff and a budget of about $12 billion. Last year, the IRS handled 178 million returns with just over 79,000 staff and an inflation-adjusted budget of $10.3 billion. Congress has already tried starving the IRS. It was a disaster. What’s needed now is to revive the agency so it can function properly — on all fronts.
Given the turmoil at the IRS, it would also be helpful to have a new IRS commissioner in place swiftly. In November, President Biden nominated Danny Werfel to be the IRS’s next leader. Werfel served as acting commissioner in 2013, when he had to navigate a government shutdown and restore trust in the agency after controversy around scrutiny of conservative nonprofits. He has the experience for the job, and the Senate should move on his nomination quickly.
House Republicans claim they want the tax agency to function better. It doesn’t get much more basic than having an IRS that operates on technology that’s newer than half a century old, can process returns in weeks, not months, and can evaluate tax-avoidance schemes by the superwealthy. This isn’t the time to cut. It’s the time to resuscitate.
By the Washington Post Editorial Board
For the past three years, the IRS has failed to do its most basic job: processing tax returns in a timely manner. There are many reasons. The pandemic upended almost everything for a while. Years of staffing and budget cuts left the agency shorthanded. Ancient computer systems hampered operations. And Congress kept asking the IRS to do more: implement the sweeping 2017 GOP tax code overhaul, then send stimulus checks — three times — to the vast majority of Americans during the pandemic. Any one of these issues would have been tough to manage. Together, they nearly sunk an agency that is critical to funding the U.S. government.
Yet House Republicans made it their first priority this year to pass legislation slashing IRS funding, which would worsen the agency’s problems — and the service it provides Americans.
House Republicans know better; they have heard from desperate constituents who have failed repeatedly to reach the IRS. Calling is almost impossible. The IRS answered just 13 percent of calls last year and 11 percent in 2021. Mailing documents to the IRS is also often unavailing. Millions of unprocessed paper tax returns and correspondence about problems with tax returns sit unopened in IRS facilities. At an IRS processing center in Austin, the situation was so dire that IRS officials took over the entire cafeteria to store boxes of unprocessed mail, Post columnist Catherine Rampell reported last year.
Now the nation is days away from the start of another tax-filing season, yet about 9 million unprocessed returns remain from prior years, according to the latest update from the National Taxpayer Advocate. That’s actually an improvement from the end of 2021, when there were 16 million unprocessed returns, but it underscores the deep processing problems that the IRS still faces.
Congress’s priority should be modernizing the IRS and getting it back to full functionality. That’s why Democrats passed $80 billion in extra funding for the agency over the next decade as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. But House Republicans moved Monday to strip the IRS of $71 billion of the new funding and thwart the agency’s auditing process. They falsely claimed that money would fund 87,000 new auditors. In reality, that figure is an estimate of overall hiring needed at the IRS, not just for auditors. About half of the $80 billion is for bringing IT systems into the current century and hiring more people to answer phones and process returns.
Yes, some of the money is for hiring more auditors. But that also addresses a glaring need. “The IRS has fewer front-line, experienced examiners in the field than at any time since World War II, and fewer employees than at any time since the 1970s,” former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote in August. Put another way, the IRS has about 6,500 agents to audit 178 million tax returns. Millionaires are benefiting from this short-staffing. There were only 7,710 agent audits of tax returns listing over $1 million in income last year, down from 40,965 a decade ago. The IRS isn’t planning to use extra auditors to scrutinize more American families earning under $400,000 a year, as Mr. Rettig, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and many others have tried to explain to House Republicans. The IRS needs extra staff to review the increasingly complex audits of large businesses and superwealthy families, ensuring they follow the rules. That is in the interest of everyday, law-abiding taxpayers who should not have to make up the difference for tax cheats.
Looking at recent IRS history is telling: In fiscal 2010, the IRS processed 152 million returns with just over 94,000 staff and a budget of about $12 billion. Last year, the IRS handled 178 million returns with just over 79,000 staff and an inflation-adjusted budget of $10.3 billion. Congress has already tried starving the IRS. It was a disaster. What’s needed now is to revive the agency so it can function properly — on all fronts.
Given the turmoil at the IRS, it would also be helpful to have a new IRS commissioner in place swiftly. In November, President Biden nominated Danny Werfel to be the IRS’s next leader. Werfel served as acting commissioner in 2013, when he had to navigate a government shutdown and restore trust in the agency after controversy around scrutiny of conservative nonprofits. He has the experience for the job, and the Senate should move on his nomination quickly.
House Republicans claim they want the tax agency to function better. It doesn’t get much more basic than having an IRS that operates on technology that’s newer than half a century old, can process returns in weeks, not months, and can evaluate tax-avoidance schemes by the superwealthy. This isn’t the time to cut. It’s the time to resuscitate.
THE JAN. 6 REPORT’S MOST IMPORTANT FINDING: TRUMP ENABLED EXTREMIST GROUPS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
It will take weeks to absorb the massive, 845-page report from the House Jan. 6 select committee. No doubt, certain sections will receive more attention than others, such as Chapter 1, about Donald Trump’s role in constructing election lies, and Chapter 7, about the near-total absence of White House records during the four-hour siege of the U.S. Capitol. (Was any evidence destroyed?)
But from a historical, legal and national security perspective, the most alarming information comes in Chapters 6 and 8 and Appendix 1. Those sections cover the right-wing extremists who jointly planned and executed the violent uprising — and the degree to which Trump enabled their attack.
First and foremost, the report busts a myth promoted by right-wing apologists that because some insurrectionists began the assault on the Capitol before Trump concluded his “Stop the Steal” speech, he was not the inspiration for the attack. Wrong.
Chapter 6 details the degree to which members of extremist groups (e.g., Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters) seized upon Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election. They heard his call to come to D.C. and believed he wanted them to do what was needed to keep him in power. The Proud Boys planned to move ahead of the crowd, which later — at Trump’s instruction — followed them down Pennsylvania Avenue.
In Chapter 8, the report details the early removal of barricades at the Peace Circle by the Proud Boys and their associates. That cleared the way for thousands of protesters to move down Pennsylvania Avenue directly to the Capitol. That provides evidence of the meticulous preparation that went into the assault.
The report also underscores how Trump’s own conduct prevented law enforcement from predicting the size and ferocity of the crowd. Appendix 1 shows that there had been coordination and discussion among agencies, but it was far from sufficient. The report concludes:
While the danger to the Capitol posed by an armed and angry crowd was foreseeable, the fact that the President of the United States would be the catalyst of their fury and facilitate the attack was unprecedented in American history. If we lacked the imagination to suppose that a President would incite an attack on his own Government, urging his supporters to “fight like hell,” we lack that insight no more.
In other words, law enforcement officials were likely unprepared for the assault because they never imagined the president of the United States would inflame so many people as a few hundred extremists barreled toward the Capitol. The police might have been able to hold off those few hundred deranged election deniers, but the size of the larger crowd made that impossible.
Another critical detail that demonstrates Trump’s relationship with the extremist groups: When “Stop the Steal” rallies were held in D.C. before Jan. 6, Trump drove or flew by to lend moral support. The report explains:
President Trump made sure to let the protestors in Washington know that he personally approved of their mission. During the November rally, President Trump waved to the crowd from his presidential motorcade. Then, on the morning of December 12th, President Trump tweeted: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.” Later that day, President Trump flew over the protestors in Marine One.
The crowd was emboldened by his presence, and he was energized by their reaction. He saw himself as leader of the ragtag band and wanted desperately to repeat this experience on Jan. 6.
Moreover, several people in Trump’s inner circle were intimately involved with the insurrectionists. This includes former White House advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Michael Flynn and Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone. These individuals met with members of extremist groups, encouraged them to act and amplified their message. Bannon, of course, had a direct line to the president. (The committee reports that the two communicated on Jan. 5.) Trump was also in regular contact with Stone. The report does not connect Trump to the armed insurrectionists directly, but it gets alarmingly close.
In fact, Trump wanted a few of the most extreme figures tied to the extremist groups to speak from the podium on Jan. 6. The committee explains in Chapter 6:
President Trump wanted to include the “Stop the Steal” leaders in the January 6th event. As [Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson] put it in a text message to [Jan. 6 rally organizer Kylie Kremer]: “POTUS . . . likes the crazies.” Pierson said that she believed this was the case because President Trump “loved people who viciously defended him in public.” But their “vicious” defenses of the President clearly troubled Pierson.
Pierson tried to trim the speaker lineup — which still included the “Stop the Steal” trio of Stone, [conspiracy theorist Alex Jones], and [Stop the Steal group organizer Ali Alexander]. ... During their January 4th meeting, Pierson tried to convince President Trump to minimize the role of these potentially explosive figures at the Ellipse. She offered to place them at a planned event the night before in Freedom Plaza or on other stages in DC on January 6th. ...
President Trump was still unwilling to remove them from the lineup entirely. The President instructed Pierson to give Stone a speaking slot on January 5th and asked for more information about Ali Alexander. After discussing the matter with [former White House communications official Dan Scavino], President Trump also requested that Alexander be given a speaking slot. ...
In the end, the “Stop the Steal” leaders — Stone, Jones and Alexander — did not appear on the stage at the Ellipse on January 6th, although they did speak at other planned events, consistent with the President’s request.
These facts are particularly troubling given the revelation from testimony before the committee that Trump demanded that armed people be able to pass through the magnetometers at his rally. He also failed to send forces to put down the insurrection once rioters reached the Capitol.
Plus, exchanges between former White House adviser Hope Hicks and other Trump aides reflect that they appealed to Trump before Jan. 6 to ask his supporters to behave peacefully. As Hicks texted one campaign aide on Jan. 6, “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.”
The House committee lacked the ability to immunize witnesses to obtain cooperation. But special counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee investigations into Trump, does have that power. He will therefore be able to probe further to answer questions. For example: What communication took place between the White House and the Trump team’s “command center” at the Willard Hotel? How much did Trump know about the violent groups he was inciting?
The role of violent extremist groups cannot be minimized. In the next Congress, Republicans will likely ignore or play down their existence. Some will attempt to paint law enforcement action against such groups as oppressive and tyrannical. Nevertheless, Democrats and other sober-minded Americans must insist that law enforcement remain vigilant against them.
The overarching takeaway from the report is that the Jan. 6 assault was a highly organized operation by groups that joined together to keep Trump in power with violence. Trump knew they were armed, had close associates directly engaged with them, let them run rampant for hours and even egged them on during that time by demonizing his vice president.
If that does not amount to giving “aid or comfort” to those engaging in an insurrection against the United States, I don’t know what does.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
It will take weeks to absorb the massive, 845-page report from the House Jan. 6 select committee. No doubt, certain sections will receive more attention than others, such as Chapter 1, about Donald Trump’s role in constructing election lies, and Chapter 7, about the near-total absence of White House records during the four-hour siege of the U.S. Capitol. (Was any evidence destroyed?)
But from a historical, legal and national security perspective, the most alarming information comes in Chapters 6 and 8 and Appendix 1. Those sections cover the right-wing extremists who jointly planned and executed the violent uprising — and the degree to which Trump enabled their attack.
First and foremost, the report busts a myth promoted by right-wing apologists that because some insurrectionists began the assault on the Capitol before Trump concluded his “Stop the Steal” speech, he was not the inspiration for the attack. Wrong.
Chapter 6 details the degree to which members of extremist groups (e.g., Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters) seized upon Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election. They heard his call to come to D.C. and believed he wanted them to do what was needed to keep him in power. The Proud Boys planned to move ahead of the crowd, which later — at Trump’s instruction — followed them down Pennsylvania Avenue.
In Chapter 8, the report details the early removal of barricades at the Peace Circle by the Proud Boys and their associates. That cleared the way for thousands of protesters to move down Pennsylvania Avenue directly to the Capitol. That provides evidence of the meticulous preparation that went into the assault.
The report also underscores how Trump’s own conduct prevented law enforcement from predicting the size and ferocity of the crowd. Appendix 1 shows that there had been coordination and discussion among agencies, but it was far from sufficient. The report concludes:
While the danger to the Capitol posed by an armed and angry crowd was foreseeable, the fact that the President of the United States would be the catalyst of their fury and facilitate the attack was unprecedented in American history. If we lacked the imagination to suppose that a President would incite an attack on his own Government, urging his supporters to “fight like hell,” we lack that insight no more.
In other words, law enforcement officials were likely unprepared for the assault because they never imagined the president of the United States would inflame so many people as a few hundred extremists barreled toward the Capitol. The police might have been able to hold off those few hundred deranged election deniers, but the size of the larger crowd made that impossible.
Another critical detail that demonstrates Trump’s relationship with the extremist groups: When “Stop the Steal” rallies were held in D.C. before Jan. 6, Trump drove or flew by to lend moral support. The report explains:
President Trump made sure to let the protestors in Washington know that he personally approved of their mission. During the November rally, President Trump waved to the crowd from his presidential motorcade. Then, on the morning of December 12th, President Trump tweeted: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA.” Later that day, President Trump flew over the protestors in Marine One.
The crowd was emboldened by his presence, and he was energized by their reaction. He saw himself as leader of the ragtag band and wanted desperately to repeat this experience on Jan. 6.
Moreover, several people in Trump’s inner circle were intimately involved with the insurrectionists. This includes former White House advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Michael Flynn and Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone. These individuals met with members of extremist groups, encouraged them to act and amplified their message. Bannon, of course, had a direct line to the president. (The committee reports that the two communicated on Jan. 5.) Trump was also in regular contact with Stone. The report does not connect Trump to the armed insurrectionists directly, but it gets alarmingly close.
In fact, Trump wanted a few of the most extreme figures tied to the extremist groups to speak from the podium on Jan. 6. The committee explains in Chapter 6:
President Trump wanted to include the “Stop the Steal” leaders in the January 6th event. As [Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson] put it in a text message to [Jan. 6 rally organizer Kylie Kremer]: “POTUS . . . likes the crazies.” Pierson said that she believed this was the case because President Trump “loved people who viciously defended him in public.” But their “vicious” defenses of the President clearly troubled Pierson.
Pierson tried to trim the speaker lineup — which still included the “Stop the Steal” trio of Stone, [conspiracy theorist Alex Jones], and [Stop the Steal group organizer Ali Alexander]. ... During their January 4th meeting, Pierson tried to convince President Trump to minimize the role of these potentially explosive figures at the Ellipse. She offered to place them at a planned event the night before in Freedom Plaza or on other stages in DC on January 6th. ...
President Trump was still unwilling to remove them from the lineup entirely. The President instructed Pierson to give Stone a speaking slot on January 5th and asked for more information about Ali Alexander. After discussing the matter with [former White House communications official Dan Scavino], President Trump also requested that Alexander be given a speaking slot. ...
In the end, the “Stop the Steal” leaders — Stone, Jones and Alexander — did not appear on the stage at the Ellipse on January 6th, although they did speak at other planned events, consistent with the President’s request.
These facts are particularly troubling given the revelation from testimony before the committee that Trump demanded that armed people be able to pass through the magnetometers at his rally. He also failed to send forces to put down the insurrection once rioters reached the Capitol.
Plus, exchanges between former White House adviser Hope Hicks and other Trump aides reflect that they appealed to Trump before Jan. 6 to ask his supporters to behave peacefully. As Hicks texted one campaign aide on Jan. 6, “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.”
The House committee lacked the ability to immunize witnesses to obtain cooperation. But special counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee investigations into Trump, does have that power. He will therefore be able to probe further to answer questions. For example: What communication took place between the White House and the Trump team’s “command center” at the Willard Hotel? How much did Trump know about the violent groups he was inciting?
The role of violent extremist groups cannot be minimized. In the next Congress, Republicans will likely ignore or play down their existence. Some will attempt to paint law enforcement action against such groups as oppressive and tyrannical. Nevertheless, Democrats and other sober-minded Americans must insist that law enforcement remain vigilant against them.
The overarching takeaway from the report is that the Jan. 6 assault was a highly organized operation by groups that joined together to keep Trump in power with violence. Trump knew they were armed, had close associates directly engaged with them, let them run rampant for hours and even egged them on during that time by demonizing his vice president.
If that does not amount to giving “aid or comfort” to those engaging in an insurrection against the United States, I don’t know what does.
THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE JUST MADE HISTORY. HERE’S WHAT THAT MEANS FOR PROSECUTORS.
By Norman Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer
Mr. Eisen and Ms. Perry are among the authors of “Trump on Trial,” a Brookings Institution report on the Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Wertheimer is president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to strengthen American democracy.
In voting on Monday to issue a sweeping final report, the Jan. 6 committee has honored its duty and the Constitution. When the full report is released this week, there will be much to review and process for our country, our government and American history. But given the facts that have been revealed, these hearings had to end with criminal referrals against Donald Trump and his minions.
The House committee articulated a powerful legal case encompassing the many schemes of Mr. Trump, John Eastman and others, including the audacious promotion of false electoral slates. The committee also recommended prosecution of Mr. Trump on charges of inciting insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists — a charge unseen since the Civil War. The referrals make clear to prosecutors and to Americans just how dangerous the attempted coup was, and how vulnerable our system was (and is) to such assaults.
The committee demonstrated its seriousness of purpose by refusing to put forth a laundry list of defendants. The committee members have all along thought as legislators and public educators, but also have put themselves in the minds of prosecutors. That led them to rightly focus on a short list of prospective defendants against whom the evidence is most damning, providing critical context to the prosecutors. Focusing on the very best cases avoids diluting the effect of the referrals with more tenuous theories against a large number of actors, and emphasizes the cases the prosecutors can actually win.
There is a logic to suggesting the consideration of charges against Mr. Eastman, who was the outside coup counsel, together with his client Mr. Trump and others such as Jeffrey Clark, who was instrumental in advocating the coup from within as a government lawyer. The committee wrote that Mr. Clark “stands out as a participant in the conspiracy.” A focus on the client and his counsel is not only powerfully symbolic — this was, after all, an attempted coup that was advanced by attorneys, not soldiers — it’s also driven by the evidence that the committee has accumulated. It indicates that a strong case can be advanced against Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and others for their scheme to fraudulently declare Mr. Trump president by pushing a staggering variety of falsehoods culminating in proposed fake electoral slates.
The evidence detailed in the committee’s hearings and the executive summary of the committee report reveal how Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark worked to advance Mr. Trump’s goal of overturning the election. Mr. Trump loudly challenged the outcome, and Mr. Eastman amplified those false claims in litigation, testimony and advocacy. Mr. Clark urged those false claims within the halls of the Department of Justice, where he was the acting head of the civil division.
The committee exposed how, as other ploys failed, the scheme to send false electors to Congress intensified. One of the most striking moments of the nine committee hearings was the video testimony of Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, describing how Mr. Trump called her and then “turned the call over” to Mr. Eastman, who asked for her help in gathering the false electors in key states. No less startling was the testimony by Mr. Clark’s superiors at the Justice Department about his proposed letter to Georgia election officials to try to get them to open the door to the false electors effort. (Disclosure: Mr. Eisen was part of bar complaints against Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark.)
It is not just the evidence the committee has derived that makes the referrals so strong, but also the law. The legal theories in the executive summary should be persuasive to prosecutors and the public for the discipline of what they include — and for what they omit. Two of the statutory bases for the referrals — conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of an official proceeding — were already the subject of the “more likely than not” criminal findings made by a federal district court litigating a committee subpoena. But the other two statutory bases for the criminal referrals are notable. The committee has gripped the nation by constantly offering surprises, and it has here served them up yet again.
Perhaps the biggest of those surprises is the inclusion of a referral for inciting and assisting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists under 18 U.S.C. 2383. That law derives from one first enacted in 1862 during the Civil War to provide for criminal penalties against Confederates and their accomplices attempting a violent secession from the Union.
Although the statute is seldom used, the committee is correct in its assessment that it applies to Mr. Trump’s conduct by summoning and whipping up the insurrectionists on Jan. 6 and then by failing to take action for three hours. The committee offers numerous examples of relevant misconduct, from Mr. Trump’s infamous remarks on the Ellipse, knowing that some of his listeners were armed, to his tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, while the insurrection was underway, to his affectionate comments that day about the rioters (even if asking them to respect law enforcement).
This referral parallels the expected obstruction of Congress recommendation, providing a belt-and-suspenders approach to securing justice for the events of Jan. 6. Moreover, the Section 2383 referral sets up possible disqualification of Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate. That is because the statute tracks Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits someone who has “given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the United States from serving in an elected, judicial or military office. Thus, the committee’s evidence and analysis will be useful to those asking election officials and courts to consider whether Mr. Trump must be excluded from primary ballots.
And who knows, it just may persuade prosecutors, too. After all, seditious conspiracy charges were also rare until this month’s landmark convictions of Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs for conspiring to promote violent insurrection on Jan. 6.
In the 14th Amendment context, citizens could use the committee report to go to their state election officials to argue that Mr. Trump is prohibited from holding office and so from appearing on the ballot. There need not be a criminal conviction or even criminal charges; these citizens can point out that the constitutional prohibition has been prompted by the committee’s evidence. However those decisions by election officials turn out, the next stop will be the courts, which have already held that Section 3 violators can indeed be barred.
The committee also advances a false statements theory under 18 U.S.C. 1001. Here it makes the case that the fake electoral slates pressed on Congress and the National Archives by Mr. Trump and his associates are actionable as false statements.
There’s a simplicity to the false statements that complements the more sweeping nature of the broad 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy to defraud the United States that the committee also articulates. You can’t press phony electoral slates on Congress any more than you can spend counterfeit cash in the House cafeteria. It is not complicated, and it is a valuable addition to the public discourse and to prosecutors’ thinking.
There’s much more that could be said about everything else in the executive summary the committee just approved. The focus on Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman should not be read to exclude others who are named as apparent co-conspirators from further investigation by the Department of Justice. Prominent among them, in addition to Mr. Clark, are Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and the outside attorney Kenneth Chesebro. However, in a further showing of the committee’s restraint, the executive summary notes that it “does not attempt to determine all of the participants” in the offenses referred — but that federal and state prosecutors have the additional investigative tools to make those determinations. They should do so expeditiously.
But for now the referrals are the main event. By focusing on a short list of potential defendants and charges, and substantiating them, the committee has provided the public, the press and above all federal prosecutors with a powerful aid. A well-reasoned outside opinion is rare and valuable as prosecutors make these highly consequential decisions.
Still, these are largely unprecedented cases. They will not be easy to bring or to win. Ultimately, that is why the committee’s referrals are so meaningful. Prosecutors need all the help they can get, and the Jan. 6 committee just gave it to them.
By Norman Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer
Mr. Eisen and Ms. Perry are among the authors of “Trump on Trial,” a Brookings Institution report on the Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Wertheimer is president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to strengthen American democracy.
In voting on Monday to issue a sweeping final report, the Jan. 6 committee has honored its duty and the Constitution. When the full report is released this week, there will be much to review and process for our country, our government and American history. But given the facts that have been revealed, these hearings had to end with criminal referrals against Donald Trump and his minions.
The House committee articulated a powerful legal case encompassing the many schemes of Mr. Trump, John Eastman and others, including the audacious promotion of false electoral slates. The committee also recommended prosecution of Mr. Trump on charges of inciting insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists — a charge unseen since the Civil War. The referrals make clear to prosecutors and to Americans just how dangerous the attempted coup was, and how vulnerable our system was (and is) to such assaults.
The committee demonstrated its seriousness of purpose by refusing to put forth a laundry list of defendants. The committee members have all along thought as legislators and public educators, but also have put themselves in the minds of prosecutors. That led them to rightly focus on a short list of prospective defendants against whom the evidence is most damning, providing critical context to the prosecutors. Focusing on the very best cases avoids diluting the effect of the referrals with more tenuous theories against a large number of actors, and emphasizes the cases the prosecutors can actually win.
There is a logic to suggesting the consideration of charges against Mr. Eastman, who was the outside coup counsel, together with his client Mr. Trump and others such as Jeffrey Clark, who was instrumental in advocating the coup from within as a government lawyer. The committee wrote that Mr. Clark “stands out as a participant in the conspiracy.” A focus on the client and his counsel is not only powerfully symbolic — this was, after all, an attempted coup that was advanced by attorneys, not soldiers — it’s also driven by the evidence that the committee has accumulated. It indicates that a strong case can be advanced against Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and others for their scheme to fraudulently declare Mr. Trump president by pushing a staggering variety of falsehoods culminating in proposed fake electoral slates.
The evidence detailed in the committee’s hearings and the executive summary of the committee report reveal how Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark worked to advance Mr. Trump’s goal of overturning the election. Mr. Trump loudly challenged the outcome, and Mr. Eastman amplified those false claims in litigation, testimony and advocacy. Mr. Clark urged those false claims within the halls of the Department of Justice, where he was the acting head of the civil division.
The committee exposed how, as other ploys failed, the scheme to send false electors to Congress intensified. One of the most striking moments of the nine committee hearings was the video testimony of Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, describing how Mr. Trump called her and then “turned the call over” to Mr. Eastman, who asked for her help in gathering the false electors in key states. No less startling was the testimony by Mr. Clark’s superiors at the Justice Department about his proposed letter to Georgia election officials to try to get them to open the door to the false electors effort. (Disclosure: Mr. Eisen was part of bar complaints against Mr. Eastman and Mr. Clark.)
It is not just the evidence the committee has derived that makes the referrals so strong, but also the law. The legal theories in the executive summary should be persuasive to prosecutors and the public for the discipline of what they include — and for what they omit. Two of the statutory bases for the referrals — conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of an official proceeding — were already the subject of the “more likely than not” criminal findings made by a federal district court litigating a committee subpoena. But the other two statutory bases for the criminal referrals are notable. The committee has gripped the nation by constantly offering surprises, and it has here served them up yet again.
Perhaps the biggest of those surprises is the inclusion of a referral for inciting and assisting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists under 18 U.S.C. 2383. That law derives from one first enacted in 1862 during the Civil War to provide for criminal penalties against Confederates and their accomplices attempting a violent secession from the Union.
Although the statute is seldom used, the committee is correct in its assessment that it applies to Mr. Trump’s conduct by summoning and whipping up the insurrectionists on Jan. 6 and then by failing to take action for three hours. The committee offers numerous examples of relevant misconduct, from Mr. Trump’s infamous remarks on the Ellipse, knowing that some of his listeners were armed, to his tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, while the insurrection was underway, to his affectionate comments that day about the rioters (even if asking them to respect law enforcement).
This referral parallels the expected obstruction of Congress recommendation, providing a belt-and-suspenders approach to securing justice for the events of Jan. 6. Moreover, the Section 2383 referral sets up possible disqualification of Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate. That is because the statute tracks Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits someone who has “given aid or comfort to the enemies” of the United States from serving in an elected, judicial or military office. Thus, the committee’s evidence and analysis will be useful to those asking election officials and courts to consider whether Mr. Trump must be excluded from primary ballots.
And who knows, it just may persuade prosecutors, too. After all, seditious conspiracy charges were also rare until this month’s landmark convictions of Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs for conspiring to promote violent insurrection on Jan. 6.
In the 14th Amendment context, citizens could use the committee report to go to their state election officials to argue that Mr. Trump is prohibited from holding office and so from appearing on the ballot. There need not be a criminal conviction or even criminal charges; these citizens can point out that the constitutional prohibition has been prompted by the committee’s evidence. However those decisions by election officials turn out, the next stop will be the courts, which have already held that Section 3 violators can indeed be barred.
The committee also advances a false statements theory under 18 U.S.C. 1001. Here it makes the case that the fake electoral slates pressed on Congress and the National Archives by Mr. Trump and his associates are actionable as false statements.
There’s a simplicity to the false statements that complements the more sweeping nature of the broad 18 U.S.C. 371 conspiracy to defraud the United States that the committee also articulates. You can’t press phony electoral slates on Congress any more than you can spend counterfeit cash in the House cafeteria. It is not complicated, and it is a valuable addition to the public discourse and to prosecutors’ thinking.
There’s much more that could be said about everything else in the executive summary the committee just approved. The focus on Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman should not be read to exclude others who are named as apparent co-conspirators from further investigation by the Department of Justice. Prominent among them, in addition to Mr. Clark, are Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and the outside attorney Kenneth Chesebro. However, in a further showing of the committee’s restraint, the executive summary notes that it “does not attempt to determine all of the participants” in the offenses referred — but that federal and state prosecutors have the additional investigative tools to make those determinations. They should do so expeditiously.
But for now the referrals are the main event. By focusing on a short list of potential defendants and charges, and substantiating them, the committee has provided the public, the press and above all federal prosecutors with a powerful aid. A well-reasoned outside opinion is rare and valuable as prosecutors make these highly consequential decisions.
Still, these are largely unprecedented cases. They will not be easy to bring or to win. Ultimately, that is why the committee’s referrals are so meaningful. Prosecutors need all the help they can get, and the Jan. 6 committee just gave it to them.
THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE LOWERED THE BOOM ON TRUMP. NOW THE BALL IS IN DOJ’S COURT.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Donald Trump cannot pass off the House Jan. 6 select committee’s final report as mere partisan opinion. His criminal liability is based on a mound of evidence, as the committee meticulously detailed.
Moreover, the committee’s “roadmap to justice” is not just a restatement of facts already made public by the committee. It is the foundation that the Justice Department could use to prosecute the former president and his underlings to the fullest extent of the law.
The report’s executive summary, which the committee released on Monday, includes four criminal referrals for Trump: insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement. Trump lawyer John Eastman is also slated to be referred for obstruction of a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The committee leaves open the possibility that others might be referred for participation in such crimes, leaving it to the Justice Department to investigate.
At its core, the report lays out the evidence for critical facts:
Never in the history of the republic has Congress taken such a momentous step of issuing a criminal referral of a former president. Then again, never in our history has a president attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
While a referral has no legal significance, the roadmap puts great pressure on the Justice Department. If special counsel Jack Smith decides not to indict Trump, he will have to explain why his judgment differs from that of a congressional committee that painstakingly examined the evidence and presented it to the American people.
Let’s take a look at each of the potential charges against Trump:
Insurrection
In some sense, this referral should come as no surprise. The entire country saw Trump unleash the mob to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes. A majority of the House impeached Trump specifically for incitement of insurrection. And 57 senators voted to convict him on that charge.
The statute concerning such a criminal charge is fairly straightforward. Section 2383 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code states: “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” The committee argues that Trump “gave aid and comfort" to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists with his actions that day.
As several legal commentators have noted, prosecutors in an insurrection case would not need to prove that Trump agreed to overthrow the government, as would be required for a seditious conspiracy charge. They would only need prove he assisted in opposing the authority of the government.
Moreover, conviction under Section 2383 would bar Trump from holding federal office. In essence, a successful prosecution on these lines would accomplish what Republican senators refused to do in the impeachment trial: prevent Trump from ever regaining the presidency.
Yes, proving that Trump “gave aid or comfort” (as opposed to mere cheerleading) would be difficult. Prosecutors would likely have to overcome a First Amendment defense. But the committee’s job was not to make a final prosecutorial judgment about whether a conviction is possible; it was to confirm that the country collectively witnessed an unprecedented crime. In setting forth a voluminous record and encouraging criminal charges, it puts the onus on Smith to decide whether the totality of evidence would not be enough to persuade a jury to convict Trump of insurrection.
Obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States
These potential charges are nothing new. Legal scholars as well as federal District Judge David O. Carter (in adjudicating Eastman’s attempts to avoid complying with congressional subpoenas based on client-attorney privilege) have found it more likely than not that Trump committed such crimes. (The committee’s summary devotes substantial space to reviewing Carter’s analysis.)
In fact, multiple Jan. 6 insurrectionists have either pleaded guilty to or been convicted of obstructing a congressional proceeding under Section 1512(c) of Title 18. The executive summary released by the committee explains:
Sufficient evidence exists of one or more potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) for a criminal referral of President Trump based solely on his plan to get Vice President Pence to prevent certification of the election at the Joint Session of Congress. Those facts standing alone are sufficient. But such a charge under that statute can also be based on the plan to create and transmit to the Executive and Legislative branches fraudulent electoral slates, which were ultimately intended to facilitate an unlawful action by Vice President Pence – to refuse to count legitimate, certified electoral votes during Congress’s official January 6th proceeding.
Additionally, evidence developed about the many other elements of President Trump’s plans to overturn the election, including soliciting State legislatures, State officials, and others to alter official electoral outcomes, provides further evidence that President Trump was attempting through multiple means to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th. This is also true of President Trump’s personal directive to the Department of Justice to “just say that the election was was [sic] corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen.”
Trump’s plot to create alternative electors warrants a conspiracy to defraud charge for similar reasons. This is based on Section 371 of Title 18, which the Supreme Court has ruled makes it a crime to obstruct lawful governmental functions through "deceit, craft or trickery, [or] by means that are dishonest.”
As the committee’s executive summary points out, “The evidence of this element overlaps greatly with the evidence of the Section 1512(c)(2) violations. ... President Trump engaged in a multi-part plan described in this Report to obstruct a lawful certification of the election.”
Conspiracy to make a false statement
This is based on Section 1001 of Title 18, which applies to anyone who “makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” to Congress or who “makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry.”
Trump’s attempt to compile phony alternate electors to submit to Congress could subject him to prosecution for this crime. The committee finds:
The Committee believes that sufficient evidence exists for a criminal referral of President Trump for illegally engaging in a conspiracy to violate Section 1001; the evidence indicates that he entered into an agreement with Eastman and others to make the false statement (the fake electoral certificates), by deceitful or dishonest means, and at least one member of the conspiracy engaged in at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy (e.g. President Trump and Eastman’s call to Ronna McDaniel).
Other potential avenues for accountability
The Justice Department is by no means limited to these pathways of prosecution. The committee holds out the possibility that the department might pursue other charges such as seditious conspiracy if it uncovers evidence that Trump conspired with the violent armed groups that stormed the Capitol.
The Justice Department might also prosecute him under another statute (Section 372) for conspiring “to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof." As the committee noted, there were “potential efforts to obstruct its investigation, including by certain counsel (some paid by groups connected to the former President) who may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the Committee.”
The committee also included this stunning revelation: “The Select Committee is aware of multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses. The Department of Justice is aware of at least one of those circumstances.”
By leaving certain matters and certain potential defendants to the discretion of the Justice Department, the committee establishes its own credibility and underscores its own limits in accumulating evidence.
Beyond prosecution, the report cites members of Congress who failed to comply with subpoenas issued to them, which the committee will refer to the House Ethics Committee for further action. This includes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.).
Many Americans have rightly wondered whether Trump would ever be held accountable for his misdeeds. Today marks a critical, unprecedented and justifiable step toward making that happen. The ball is now in Jack Smith’s court to uphold the rule of law.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Donald Trump cannot pass off the House Jan. 6 select committee’s final report as mere partisan opinion. His criminal liability is based on a mound of evidence, as the committee meticulously detailed.
Moreover, the committee’s “roadmap to justice” is not just a restatement of facts already made public by the committee. It is the foundation that the Justice Department could use to prosecute the former president and his underlings to the fullest extent of the law.
The report’s executive summary, which the committee released on Monday, includes four criminal referrals for Trump: insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement. Trump lawyer John Eastman is also slated to be referred for obstruction of a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The committee leaves open the possibility that others might be referred for participation in such crimes, leaving it to the Justice Department to investigate.
At its core, the report lays out the evidence for critical facts:
- Trump attempted to stay in power despite the vote of the American people.
- He tried to concoct phony slates of electors to change the electoral vote.
- He tried to pressure former vice president Mike Pence to disregard the electoral count.
- When that did not work, he summoned the mob to the capital on Jan. 6, 2021, urged rally attendees (some of whom were armed) to march to the Capitol and did nothing for 187 minutes to stop the violence that ensued. In fact, while the insurrection was underway, he sent out a tweet putting a target on Pence’s back.
Never in the history of the republic has Congress taken such a momentous step of issuing a criminal referral of a former president. Then again, never in our history has a president attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
While a referral has no legal significance, the roadmap puts great pressure on the Justice Department. If special counsel Jack Smith decides not to indict Trump, he will have to explain why his judgment differs from that of a congressional committee that painstakingly examined the evidence and presented it to the American people.
Let’s take a look at each of the potential charges against Trump:
Insurrection
In some sense, this referral should come as no surprise. The entire country saw Trump unleash the mob to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes. A majority of the House impeached Trump specifically for incitement of insurrection. And 57 senators voted to convict him on that charge.
The statute concerning such a criminal charge is fairly straightforward. Section 2383 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code states: “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” The committee argues that Trump “gave aid and comfort" to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists with his actions that day.
As several legal commentators have noted, prosecutors in an insurrection case would not need to prove that Trump agreed to overthrow the government, as would be required for a seditious conspiracy charge. They would only need prove he assisted in opposing the authority of the government.
Moreover, conviction under Section 2383 would bar Trump from holding federal office. In essence, a successful prosecution on these lines would accomplish what Republican senators refused to do in the impeachment trial: prevent Trump from ever regaining the presidency.
Yes, proving that Trump “gave aid or comfort” (as opposed to mere cheerleading) would be difficult. Prosecutors would likely have to overcome a First Amendment defense. But the committee’s job was not to make a final prosecutorial judgment about whether a conviction is possible; it was to confirm that the country collectively witnessed an unprecedented crime. In setting forth a voluminous record and encouraging criminal charges, it puts the onus on Smith to decide whether the totality of evidence would not be enough to persuade a jury to convict Trump of insurrection.
Obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States
These potential charges are nothing new. Legal scholars as well as federal District Judge David O. Carter (in adjudicating Eastman’s attempts to avoid complying with congressional subpoenas based on client-attorney privilege) have found it more likely than not that Trump committed such crimes. (The committee’s summary devotes substantial space to reviewing Carter’s analysis.)
In fact, multiple Jan. 6 insurrectionists have either pleaded guilty to or been convicted of obstructing a congressional proceeding under Section 1512(c) of Title 18. The executive summary released by the committee explains:
Sufficient evidence exists of one or more potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) for a criminal referral of President Trump based solely on his plan to get Vice President Pence to prevent certification of the election at the Joint Session of Congress. Those facts standing alone are sufficient. But such a charge under that statute can also be based on the plan to create and transmit to the Executive and Legislative branches fraudulent electoral slates, which were ultimately intended to facilitate an unlawful action by Vice President Pence – to refuse to count legitimate, certified electoral votes during Congress’s official January 6th proceeding.
Additionally, evidence developed about the many other elements of President Trump’s plans to overturn the election, including soliciting State legislatures, State officials, and others to alter official electoral outcomes, provides further evidence that President Trump was attempting through multiple means to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th. This is also true of President Trump’s personal directive to the Department of Justice to “just say that the election was was [sic] corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen.”
Trump’s plot to create alternative electors warrants a conspiracy to defraud charge for similar reasons. This is based on Section 371 of Title 18, which the Supreme Court has ruled makes it a crime to obstruct lawful governmental functions through "deceit, craft or trickery, [or] by means that are dishonest.”
As the committee’s executive summary points out, “The evidence of this element overlaps greatly with the evidence of the Section 1512(c)(2) violations. ... President Trump engaged in a multi-part plan described in this Report to obstruct a lawful certification of the election.”
Conspiracy to make a false statement
This is based on Section 1001 of Title 18, which applies to anyone who “makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” to Congress or who “makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry.”
Trump’s attempt to compile phony alternate electors to submit to Congress could subject him to prosecution for this crime. The committee finds:
The Committee believes that sufficient evidence exists for a criminal referral of President Trump for illegally engaging in a conspiracy to violate Section 1001; the evidence indicates that he entered into an agreement with Eastman and others to make the false statement (the fake electoral certificates), by deceitful or dishonest means, and at least one member of the conspiracy engaged in at least one overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy (e.g. President Trump and Eastman’s call to Ronna McDaniel).
Other potential avenues for accountability
The Justice Department is by no means limited to these pathways of prosecution. The committee holds out the possibility that the department might pursue other charges such as seditious conspiracy if it uncovers evidence that Trump conspired with the violent armed groups that stormed the Capitol.
The Justice Department might also prosecute him under another statute (Section 372) for conspiring “to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof." As the committee noted, there were “potential efforts to obstruct its investigation, including by certain counsel (some paid by groups connected to the former President) who may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the Committee.”
The committee also included this stunning revelation: “The Select Committee is aware of multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses. The Department of Justice is aware of at least one of those circumstances.”
By leaving certain matters and certain potential defendants to the discretion of the Justice Department, the committee establishes its own credibility and underscores its own limits in accumulating evidence.
Beyond prosecution, the report cites members of Congress who failed to comply with subpoenas issued to them, which the committee will refer to the House Ethics Committee for further action. This includes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.).
Many Americans have rightly wondered whether Trump would ever be held accountable for his misdeeds. Today marks a critical, unprecedented and justifiable step toward making that happen. The ball is now in Jack Smith’s court to uphold the rule of law.
AN ‘IMPERIAL SUPREME COURT’ ASSERTS ITS POWER, ALARMING SCHOLARS
Several new studies document the current court’s distinctive insistence on its dominance and the justices’ willingness to use procedural shortcuts to achieve it.
By Adam Liptak, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The conventional critique of the Supreme Court these days is that it has lurched to the right and is out of step with the public on many issues. That is true so far as it goes.
But a burst of recent legal scholarship makes a deeper point, saying the current court is distinctive in a different way: It has rapidly been accumulating power at the expense of every other part of the government.
The phenomenon was documented last month by Mark A. Lemley, a law professor at Stanford, in an article called “The Imperial Supreme Court” in The Harvard Law Review.
“The court has not been favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments,” Professor Lemley wrote. “Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once.”
He added, “It is a court that is consolidating its power, systematically undercutting any branch of government, federal or state, that might threaten that power, while at the same time undercutting individual rights.”
The arguments this month over the role of state legislatures in setting rules for federal elections seemed to illustrate the point. The questioning suggested that the court was not prepared to adopt a novel legal theory that would upset the ordinary checks and balances at the state level in election litigation.
Rather, the justices seemed ready to elevate their own role in the process, giving themselves the right to do something ordinarily forbidden: second-guess state courts’ interpretations of state law.
In a similar vein, Justice Elena Kagan noted the majority’s imperial impulses in a dissent from a decision in June that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to address climate change.
“The court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy,” she wrote. “I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
A second study, to be published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, concentrated on cases involving the executive branch and backed up Professor Lemley’s observations with data. Taking account of 3,660 decisions since 1937, the study found that the court led since 2005 by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been “uniquely willing to check executive authority.”
This trend was even more pronounced in cases discussed in law school casebooks and featured on the front page of this newspaper. The executive branch in the Roberts court era won just 35 percent of the time in those cases, a rate more than 20 percentage points lower than the historical average.
The study’s authors, Rebecca L. Brown and Lee Epstein, both of the University of Southern California, wrote that “there is little indication that the Roberts court’s willingness to rule against the president bears any reliable relation to preserving the balance among the branches or the workings and accountability of the democratic process.”
“Instead,” they wrote, “there are increasingly frequent indications that the court is establishing a position of judicial supremacy over the president and Congress.”
Professor Brown added in an interview that the nature of the court’s reasoning has shifted.
“When the court used to rule in favor of the president, they would do so with a sort of humility,” she said. “They would say: ‘It’s not up to us to decide this. We will defer to the president. He wins.’ Now the court says, ‘The president wins because we think he’s right.’”
Nor does the Supreme Court seem to trust lower federal courts. It has, for instance, made a habit of hearing cases before federal appeals courts have ruled on them, using a procedure called “certiorari before judgment.” It used to be reserved for exceptional cases like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor or President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel industry.
Before 2019, the court had not used the procedure for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, he found, the court has used it 19 times.
The court has been using another kind of shortcut to enhance its power, as two law professors — Lisa Tucker of Drexel University and Stefanie A. Lindquist of Arizona State University — demonstrated in a recent guest essay. The court has been, they wrote, “increasingly setting aside legally significant decisions from the lower courts as if they had never happened, invalidating them in brief procedural orders.”
Yet another study, from Tejas Narechania, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the cases selected by the justices for full-blown review on the merits.
“The Roberts court, more than any other court in history, uses its docket-setting discretion to select cases that allow it to revisit and overrule precedent,” Professor Narechania found in the study, which will be published in the St. Louis University Law Journal and built on an earlier one in the Columbia Law Review.
In September, in remarks at a judicial conference, Chief Justice Roberts insisted on the court’s primacy.
“You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is,” he said, echoing Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous statement in Marbury v. Madison, the foundational 1803 decision: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial branch to say what the law is.”
The statement is popular with the current court. “Over half of the total number of majority or concurring opinions in Supreme Court history to have quoted this language from Marbury,” Professors Brown and Epstein wrote, “have been penned by the Roberts court.”
Several new studies document the current court’s distinctive insistence on its dominance and the justices’ willingness to use procedural shortcuts to achieve it.
By Adam Liptak, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The conventional critique of the Supreme Court these days is that it has lurched to the right and is out of step with the public on many issues. That is true so far as it goes.
But a burst of recent legal scholarship makes a deeper point, saying the current court is distinctive in a different way: It has rapidly been accumulating power at the expense of every other part of the government.
The phenomenon was documented last month by Mark A. Lemley, a law professor at Stanford, in an article called “The Imperial Supreme Court” in The Harvard Law Review.
“The court has not been favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments,” Professor Lemley wrote. “Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once.”
He added, “It is a court that is consolidating its power, systematically undercutting any branch of government, federal or state, that might threaten that power, while at the same time undercutting individual rights.”
The arguments this month over the role of state legislatures in setting rules for federal elections seemed to illustrate the point. The questioning suggested that the court was not prepared to adopt a novel legal theory that would upset the ordinary checks and balances at the state level in election litigation.
Rather, the justices seemed ready to elevate their own role in the process, giving themselves the right to do something ordinarily forbidden: second-guess state courts’ interpretations of state law.
In a similar vein, Justice Elena Kagan noted the majority’s imperial impulses in a dissent from a decision in June that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to address climate change.
“The court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy,” she wrote. “I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
A second study, to be published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, concentrated on cases involving the executive branch and backed up Professor Lemley’s observations with data. Taking account of 3,660 decisions since 1937, the study found that the court led since 2005 by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been “uniquely willing to check executive authority.”
This trend was even more pronounced in cases discussed in law school casebooks and featured on the front page of this newspaper. The executive branch in the Roberts court era won just 35 percent of the time in those cases, a rate more than 20 percentage points lower than the historical average.
The study’s authors, Rebecca L. Brown and Lee Epstein, both of the University of Southern California, wrote that “there is little indication that the Roberts court’s willingness to rule against the president bears any reliable relation to preserving the balance among the branches or the workings and accountability of the democratic process.”
“Instead,” they wrote, “there are increasingly frequent indications that the court is establishing a position of judicial supremacy over the president and Congress.”
Professor Brown added in an interview that the nature of the court’s reasoning has shifted.
“When the court used to rule in favor of the president, they would do so with a sort of humility,” she said. “They would say: ‘It’s not up to us to decide this. We will defer to the president. He wins.’ Now the court says, ‘The president wins because we think he’s right.’”
Nor does the Supreme Court seem to trust lower federal courts. It has, for instance, made a habit of hearing cases before federal appeals courts have ruled on them, using a procedure called “certiorari before judgment.” It used to be reserved for exceptional cases like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor or President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel industry.
Before 2019, the court had not used the procedure for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, he found, the court has used it 19 times.
The court has been using another kind of shortcut to enhance its power, as two law professors — Lisa Tucker of Drexel University and Stefanie A. Lindquist of Arizona State University — demonstrated in a recent guest essay. The court has been, they wrote, “increasingly setting aside legally significant decisions from the lower courts as if they had never happened, invalidating them in brief procedural orders.”
Yet another study, from Tejas Narechania, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the cases selected by the justices for full-blown review on the merits.
“The Roberts court, more than any other court in history, uses its docket-setting discretion to select cases that allow it to revisit and overrule precedent,” Professor Narechania found in the study, which will be published in the St. Louis University Law Journal and built on an earlier one in the Columbia Law Review.
In September, in remarks at a judicial conference, Chief Justice Roberts insisted on the court’s primacy.
“You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is,” he said, echoing Chief Justice John Marshall’s famous statement in Marbury v. Madison, the foundational 1803 decision: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial branch to say what the law is.”
The statement is popular with the current court. “Over half of the total number of majority or concurring opinions in Supreme Court history to have quoted this language from Marbury,” Professors Brown and Epstein wrote, “have been penned by the Roberts court.”
BOOK BANNING IS BAD POLICY. LET’S MAKE IT BAD POLITICS.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
There was a time when the term “Banned in Boston” was one of the best things that could happen to a book, a play or a movie. From roughly the 1880s to the mid-20th century, a censoriousness rooted in the city’s Puritan past supported especially aggressive laws aimed at suppressing material seen as salacious or dangerous. For many, the label was a guarantee that whatever was banned must have been, well, interesting.
Over time, such statutes were overturned in the name of free expression, but the phrase is a reminder that the current spate of book banning is not new. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous. A new round of censorship has sturdy roots in a right-wing movement that uses slogans around “parental rights” to defend removing books from libraries in the name of “protecting” children.
Actually, that’s not what we believe, and 2023 should be the year when progressives change the terms of debate on a series of cultural issues in the right wing’s arsenal. Battling book bans is one of the most important.
The shift requires moving from defense to offense and insisting that efforts to close the minds of the next generation will not make its members stronger, more resilient, more intelligent or, for that matter, more moral.
Opponents of censorship heartily agree that parents should have an important say in how schools work and how public libraries serve our children. What we’re against is a willful ideological minority imposing its views on everyone else, dictating which ideas should be forbidden in public institutions that instruct the young.
Most Americans agree with us.
Here, for example, is the conclusion of a report from the group More in Common earlier this month on attitudes toward the teaching of our country’s history, a topic that has roiled politics because of resistance to discussing racism and slavery:
“We found that Americans of all political orientations want their children to learn a history that celebrates our strengths and also examines our failures. Americans overwhelmingly agree that the experiences of minority groups are an important part of that history. And they agree that if students are better informed about America’s past there’s a better chance of not repeating past failures.”
Starting with what we agree on exposes the radical right’s efforts to divide us by picking fights that most of us don’t even want to have.
Worries about a new censorship are not figments of left-wing imaginations. A report by the freedom of expression group PEN America found 1,586 instances of individual books being banned between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, affecting 1,145 unique book titles. In September, the American Library Association reported that there would be more challenges to books in 2022 than there were in 2021, which was a record year.
The right wing is eager for parents to think that progressives support the equivalent of hardcore porn in school libraries.
Thus the finding of an October Rasmussen poll for the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its purpose as helping “parents counteract progressivism in public schools.” The survey, Rasmussen reported, found that 69 percent of voters “believe books containing explicit sexual depictions of sex acts, including homosexual sex, should not be present in public high school libraries.” The words “explicit sexual depictions of sex acts” and “homosexual sex” do a lot of work here.
Contrast this with a Hart Research Associates and North Star Opinion Research survey for the American Library Association in March. It asked: “Would you support or oppose efforts to remove books from local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them?” It found 71 percent were opposed.
These dueling surveys tell us that the right wing can win these battles only with the most lurid, over-the-top arguments that have little to do with the movement’s real objectives, a wholesale war on anything that smacks of “progressivism,” with a particular animus directed against LGBTQ people. “There is an appeal to the idea that parents should have some control over what their children learn,” Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux, who has polled extensively on educational issues, told me. “But parents don’t want a situation where the most upset parent determines what other children learn or what books are in the school library.”
The vast majority of parents want their kids’ schools to be open and welcoming settings for education, not battlefields in culture wars designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time. Opponents of book bans represent this mainstream. We should not be afraid to claim it.
By E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
There was a time when the term “Banned in Boston” was one of the best things that could happen to a book, a play or a movie. From roughly the 1880s to the mid-20th century, a censoriousness rooted in the city’s Puritan past supported especially aggressive laws aimed at suppressing material seen as salacious or dangerous. For many, the label was a guarantee that whatever was banned must have been, well, interesting.
Over time, such statutes were overturned in the name of free expression, but the phrase is a reminder that the current spate of book banning is not new. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous. A new round of censorship has sturdy roots in a right-wing movement that uses slogans around “parental rights” to defend removing books from libraries in the name of “protecting” children.
Actually, that’s not what we believe, and 2023 should be the year when progressives change the terms of debate on a series of cultural issues in the right wing’s arsenal. Battling book bans is one of the most important.
The shift requires moving from defense to offense and insisting that efforts to close the minds of the next generation will not make its members stronger, more resilient, more intelligent or, for that matter, more moral.
Opponents of censorship heartily agree that parents should have an important say in how schools work and how public libraries serve our children. What we’re against is a willful ideological minority imposing its views on everyone else, dictating which ideas should be forbidden in public institutions that instruct the young.
Most Americans agree with us.
Here, for example, is the conclusion of a report from the group More in Common earlier this month on attitudes toward the teaching of our country’s history, a topic that has roiled politics because of resistance to discussing racism and slavery:
“We found that Americans of all political orientations want their children to learn a history that celebrates our strengths and also examines our failures. Americans overwhelmingly agree that the experiences of minority groups are an important part of that history. And they agree that if students are better informed about America’s past there’s a better chance of not repeating past failures.”
Starting with what we agree on exposes the radical right’s efforts to divide us by picking fights that most of us don’t even want to have.
Worries about a new censorship are not figments of left-wing imaginations. A report by the freedom of expression group PEN America found 1,586 instances of individual books being banned between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, affecting 1,145 unique book titles. In September, the American Library Association reported that there would be more challenges to books in 2022 than there were in 2021, which was a record year.
The right wing is eager for parents to think that progressives support the equivalent of hardcore porn in school libraries.
Thus the finding of an October Rasmussen poll for the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its purpose as helping “parents counteract progressivism in public schools.” The survey, Rasmussen reported, found that 69 percent of voters “believe books containing explicit sexual depictions of sex acts, including homosexual sex, should not be present in public high school libraries.” The words “explicit sexual depictions of sex acts” and “homosexual sex” do a lot of work here.
Contrast this with a Hart Research Associates and North Star Opinion Research survey for the American Library Association in March. It asked: “Would you support or oppose efforts to remove books from local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them?” It found 71 percent were opposed.
These dueling surveys tell us that the right wing can win these battles only with the most lurid, over-the-top arguments that have little to do with the movement’s real objectives, a wholesale war on anything that smacks of “progressivism,” with a particular animus directed against LGBTQ people. “There is an appeal to the idea that parents should have some control over what their children learn,” Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux, who has polled extensively on educational issues, told me. “But parents don’t want a situation where the most upset parent determines what other children learn or what books are in the school library.”
The vast majority of parents want their kids’ schools to be open and welcoming settings for education, not battlefields in culture wars designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time. Opponents of book bans represent this mainstream. We should not be afraid to claim it.
CHILDHOOD’S GREATEST DANGER: THE DATA ON KIDS AND GUN VIOLENCE
Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children.
By Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann and Albert Sun, The New York Times
For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. We’re now living in the era of the gun.
The gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000. It was flat for more than a decade starting in 2000, and most years fewer than three in every 100,000 children were killed by guns. In 2014, the rate began to creep up, and by 2020 guns became the leading killer.
Last year was a particularly violent one: 3,597 children died by gunfire, according to provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death rate from guns was the highest it has been in more than 20 years. While the statistics for this year are incomplete, it is clear that the carnage has not receded.
In May, the nation watched as horror unfolded in Uvalde, Texas. Yet another school ripped apart by bullets — yet another group of children to mourn. Yet another shooting in a long line of school shootings. And though the number of school shootings has recently risen to the highest level on record, the overall picture is so much worse; these shootings account for less than 1 percent of the total gun deaths suffered by American children.
No group of American children has been spared, but some have fared far worse. Last year, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths involving children — 2,279 — were homicides. Since 2018, they have increased by more than 73 percent. Most homicides involved Black children, who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply.
The number of children who die by suicide with a gun has also risen to a historical high over the last decade. Last year, suicides made up nearly 30 percent of child gun deaths — 1,078. Unlike homicides, suicides disproportionately involve white children, mostly teenage boys. A decade ago, the number of white children who killed themselves with a gun totaled around 500 annually; in three of the last five years, that figure has surpassed 700.
The share of gun suicides for Black and Hispanic children has been growing, too. Still, in America, among children who die by gunfire, Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be killed by others, and white children are more likely to kill themselves.
Gun accidents that kill children have also ticked up in the last decade, though they are relatively uncommon, totaling fewer than 150 in most years.
Researchers who study gun violence say that it is difficult to explain exactly why gun deaths among children have risen so quickly, but most emphasize that the increased availability of guns — especially handguns, which tend to be used in homicides and suicides and also tend to be stored less safely than some other types of guns — has most likely played a role.
What is clear is that the United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to gun fatalities among children. When researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation recently compared a set of similarly large and wealthy nations, they found that among this group, the United States accounted for 46 percent of the child population but 97 percent of all child gun deaths.
There is no comprehensive data describing the nature of each fatal shooting in America — say, the number of children who died in circumstances related to domestic violence or gang-related fights or accidental shootings. The C.D.C. collects information on the gender and race of each child shot and killed. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that has tracked deaths and injuries related to gun violence since 2014, compiles location and other data for thousands of fatal shootings.
Using this data, The New York Times set out to examine how guns are shaping American childhood, and to understand which children have been most at risk. The analysis focused on children ages 1 through 18, which includes many high school seniors. (Infants have their own distinct mortality risks, and their deaths are often studied separately from children ages 1 and older.)
David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said that gun-ownership rates and other factors may explain some of the demographic differences in how children die by gunfire, but more data is needed to answer the question definitively.
Overall, he said, he worried that the proliferation of guns in America would lead to more and more deaths among children. “Where there are more guns around, there’s more death,” he said. “It’s just so easy when you get in arguments, when you rob somebody — if you have a gun, it’s so much easier to kill.”
Rossin-Slater said she worried that the peers of the children killed were being affected by this trauma during the most formative years of their childhood and adolescence, which would have negative downstream effects for their mental and physical health, educational trajectories, economic stability and, broadly, their happiness.
“We have to think about the repercussions of it,” she said, “for decades to come.”
Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children.
By Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann and Albert Sun, The New York Times
For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. We’re now living in the era of the gun.
The gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000. It was flat for more than a decade starting in 2000, and most years fewer than three in every 100,000 children were killed by guns. In 2014, the rate began to creep up, and by 2020 guns became the leading killer.
Last year was a particularly violent one: 3,597 children died by gunfire, according to provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death rate from guns was the highest it has been in more than 20 years. While the statistics for this year are incomplete, it is clear that the carnage has not receded.
In May, the nation watched as horror unfolded in Uvalde, Texas. Yet another school ripped apart by bullets — yet another group of children to mourn. Yet another shooting in a long line of school shootings. And though the number of school shootings has recently risen to the highest level on record, the overall picture is so much worse; these shootings account for less than 1 percent of the total gun deaths suffered by American children.
No group of American children has been spared, but some have fared far worse. Last year, nearly two-thirds of gun deaths involving children — 2,279 — were homicides. Since 2018, they have increased by more than 73 percent. Most homicides involved Black children, who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply.
The number of children who die by suicide with a gun has also risen to a historical high over the last decade. Last year, suicides made up nearly 30 percent of child gun deaths — 1,078. Unlike homicides, suicides disproportionately involve white children, mostly teenage boys. A decade ago, the number of white children who killed themselves with a gun totaled around 500 annually; in three of the last five years, that figure has surpassed 700.
The share of gun suicides for Black and Hispanic children has been growing, too. Still, in America, among children who die by gunfire, Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be killed by others, and white children are more likely to kill themselves.
Gun accidents that kill children have also ticked up in the last decade, though they are relatively uncommon, totaling fewer than 150 in most years.
Researchers who study gun violence say that it is difficult to explain exactly why gun deaths among children have risen so quickly, but most emphasize that the increased availability of guns — especially handguns, which tend to be used in homicides and suicides and also tend to be stored less safely than some other types of guns — has most likely played a role.
What is clear is that the United States is an extreme outlier when it comes to gun fatalities among children. When researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation recently compared a set of similarly large and wealthy nations, they found that among this group, the United States accounted for 46 percent of the child population but 97 percent of all child gun deaths.
There is no comprehensive data describing the nature of each fatal shooting in America — say, the number of children who died in circumstances related to domestic violence or gang-related fights or accidental shootings. The C.D.C. collects information on the gender and race of each child shot and killed. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that has tracked deaths and injuries related to gun violence since 2014, compiles location and other data for thousands of fatal shootings.
Using this data, The New York Times set out to examine how guns are shaping American childhood, and to understand which children have been most at risk. The analysis focused on children ages 1 through 18, which includes many high school seniors. (Infants have their own distinct mortality risks, and their deaths are often studied separately from children ages 1 and older.)
David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said that gun-ownership rates and other factors may explain some of the demographic differences in how children die by gunfire, but more data is needed to answer the question definitively.
Overall, he said, he worried that the proliferation of guns in America would lead to more and more deaths among children. “Where there are more guns around, there’s more death,” he said. “It’s just so easy when you get in arguments, when you rob somebody — if you have a gun, it’s so much easier to kill.”
Rossin-Slater said she worried that the peers of the children killed were being affected by this trauma during the most formative years of their childhood and adolescence, which would have negative downstream effects for their mental and physical health, educational trajectories, economic stability and, broadly, their happiness.
“We have to think about the repercussions of it,” she said, “for decades to come.”
AMERICA’S TOXIC GUN CULTURE
By The New York Times Editorial Board
A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.
The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.
The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.
These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.
The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.
Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.
The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.
In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.
This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”
As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.
A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.
The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”
This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.
In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.
“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”
The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.
A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.
All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.”
It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence.
Institutions and individuals — prominent politicians, for instance, and responsible gun owners — could do far more to insist that assault weapons have no place in public spaces, even if they are permitted in many states, where the open carry of firearms is legal. Public condemnation of such displays is a good place to start.
Republicans should also show more courage in condemning extremists in their own ranks. When Representative Massie posted his Christmas photo, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois responded on Twitter: “I’m pro second amendment, but this isn’t supporting right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish.” There’s a difference between celebrating Christmas secure in the knowledge that you have a weapon to defend your home and family and sending out a photo of your arsenal days after a school shooting.
Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.
This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.
States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.
Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.
Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.
But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.
The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.
The grotesque timing led many Democrats and several Republicans to criticize Mr. Massie for sharing the photo. Others lauded it and nearly 80,000 people liked his tweet. “That’s my kind of Christmas card!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who then posted a photo of her four sons brandishing similar weapons.
These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States. When used in mass shootings, the AR-15 makes those acts of violence far more deadly. It has become the gun of choice for mass killers, from Las Vegas to Uvalde, Sandy Hook to Buffalo.
The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.
Addressing violent right-wing extremism is a challenge on many fronts: This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue. Most important, there is a civil war raging inside the Republican Party between those who support democracy and peaceful politics and those who support far-right extremism. That conflict has repercussions for all of us, and the fetishization of guns is a pervasive part of it.
The prominence of guns in campaign ads is a good barometer of their political potency. Democrats have sometimes used guns in ads — in 2010, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, running for the Senate, shot a hole through a copy of the cap-and-trade climate bill with a single-shot hunting rifle. Since then, guns have all but disappeared from Democratic messaging. But in the most recent midterm elections, Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.
In one of the most violent of those ads, Eric Greitens, a Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri and a former Navy SEAL, kicks in the door of a house and barges in with a group of men dressed in tactical gear and holding assault rifles. Mr. Greitens boasts that the group is hunting RINOs — a derogatory term for “Republicans in name only.” The ad continues, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
Twitter flagged the ad, Facebook banned it for violating its terms of service, and Mr. Greitens lost his race for office. He may have been playacting in the ad, but many other heavily armed people with far-right political views are not. Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech.
This intimidating display of weaponry isn’t a bipartisan phenomenon: A recent New York Times analysis examined more than 700 demonstrations where people openly carrying guns showed up. At about 77 percent of the protests, those who were armed “represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election.”
As we’ve seen at libraries that host drag queen book readings, Juneteenth celebrations and Pride marches, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is fast running up against the First Amendment’s right to peaceably assemble. Securing that right, and addressing political violence in general, requires addressing the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible.
A growing number of American civilians have an unhealthy obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15. It’s a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians. Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.
The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns, and it has done so by using and cultivating their status as near mythical emblems of power, hyper-patriotism and manhood. Earlier this year, an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the gun industry explicitly markets its products by touting their military pedigree and making “covert references to violent white supremacists like the Boogaloo Boys.” These tactics “prey on young men’s insecurities by claiming their weapons will put them ‘at the top of the testosterone food chain.’”
This marketing and those sales come at a significant cost to America’s social fabric.
In his recent book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America,” Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive, described attending a Black Lives Matter rally with his son in Montana in 2020. At the rally, dozens of armed men, some of them wearing insignia from two paramilitary groups — the 3 Percenters and the Oath Keepers — appeared, carrying assault rifles. After one of the armed men assaulted his 12-year-old son, Mr. Busse had his epiphany.
“For years prior to this protest, advertising executives in the gun industry had been encouraging the ‘tactical lifestyle,’” Mr. Busse wrote. The gun industry created a culture that “glorified weapons of war and encouraged followers to ‘own the libs.’”
The formula is a simple one: More rage, more fear, more gun sales.
A portion of those proceeds are then funneled back into politics through millions of dollars in direct contributions, lobbying and spending on outside groups, most often in support of Republicans.
All told, gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 and $2 million in the first quarter of 2022, the transparency group OpenSecrets reported. “From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.”
It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence.
Institutions and individuals — prominent politicians, for instance, and responsible gun owners — could do far more to insist that assault weapons have no place in public spaces, even if they are permitted in many states, where the open carry of firearms is legal. Public condemnation of such displays is a good place to start.
Republicans should also show more courage in condemning extremists in their own ranks. When Representative Massie posted his Christmas photo, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois responded on Twitter: “I’m pro second amendment, but this isn’t supporting right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish.” There’s a difference between celebrating Christmas secure in the knowledge that you have a weapon to defend your home and family and sending out a photo of your arsenal days after a school shooting.
Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.
This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.
States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.
Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.
Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.
But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.
SO REPUBLICANS WANT TO READ THE CONSTITUTION? THEY SHOULD LOOK AT THESE PARTS.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republican leaders have announced their intention to read the Constitution on the House floor during the first day of the new Congress. That’s all well and good, but they need to understand it as well.
Unfortunately, Republicans have shown a troubling lack of comprehension of our founding document in recent years. So here’s some assistance with some sections that seem to trip them up.
Let’s start with Article II, Section 1, Clause 7: “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
This provision should have prevented former president Donald Trump from reaping income from foreigners, including foreign government officials who stayed at his properties. Yet Republicans chose to ignore it.
This is particularly important now, as Forbes recently revealed that Trump failed to disclose that he had a loan with Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate, while running for president in 2016. Forbes reports, “There’s little doubt that if the world had known about the debt while Trump was president, it would have sparked conflicts-of-interest concerns, perhaps heightened by Daewoo’s historical ties to North Korea. (In the mid-1990s, the firm was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business inside the country.)” Perhaps Republicans might want to pass legislation prohibiting any president from continuing to do business with foreigners while in office? Just a thought.
Next up is Article II, Section 1, Clause 8: “Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, [the president] shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Enough said, right?
Here’s another critical one: Article II, Section 4. “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Inciting an insurrection, refusing to come to the aid of Congress and the vice president during an attack on the U.S. Capitol, cooking up a scheme to throw out electors, and extorting Ukraine for political favors all meet the definition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Again, Republicans seemed not to care.
Let’s skip over to Article III, Section 2, Clause 2: “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
This should serve as a warning to Republicans and the partisan right-wing hacks they put on the Supreme Court. Should Democrats win back the House and keep the Senate and White House in 2024, they can alter (even abolish!) the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. They could reasonably argue that a court that operates like a partisan body, not a judicial one, shouldn’t be reviewing the decisions of lower courts.
Presumably, Republicans will include in their reading the amendments to the Constitution. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note that it does not say “Twitter shall make no law.” Nor that “publishers can reject no book.” The notion, as many on the right suggest, that it is unconstitutional for private companies to refuse to serve as a platform for misinformation or noxious views is nonsense.
It’s also worth calling attention to the “establishment of religion” clause. The framers might be shocked to learn that, according to the right-wing Supreme Court, this doesn’t prohibit organized prayer at school events,government funding of religious schools and the imposition of health-care decisions based on sectarian views.
Republicans should also mull over the 14th Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That doesn’t divide Americans into “real Americans” and “elites,” as Republicans so often do. No individual or group is entitled to maintain a grip on power, no matter what Christian nationalists say.
Let’s end on one of my personal favorites, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who … shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Republicans should understand that no former president or member of Congress who attempted to prevent the transfer of power in January 2021 should be eligible to serve. Though they shouldn’t need to consult the Constitution to know that.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republican leaders have announced their intention to read the Constitution on the House floor during the first day of the new Congress. That’s all well and good, but they need to understand it as well.
Unfortunately, Republicans have shown a troubling lack of comprehension of our founding document in recent years. So here’s some assistance with some sections that seem to trip them up.
Let’s start with Article II, Section 1, Clause 7: “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
This provision should have prevented former president Donald Trump from reaping income from foreigners, including foreign government officials who stayed at his properties. Yet Republicans chose to ignore it.
This is particularly important now, as Forbes recently revealed that Trump failed to disclose that he had a loan with Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate, while running for president in 2016. Forbes reports, “There’s little doubt that if the world had known about the debt while Trump was president, it would have sparked conflicts-of-interest concerns, perhaps heightened by Daewoo’s historical ties to North Korea. (In the mid-1990s, the firm was the only South Korean company permitted to operate a business inside the country.)” Perhaps Republicans might want to pass legislation prohibiting any president from continuing to do business with foreigners while in office? Just a thought.
Next up is Article II, Section 1, Clause 8: “Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, [the president] shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Enough said, right?
Here’s another critical one: Article II, Section 4. “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Inciting an insurrection, refusing to come to the aid of Congress and the vice president during an attack on the U.S. Capitol, cooking up a scheme to throw out electors, and extorting Ukraine for political favors all meet the definition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Again, Republicans seemed not to care.
Let’s skip over to Article III, Section 2, Clause 2: “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
This should serve as a warning to Republicans and the partisan right-wing hacks they put on the Supreme Court. Should Democrats win back the House and keep the Senate and White House in 2024, they can alter (even abolish!) the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. They could reasonably argue that a court that operates like a partisan body, not a judicial one, shouldn’t be reviewing the decisions of lower courts.
Presumably, Republicans will include in their reading the amendments to the Constitution. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note that it does not say “Twitter shall make no law.” Nor that “publishers can reject no book.” The notion, as many on the right suggest, that it is unconstitutional for private companies to refuse to serve as a platform for misinformation or noxious views is nonsense.
It’s also worth calling attention to the “establishment of religion” clause. The framers might be shocked to learn that, according to the right-wing Supreme Court, this doesn’t prohibit organized prayer at school events,
Republicans should also mull over the 14th Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That doesn’t divide Americans into “real Americans” and “elites,” as Republicans so often do. No individual or group is entitled to maintain a grip on power, no matter what Christian nationalists say.
Let’s end on one of my personal favorites, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who … shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Republicans should understand that no former president or member of Congress who attempted to prevent the transfer of power in January 2021 should be eligible to serve. Though they shouldn’t need to consult the Constitution to know that.
CYNICAL MAGA CENSORS ARE DAMAGING PUBLIC EDUCATION
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
MAGA culture warriors have heightened their threats against teachers and school administrators. Our public education system is now paying the price.
That’s the takeaway from an alarming study from a group of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Riverside. They found that the “virulent stream of hyperpartisan political conflict" has had "a chilling effect on high school education.” Teachers are seeking to avoid controversy by "pulling back on teaching lessons in civics, politics, and the history and experiences of America’s minority communities”; incidents of verbal harassment of LGBTQ students are on the rise; and many teachers and administrator are planning to leave their jobs.
The authors of the report surveyed 682 public high school principals, who confirmed that organized campaigns have attempted to intimidate public schools and force changes to align with right-wing ideology. The researchers write, “Our survey data make clear that political conflict over a set of hot button issues occurred at more than two-thirds (69%) of public schools across the nation during the 2021-2022 school year.” Moreover, “Half of all principals report that parents or other community members sought to limit or challenge teaching and learning about issues of race and racism. Nearly half report challenges to school policies and practices related to LGBTQ student rights.” And a third of principals said “parents or community members raised challenges to school library books they deemed inappropriate.”
This is not about parents getting involved in shaping how children learn in a healthy or respectful manner. Rather, the authors stress, this is about individuals trying to "spread falsehoods, deny civil liberties, and employ hostile and violent rhetoric or intimidating action.”
That kind of onslaught is most intense in purple communities where competing factions vie for control of schools. “Outside groups have specifically targeted these communities through a ‘conflict campaign’ to gain partisan advantage,” the study finds. In most cases, a relatively small group of hostile parents and community members are leading the charge, thwarting the wishes of the majority of parents and others who want kids to have an accurate, inclusive and skills-building education.
The authors write:
For example, a recent national survey finds that over 95% of Americans want high school students to learn about slavery, and 85% want high school students to learn about racial inequality. These practices are important indicators because they help prepare youth for life in a diverse democracy, the public is broadly supportive of them, and yet there is reason to fear that they may be subject to a chilling effect due to current political dynamics.
Such partisan hullabaloo not only distracts educators, but also spreads an atmosphere of incivility and prompts teachers and administrators to shy away from “discussion of current controversial issues.” As a result, fewer students are learning to debate issues. Again, this is contrary to the wishes of the 80 percent of U.S. adults who “believe that controversial issues such as immigration, the second amendment, and income inequality should be discussed in high schools.”
Intimidation also affects students’ ability to identify misinformation, to the detriment of their development and our democracy more generally. The authors write, “If educational efforts are to address this polarization and conflict, and if they are to prepare youth to participate in productive forms of democratic deliberation, it is of paramount importance that public schools better prepare students to judge the accuracy of information.”
The bottom line, according to the study’s authors: Right-wing advocacy organizations and media are impairing the ability of schools to uphold values of "diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Teachers, principals and school officials can try to manage the swirl of political conflict and demand civility within schools. Many are encouraging students to attend school board meetings and lead their own forums to discuss these issues. But until communities as a whole defend the mission of public education and the ideals of respectful and inclusive debate, teachers and administrators will continue to abandon their profession. Meanwhile, students will continue to lose skills needed to function in a diverse democracy.
Letting a small cadre of partisan bullies to prevail will have serious consequences for American society.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
MAGA culture warriors have heightened their threats against teachers and school administrators. Our public education system is now paying the price.
That’s the takeaway from an alarming study from a group of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Riverside. They found that the “virulent stream of hyperpartisan political conflict" has had "a chilling effect on high school education.” Teachers are seeking to avoid controversy by "pulling back on teaching lessons in civics, politics, and the history and experiences of America’s minority communities”; incidents of verbal harassment of LGBTQ students are on the rise; and many teachers and administrator are planning to leave their jobs.
The authors of the report surveyed 682 public high school principals, who confirmed that organized campaigns have attempted to intimidate public schools and force changes to align with right-wing ideology. The researchers write, “Our survey data make clear that political conflict over a set of hot button issues occurred at more than two-thirds (69%) of public schools across the nation during the 2021-2022 school year.” Moreover, “Half of all principals report that parents or other community members sought to limit or challenge teaching and learning about issues of race and racism. Nearly half report challenges to school policies and practices related to LGBTQ student rights.” And a third of principals said “parents or community members raised challenges to school library books they deemed inappropriate.”
This is not about parents getting involved in shaping how children learn in a healthy or respectful manner. Rather, the authors stress, this is about individuals trying to "spread falsehoods, deny civil liberties, and employ hostile and violent rhetoric or intimidating action.”
That kind of onslaught is most intense in purple communities where competing factions vie for control of schools. “Outside groups have specifically targeted these communities through a ‘conflict campaign’ to gain partisan advantage,” the study finds. In most cases, a relatively small group of hostile parents and community members are leading the charge, thwarting the wishes of the majority of parents and others who want kids to have an accurate, inclusive and skills-building education.
The authors write:
For example, a recent national survey finds that over 95% of Americans want high school students to learn about slavery, and 85% want high school students to learn about racial inequality. These practices are important indicators because they help prepare youth for life in a diverse democracy, the public is broadly supportive of them, and yet there is reason to fear that they may be subject to a chilling effect due to current political dynamics.
Such partisan hullabaloo not only distracts educators, but also spreads an atmosphere of incivility and prompts teachers and administrators to shy away from “discussion of current controversial issues.” As a result, fewer students are learning to debate issues. Again, this is contrary to the wishes of the 80 percent of U.S. adults who “believe that controversial issues such as immigration, the second amendment, and income inequality should be discussed in high schools.”
Intimidation also affects students’ ability to identify misinformation, to the detriment of their development and our democracy more generally. The authors write, “If educational efforts are to address this polarization and conflict, and if they are to prepare youth to participate in productive forms of democratic deliberation, it is of paramount importance that public schools better prepare students to judge the accuracy of information.”
The bottom line, according to the study’s authors: Right-wing advocacy organizations and media are impairing the ability of schools to uphold values of "diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Teachers, principals and school officials can try to manage the swirl of political conflict and demand civility within schools. Many are encouraging students to attend school board meetings and lead their own forums to discuss these issues. But until communities as a whole defend the mission of public education and the ideals of respectful and inclusive debate, teachers and administrators will continue to abandon their profession. Meanwhile, students will continue to lose skills needed to function in a diverse democracy.
Letting a small cadre of partisan bullies to prevail will have serious consequences for American society.
MEDICARE ADVANTAGE? MORE LIKE MEDICARE DISADVANTAGE.
By Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
When the annual enrollment period for Medicare ends on Dec. 7, analysts expect that, for the first time, more seniors will receive their 2023 health-care coverage from Medicare Advantage than the traditional program.
That’s not a good thing for either elderly Americans or federal coffers. And while seniors are well advised to approach these plans with caution, we should all be paying attention to what’s going on.
Medicare Advantage plans, which are private insurance plans for seniors paid for with federal dollars, originated as a government savings strategy, on the theory that the private sector could improve on government performance at a lower cost. But over the past two decades, it has become clear that Medicare Advantage does not result in improved care for less money. Instead, it will come as no surprise to Americans familiar with the health insurance industry that insurers found a way to turn it into yet another profit center, while putting bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of patients.
The problems are so pronounced that Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) — both advocates of Medicare-for-all — recently introduced little-noticed legislation that would ban private insurers from using the word “Medicare” in their names or advertisements.
“Medicare implies universal coverage. You can go to any doctor, you can get your claims reimbursed,” Khanna told me. “You shouldn’t be able to appropriate the trust and faith people have in Medicare to sell a private product for personal profit that doesn’t have the same rules.”
Insurers in Medicare Advantage are paid a flat fee by the government, based on the enrollee’s health. These insurance companies often want their members to appear as ill as possible — at least as far as the Feds are concerned. They might “upcode,” in doctor speak, maximizing the amount of money they receive. (The federal government calls that practice “fraud” and has sued several of the largest insurers in federal court for it, including Anthem and Cigna, in cases still ongoing.)
As a result, multiple studies have found that seniors on Medicare Advantage cost the government more than those in the traditional program, exactly the opposite of what is intended. A government advisory panel recently estimated the overpayment was $12 billion in 2020.
This flood of money is fattening the bottom line of the health insurance giants even as they’re increasing pressure on the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which is projected to run out of funds in 2026. And Congress is loath to crack down, thanks to the combined power of health insurance lobbying and the program’s popularity with cash-strapped seniors.
Meanwhile, it’s not like seniors are getting better care for the money the federal government is spending — in fact, it can be worse. A research brief posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research website found picking the right plan could literally be a matter of life or death.
It’s “widespread” for Medicare Advantage plans to initially deny coverage for doctor-advised care, according to a report released this year by the Department of Health and Human Services. Plans erect roadblocks to treatment by demanding prior authorization for services traditional Medicare covers without questions. Plans can — and sometimes do — refuse to cover necessary prescription drugs. There are increasing complaints that private insurers rush patients out of skilled nursing and rehab facilities.
So why do people sign up? Traditional Medicare is not simple. It’s a complicated stew of different parts — for hospitalization, for doctors and for prescriptions. Seniors might feel they have to purchase supplemental coverage known as Medigap, which helps cover the co-pays and deductibles that Medicare does not cover.
Many Medicare Advantage plans eliminate or significantly reduce these out-of-pocket costs, as long as beneficiaries stay within their approved network. The private policies also frequently offer vision and dental coverage, not to mention gym memberships, something not on offer in Medicare itself.
These extras have an appeal. But a streamlined plan that can end up costing seniors more is no bargain — and Medicare Advantage sometimes relies on deceptive marketing to get them in the door. A report issued earlier this year by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic majority found that unscrupulous insurance agents — who are paid significantly more to sign up seniors for Medicare Advantage plans than for the traditional offering — will sometimes be misleading about networks and benefits, and even pursue seniors suffering from dementia. Ads featuring celebrities claim the plans will put more money in seniors’ pockets.
Medicare Advantage defenders are quick to point out that surveys show their enrollees are more likely to receive such preventive health and wellness services as monitoring of high blood pressure than those with the traditional program. But it’s usually when someone gets seriously ill that Medicare Advantage’s weaknesses become clear.
What would be best would be to fix Medicare, to make it more generous to enrollees and less generous to insurers. That’s unlikely to happen. But we can at least insist on calling it out for what it is: Try Medicare Disadvantage.
By Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
When the annual enrollment period for Medicare ends on Dec. 7, analysts expect that, for the first time, more seniors will receive their 2023 health-care coverage from Medicare Advantage than the traditional program.
That’s not a good thing for either elderly Americans or federal coffers. And while seniors are well advised to approach these plans with caution, we should all be paying attention to what’s going on.
Medicare Advantage plans, which are private insurance plans for seniors paid for with federal dollars, originated as a government savings strategy, on the theory that the private sector could improve on government performance at a lower cost. But over the past two decades, it has become clear that Medicare Advantage does not result in improved care for less money. Instead, it will come as no surprise to Americans familiar with the health insurance industry that insurers found a way to turn it into yet another profit center, while putting bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of patients.
The problems are so pronounced that Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) — both advocates of Medicare-for-all — recently introduced little-noticed legislation that would ban private insurers from using the word “Medicare” in their names or advertisements.
“Medicare implies universal coverage. You can go to any doctor, you can get your claims reimbursed,” Khanna told me. “You shouldn’t be able to appropriate the trust and faith people have in Medicare to sell a private product for personal profit that doesn’t have the same rules.”
Insurers in Medicare Advantage are paid a flat fee by the government, based on the enrollee’s health. These insurance companies often want their members to appear as ill as possible — at least as far as the Feds are concerned. They might “upcode,” in doctor speak, maximizing the amount of money they receive. (The federal government calls that practice “fraud” and has sued several of the largest insurers in federal court for it, including Anthem and Cigna, in cases still ongoing.)
As a result, multiple studies have found that seniors on Medicare Advantage cost the government more than those in the traditional program, exactly the opposite of what is intended. A government advisory panel recently estimated the overpayment was $12 billion in 2020.
This flood of money is fattening the bottom line of the health insurance giants even as they’re increasing pressure on the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which is projected to run out of funds in 2026. And Congress is loath to crack down, thanks to the combined power of health insurance lobbying and the program’s popularity with cash-strapped seniors.
Meanwhile, it’s not like seniors are getting better care for the money the federal government is spending — in fact, it can be worse. A research brief posted on the National Bureau of Economic Research website found picking the right plan could literally be a matter of life or death.
It’s “widespread” for Medicare Advantage plans to initially deny coverage for doctor-advised care, according to a report released this year by the Department of Health and Human Services. Plans erect roadblocks to treatment by demanding prior authorization for services traditional Medicare covers without questions. Plans can — and sometimes do — refuse to cover necessary prescription drugs. There are increasing complaints that private insurers rush patients out of skilled nursing and rehab facilities.
So why do people sign up? Traditional Medicare is not simple. It’s a complicated stew of different parts — for hospitalization, for doctors and for prescriptions. Seniors might feel they have to purchase supplemental coverage known as Medigap, which helps cover the co-pays and deductibles that Medicare does not cover.
Many Medicare Advantage plans eliminate or significantly reduce these out-of-pocket costs, as long as beneficiaries stay within their approved network. The private policies also frequently offer vision and dental coverage, not to mention gym memberships, something not on offer in Medicare itself.
These extras have an appeal. But a streamlined plan that can end up costing seniors more is no bargain — and Medicare Advantage sometimes relies on deceptive marketing to get them in the door. A report issued earlier this year by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic majority found that unscrupulous insurance agents — who are paid significantly more to sign up seniors for Medicare Advantage plans than for the traditional offering — will sometimes be misleading about networks and benefits, and even pursue seniors suffering from dementia. Ads featuring celebrities claim the plans will put more money in seniors’ pockets.
Medicare Advantage defenders are quick to point out that surveys show their enrollees are more likely to receive such preventive health and wellness services as monitoring of high blood pressure than those with the traditional program. But it’s usually when someone gets seriously ill that Medicare Advantage’s weaknesses become clear.
What would be best would be to fix Medicare, to make it more generous to enrollees and less generous to insurers. That’s unlikely to happen. But we can at least insist on calling it out for what it is: Try Medicare Disadvantage.
GAS DRILLER PLEADS NO CONTEST TO POLLUTING TOWN’S WATER
Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller has pleaded no contest to criminal environmental charges in a landmark pollution case
By Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press
MONTROSE, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller pleaded no contest Tuesday to criminal charges, capping a landmark environmental case against a company that prosecutors say polluted a rural community’s drinking water 14 years ago and then tried to evade responsibility.
Residents of the tiny crossroads of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania say they have gone more than a decade without a clean, reliable source of drinking water after their aquifer was ruined by Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc.
Under a plea deal entered in Susquehanna County Court, Coterra agreed to pay $16.29 million to fund construction of a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
“After more than decade of denials, of shirking responsibility and accountability, Coterra pleaded to their crime, and the people of Dimock finally had their day in court,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the state’s incoming governor, said outside the courtroom. “Today is further proof that you don’t get to just walk away from the harm you do here in Pennsylvania.”
The plea — the result of years of negotiations between Coterra and the attorney general’s office — represents a milestone in one of the most prominent pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. Dimock drew national notoriety after residents were filmed lighting their tap water on fire in the Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary “Gasland.”
Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., was charged in June 2020 with 15 criminal counts, most of them felonies, after a grand jury investigation found the company drilled faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.
The grand jury blasted what it called Cabot’s “long-term indifference to the damage it caused to the environment and citizens of Susquehanna County.”
Cabot, which merged with Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. to form Coterra, has long maintained the gas in residents’ water was naturally occurring.
Coterra pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of prohibition against discharge of industrial wastes under the state’s Clean Streams Law. The plea means Coterra does not admit guilt but agreed to accept criminal responsibility.
“Coterra has worked closely with the Office of Attorney General to resolve historical matters and create a path forward for all parties,” company spokesperson George Stark said via email. He said Coterra “strives to follow best practices, exceed industry standards, and to continue to be a valuable community partner.”
Many residents have avoided using their well water since the aquifer was contaminated with methane and heavy metals, using bottled water, bulk water purchased commercially, and even water drawn from creeks and artesian wells instead.
“These people had to find very creative ways to get water for their homes, water for their families, their kids, their critters, and it was not pretty,” Dimock resident Victoria Switzer said Tuesday. “It was just crazy, people trying to find water.”
Switzer, whose house will be connected to the new water line, called it “wonderful news” — and a long time coming.
Another resident, Scott Ely, said some of his neighbors had moved away or developed health problems as a result of Coterra’s practices, while his own children, now in college, had grown up “without a safe water source.”
“There’s so much heartache,” he said.
Residents were informed of the plea deal last week. A public utility, Pennsylvania American Water, plans to drill two wells — what it calls a “public groundwater system” — and build a treatment plant that will remove any contaminants from the water before piping it to about 20 homes in Dimock. The utility estimates that construction will take about three years, during which Coterra will be required to provide individual treatment systems and bottled water to impacted residents.
The settlement comes near the end of Shapiro’s tenure as attorney general.
On Tuesday, Shapiro, a Democrat who will be sworn in as governor in January, pledged more aggressive regulatory oversight of the industry.
“We have to change our regulatory structure here in the commonwealth,” Shapiro said. “We have to make sure we are setting clear rules of the road and holding industry accountable. If the regulators fail to do that, then industry is not going to be constrained and they’re going to go ahead and put profits before people. And that’s where the danger comes in.”
Shapiro demurred on the question of whether Coterra would be permitted to resume drilling in a 9-square-mile (23-square-kilometer) area of Dimock where it has long been banned. Shpairo said he would review the matter with his new environmental secretary after taking office as governor.
The criminal case has not slowed Coterra’s business. It is the leading shale gas driller in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas-producing state.
Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller has pleaded no contest to criminal environmental charges in a landmark pollution case
By Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press
MONTROSE, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller pleaded no contest Tuesday to criminal charges, capping a landmark environmental case against a company that prosecutors say polluted a rural community’s drinking water 14 years ago and then tried to evade responsibility.
Residents of the tiny crossroads of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania say they have gone more than a decade without a clean, reliable source of drinking water after their aquifer was ruined by Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc.
Under a plea deal entered in Susquehanna County Court, Coterra agreed to pay $16.29 million to fund construction of a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.
“After more than decade of denials, of shirking responsibility and accountability, Coterra pleaded to their crime, and the people of Dimock finally had their day in court,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the state’s incoming governor, said outside the courtroom. “Today is further proof that you don’t get to just walk away from the harm you do here in Pennsylvania.”
The plea — the result of years of negotiations between Coterra and the attorney general’s office — represents a milestone in one of the most prominent pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. Dimock drew national notoriety after residents were filmed lighting their tap water on fire in the Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary “Gasland.”
Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., was charged in June 2020 with 15 criminal counts, most of them felonies, after a grand jury investigation found the company drilled faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.
The grand jury blasted what it called Cabot’s “long-term indifference to the damage it caused to the environment and citizens of Susquehanna County.”
Cabot, which merged with Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. to form Coterra, has long maintained the gas in residents’ water was naturally occurring.
Coterra pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of prohibition against discharge of industrial wastes under the state’s Clean Streams Law. The plea means Coterra does not admit guilt but agreed to accept criminal responsibility.
“Coterra has worked closely with the Office of Attorney General to resolve historical matters and create a path forward for all parties,” company spokesperson George Stark said via email. He said Coterra “strives to follow best practices, exceed industry standards, and to continue to be a valuable community partner.”
Many residents have avoided using their well water since the aquifer was contaminated with methane and heavy metals, using bottled water, bulk water purchased commercially, and even water drawn from creeks and artesian wells instead.
“These people had to find very creative ways to get water for their homes, water for their families, their kids, their critters, and it was not pretty,” Dimock resident Victoria Switzer said Tuesday. “It was just crazy, people trying to find water.”
Switzer, whose house will be connected to the new water line, called it “wonderful news” — and a long time coming.
Another resident, Scott Ely, said some of his neighbors had moved away or developed health problems as a result of Coterra’s practices, while his own children, now in college, had grown up “without a safe water source.”
“There’s so much heartache,” he said.
Residents were informed of the plea deal last week. A public utility, Pennsylvania American Water, plans to drill two wells — what it calls a “public groundwater system” — and build a treatment plant that will remove any contaminants from the water before piping it to about 20 homes in Dimock. The utility estimates that construction will take about three years, during which Coterra will be required to provide individual treatment systems and bottled water to impacted residents.
The settlement comes near the end of Shapiro’s tenure as attorney general.
On Tuesday, Shapiro, a Democrat who will be sworn in as governor in January, pledged more aggressive regulatory oversight of the industry.
“We have to change our regulatory structure here in the commonwealth,” Shapiro said. “We have to make sure we are setting clear rules of the road and holding industry accountable. If the regulators fail to do that, then industry is not going to be constrained and they’re going to go ahead and put profits before people. And that’s where the danger comes in.”
Shapiro demurred on the question of whether Coterra would be permitted to resume drilling in a 9-square-mile (23-square-kilometer) area of Dimock where it has long been banned. Shpairo said he would review the matter with his new environmental secretary after taking office as governor.
The criminal case has not slowed Coterra’s business. It is the leading shale gas driller in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas-producing state.
LAW ENFORCEMENT IS FAILING TO CRACK DOWN ON DOMESTIC TERRORISM
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Given the spate of domestic terrorism attacks in recent years — the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue, the massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; for example — you would think law enforcement agencies are engaged in a robust effort to combat such violence, right? Wrong.
Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a largely overlooked — yet damning — report detailing the failures of national security agencies on this front.
“Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased," the committee reports. "National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland.” The uptick is predominately attributable to “white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” Yet “without better data, it is difficult to evaluate whether federal agencies are appropriately allocating resources and setting priorities.”
The report arrived just as billionaire Elon Musk opened the floodgates to right-wing extremists and purveyors of disinformation on Twitter. The committee notes, “Social media platforms have played an increasing role in the spread of extremist content that translates into real world violence, due in part to business models that incentivize user engagement over safety.” It also found that these companies’ business models "are designed to increase user engagement (i.e., keep people viewing content online) and that, as experts testified before this Committee, more extreme content tends to increase user engagement, thus leading such content to be amplified.”
The extent of the threat is staggering. The report mentions a 2021 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that found there were 110 domestic terrorist plots in 2020 alone, a 244 percent increase from 2019. The Anti-Defamation League also reports that over the past decade, domestic extremists have killed 443 people. More than half of the deaths were attributable to white supremacists. Had foreign terrorists committed such crimes, Republicans would have raised a ruckus.
Although FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified about the threat of domestic terrorism in March 2021 and pledged to work with the Senate committee on reporting, his agency has done little to address it. The committee reports, "the federal government — specifically FBI and [the Department of Homeland Security] — has failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism as required by federal law, has not appropriately allocated its resources to match the current threat, and has not aligned its definitions to make its investigations consistent and its actions proportional to the threat of domestic terrorism.” And even when the feds have accumulated data, “DHS and FBI have not appropriately allocated their resources to match the current threat, despite recent increased investments and efforts.”
Former assistant FBI director Frank Figliuzzi tells me, “The Senate report raises questions as to why the FBI and DHS still don’t have their act together." He also notes that the FBI’s decision to merge data on white supremacy cases with black nationalist cases into a “race-based” category "takes political correctness to a dangerous extreme.” He adds, "This work demands transparency not politics.”
Certainly both the DHS and FBI have many pressing priorities. Border control takes up much of DHS’s attention, and the FBI covers everything from cyberterrorism to white collar crime to foreign espionage. Nevertheless, there’s a nagging sense that the two institutions are uncomfortable with cracking down on domestic terrorists, either because of legitimate concerns for civil liberties or because a handful of agents sympathize with right-wing authoritarianism (as is the case in law enforcement and the military).
“The difficulty with addressing violent domestic terror has all too often been that the ‘bad guys’ look too much like the rest of us,” former prosecutor Joyce White Vance tells me. She adds that the FBI often grouped white supremacist domestic terrorist movements with other, less dangerous groups and insisted they all be treated the same. “We are paying the price for that failure now,” she said.
Reaction to the report from groups that track domestic terrorism has been harsh. The Anti-Defamation League tweeted that law enforcement must "treat this dangerous threat with the necessary urgency & resources.” The progressive Brennan Center similarly spotted a lack of urgency:
Public concerns regarding far-right violence increased in the aftermath of the 2015 racially motivated mass shooting at the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which then-FBI Director James Comey refused to call an act of terrorism. Concerns intensified after law enforcement failed to stop multiple incidents of white supremacist violence committed at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leaked FBI report revealed it had created a new domestic terrorism category called “Black Identity Extremists” that labeled Black activists protesting racist police violence as threats. . . .
Throughout this time, the FBI failed to provide basic facts about its domestic terrorism program that would enable an assessment of whether it was appropriately targeting its counterterrorism resources. This lack of transparency triggered several legislative efforts to compel the FBI to publish data documenting each domestic terrorism incident, the number of investigations it initiated, and the number of convictions, all broken down by the various categories the FBI used to manage its work, which then included white supremacists, so-called Black Identity Extremists, animal rights extremists, and others.
In fact, Congress passed a law in 2019 requiring intelligence agencies to produce a report on domestic terrorism threats, but they failed to do so. The Brennan Center explains, “In reports filed in 2021 and 2022, the FBI argued that while it could provide topline statistics regarding the number of investigations it opened, it couldn’t provide data regarding domestic terrorism incidents because the bureau didn’t collect it and no law required state and local law enforcement agencies to report it.”
Part of the problem is that whenever law enforcement indicates an interest in pursuing such threats, right-wing actors go nuts. When Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to investigate violent threats against public officials, Republicans wrongly accused him of suppressing dissent and labeling ordinary Americans as “domestic terrorists.” To his credit, Garland created a unit within the Justice Department to combat domestic terrorism, but it must rely on the FBI and other law enforcement groups to track and investigate crimes.
Congress must lead the way for reform. The House Jan. 6 select committee, which is investigating the FBI’s failure to respond to credible threats to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can address the lapses and make specific recommendations to correct the problem. And in the new Congress, Senate Democrats must be unstinting in holding Wray accountable for complying with information-gathering requirements.
Meanwhile, as Republicans grill (and possibly even impeach) DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, House Democrats should use their time during such hearings to explore the response to domestic terrorism in Mayorkas’s ranks. A DHS official insisted that domestic violent extremism is a “top priority," that the agency has worked with state and local partners, and has produced 110 “intelligence products.” But despite setting up a domestic terrorism branch within the DHS, the report documents shortcomings in data collection and sharing.
Finally, lawmakers need to take a hard look not only at Twitter, but also TikTok, Facebook and YouTube for providing platforms to violent and extremist individuals and groups. Without infringing on First Amendment rights, Congress should compel these companies to be more transparent about their moderation policies.
Yaël Eisenstat, ADL’s vice president for technology and society, tells me, “It is encouraging that the Senate report acknowledges and underscores social media’s role in enabling, amplifying, and normalizing hate and extremism.” She adds that “the existence and viral amplification of hate content and disinformation is a feature, not a bug, of social media platforms.”
If the government had made such little effort to crack down on foreign terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, the political backlash would have been intense. The same must be true of domestic terrorism. Federal agencies and social media companies should not get a pass.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Given the spate of domestic terrorism attacks in recent years — the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue, the massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; for example — you would think law enforcement agencies are engaged in a robust effort to combat such violence, right? Wrong.
Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a largely overlooked — yet damning — report detailing the failures of national security agencies on this front.
“Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased," the committee reports. "National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland.” The uptick is predominately attributable to “white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” Yet “without better data, it is difficult to evaluate whether federal agencies are appropriately allocating resources and setting priorities.”
The report arrived just as billionaire Elon Musk opened the floodgates to right-wing extremists and purveyors of disinformation on Twitter. The committee notes, “Social media platforms have played an increasing role in the spread of extremist content that translates into real world violence, due in part to business models that incentivize user engagement over safety.” It also found that these companies’ business models "are designed to increase user engagement (i.e., keep people viewing content online) and that, as experts testified before this Committee, more extreme content tends to increase user engagement, thus leading such content to be amplified.”
The extent of the threat is staggering. The report mentions a 2021 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that found there were 110 domestic terrorist plots in 2020 alone, a 244 percent increase from 2019. The Anti-Defamation League also reports that over the past decade, domestic extremists have killed 443 people. More than half of the deaths were attributable to white supremacists. Had foreign terrorists committed such crimes, Republicans would have raised a ruckus.
Although FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified about the threat of domestic terrorism in March 2021 and pledged to work with the Senate committee on reporting, his agency has done little to address it. The committee reports, "the federal government — specifically FBI and [the Department of Homeland Security] — has failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism as required by federal law, has not appropriately allocated its resources to match the current threat, and has not aligned its definitions to make its investigations consistent and its actions proportional to the threat of domestic terrorism.” And even when the feds have accumulated data, “DHS and FBI have not appropriately allocated their resources to match the current threat, despite recent increased investments and efforts.”
Former assistant FBI director Frank Figliuzzi tells me, “The Senate report raises questions as to why the FBI and DHS still don’t have their act together." He also notes that the FBI’s decision to merge data on white supremacy cases with black nationalist cases into a “race-based” category "takes political correctness to a dangerous extreme.” He adds, "This work demands transparency not politics.”
Certainly both the DHS and FBI have many pressing priorities. Border control takes up much of DHS’s attention, and the FBI covers everything from cyberterrorism to white collar crime to foreign espionage. Nevertheless, there’s a nagging sense that the two institutions are uncomfortable with cracking down on domestic terrorists, either because of legitimate concerns for civil liberties or because a handful of agents sympathize with right-wing authoritarianism (as is the case in law enforcement and the military).
“The difficulty with addressing violent domestic terror has all too often been that the ‘bad guys’ look too much like the rest of us,” former prosecutor Joyce White Vance tells me. She adds that the FBI often grouped white supremacist domestic terrorist movements with other, less dangerous groups and insisted they all be treated the same. “We are paying the price for that failure now,” she said.
Reaction to the report from groups that track domestic terrorism has been harsh. The Anti-Defamation League tweeted that law enforcement must "treat this dangerous threat with the necessary urgency & resources.” The progressive Brennan Center similarly spotted a lack of urgency:
Public concerns regarding far-right violence increased in the aftermath of the 2015 racially motivated mass shooting at the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopalian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which then-FBI Director James Comey refused to call an act of terrorism. Concerns intensified after law enforcement failed to stop multiple incidents of white supremacist violence committed at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a leaked FBI report revealed it had created a new domestic terrorism category called “Black Identity Extremists” that labeled Black activists protesting racist police violence as threats. . . .
Throughout this time, the FBI failed to provide basic facts about its domestic terrorism program that would enable an assessment of whether it was appropriately targeting its counterterrorism resources. This lack of transparency triggered several legislative efforts to compel the FBI to publish data documenting each domestic terrorism incident, the number of investigations it initiated, and the number of convictions, all broken down by the various categories the FBI used to manage its work, which then included white supremacists, so-called Black Identity Extremists, animal rights extremists, and others.
In fact, Congress passed a law in 2019 requiring intelligence agencies to produce a report on domestic terrorism threats, but they failed to do so. The Brennan Center explains, “In reports filed in 2021 and 2022, the FBI argued that while it could provide topline statistics regarding the number of investigations it opened, it couldn’t provide data regarding domestic terrorism incidents because the bureau didn’t collect it and no law required state and local law enforcement agencies to report it.”
Part of the problem is that whenever law enforcement indicates an interest in pursuing such threats, right-wing actors go nuts. When Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to investigate violent threats against public officials, Republicans wrongly accused him of suppressing dissent and labeling ordinary Americans as “domestic terrorists.” To his credit, Garland created a unit within the Justice Department to combat domestic terrorism, but it must rely on the FBI and other law enforcement groups to track and investigate crimes.
Congress must lead the way for reform. The House Jan. 6 select committee, which is investigating the FBI’s failure to respond to credible threats to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can address the lapses and make specific recommendations to correct the problem. And in the new Congress, Senate Democrats must be unstinting in holding Wray accountable for complying with information-gathering requirements.
Meanwhile, as Republicans grill (and possibly even impeach) DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, House Democrats should use their time during such hearings to explore the response to domestic terrorism in Mayorkas’s ranks. A DHS official insisted that domestic violent extremism is a “top priority," that the agency has worked with state and local partners, and has produced 110 “intelligence products.” But despite setting up a domestic terrorism branch within the DHS, the report documents shortcomings in data collection and sharing.
Finally, lawmakers need to take a hard look not only at Twitter, but also TikTok, Facebook and YouTube for providing platforms to violent and extremist individuals and groups. Without infringing on First Amendment rights, Congress should compel these companies to be more transparent about their moderation policies.
Yaël Eisenstat, ADL’s vice president for technology and society, tells me, “It is encouraging that the Senate report acknowledges and underscores social media’s role in enabling, amplifying, and normalizing hate and extremism.” She adds that “the existence and viral amplification of hate content and disinformation is a feature, not a bug, of social media platforms.”
If the government had made such little effort to crack down on foreign terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, the political backlash would have been intense. The same must be true of domestic terrorism. Federal agencies and social media companies should not get a pass.
THIS WEEK, BILLIONAIRES MADE A STRONG CASE FOR ABOLISHING THEMSELVES
By Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and other books.
In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves.
One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class.
It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few.
As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).
In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.
His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.
Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.
But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.
For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who this week was doing his part to undermine another pretension of billionaire benevolence: the generosity pose.
On Monday, he made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion fortune away, with a focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity.
That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.
It’s too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos’s philanthropy will help others, but what’s certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Mega-philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos’s reputation, in that way preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money — and to do more social damage.
And it will increase his already gigantic power over public life. For plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach — the kind that doesn’t threaten them or their class. Shortly before his big announcement, Mr. Bezos gave Dolly Parton a $100 million “Courage and Civility Award” to spend on her chosen causes. Ms. Parton is indeed courageous and civil, but so are the workers fighting to unionize Amazon facilities, and I don’t see anyone offering them nine-digit thank-you bonuses.
But once again, instead of the usual critics having to make this case, this week Mr. Bezos took the wheel. Just minutes after his philanthropy announcement on CNN, news broke that Amazon would be laying off thousands of workers, reminding everyone of what was really going on.
At first glance, the two stories might seem like matter and antimatter, or at least two opposite realities. But they are the same story: The system that treats human beings as disposable commodities upholds and reproduces itself by sprinkling some fairy dust and hoping that we will forget the injustice that paid for it.
Then, of course, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto kingpin whose spectacular downfall, along with that of FTX, the company he founded, caused $32 billion to disappear, much of it belonging to hundreds of thousands of regular people.
Mr. Bankman-Fried embodies another pretension of plutocratic benevolence: that of the renegade, the people’s billionaire. Like many others, he hawked cryptocurrency as a fight against the establishment, against the big banks, against the powers that be, man. He has said his work was motivated by the ideals of effective altruism, a trendy school of thought that encourages people to go out and make as big a heap of money as they can so that they can use it to heal the world. But, as he admitted in an interview this week with Kelsey Piper of Vox, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims about the ethical nature of his pursuit were an example of “this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Finally, of course, this week there was Donald Trump (because let’s face it, there’s always Donald Trump), who has incarnated the most dangerous billionaire pretension of all: that of the hero who in all the world is the only one who can save us. He gamed the system so effectively that only he knows how to un-game it; he manipulated politicians so much that only he knows how to drain the swamp; he amassed so much money that only he is above corruption.
On Tuesday night he addressed a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago and, as expected, announced that he was going to run for president again. He said the usual things that politicians are supposed to say, about how he was doing it for America’s benefit. But this time it was no longer possible to imagine that even he believed it. After all, only a week had passed since America had voted in the midterm elections and rejected most of the high-profile candidates he endorsed — in the process, even Republican commentators agree, rejecting him. He dragged the party down so far that it did not regain the Senate and only barely regained the House.
Fearing even more disastrous outcomes, trusted advisers and allies encouraged him not to run again, or at least to delay his announcement. But they were wasting their time. Standing up there onstage, so low-energy that even Jeb Bush’s son felt compelled to comment, Mr. Trump took in the applause but offered no new ideas or directions. It was a variant of the performance that the others had been putting on, but with one crucial difference: Unlike Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who strain to show us how public-spirited they are, Mr. Trump could hardly be bothered to care.
It was a particularly unsubtle reminder that billionaires are not our saviors. They are our mistake.
By Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and other books.
In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves.
One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class.
It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist at our collective pleasure. If enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policies to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth while so many beg for scraps. It is not only the vast political power of billionaires that keeps us keeping them around, it’s also the popular embrace of certain myths — about the generosity, the genius, the renegade spirit, the above-it-ness of billionaires, to name a few.
As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).
In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.
His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.
Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.
But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.
For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who this week was doing his part to undermine another pretension of billionaire benevolence: the generosity pose.
On Monday, he made a big splash when CNN released an interview in which he announced that he was giving the great bulk of his more than $120 billion fortune away, with a focus on fighting climate change and promoting unity.
That sure sounds impressive, but his gesture wasn’t about generosity any more than Herschel Walker’s Senate candidacy in Georgia is for the children. After all, the money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.
It’s too soon to tell if Mr. Bezos’s philanthropy will help others, but what’s certain is that it will help Mr. Bezos a lot. Mega-philanthropists of his ilk tend to give through foundations, which they establish in ways that save them an immense amount in taxes, sometimes merely by moving the money from one of their own accounts to another. Giving will also burnish Mr. Bezos’s reputation, in that way preserving and protecting his opportunity to earn yet more money — and to do more social damage.
And it will increase his already gigantic power over public life. For plutocrats like Mr. Bezos, that may be the biggest payoff of all. Their wealth is so vast that by distributing even a small fraction of it, they skew the public agenda toward the kind of social change they can stomach — the kind that doesn’t threaten them or their class. Shortly before his big announcement, Mr. Bezos gave Dolly Parton a $100 million “Courage and Civility Award” to spend on her chosen causes. Ms. Parton is indeed courageous and civil, but so are the workers fighting to unionize Amazon facilities, and I don’t see anyone offering them nine-digit thank-you bonuses.
But once again, instead of the usual critics having to make this case, this week Mr. Bezos took the wheel. Just minutes after his philanthropy announcement on CNN, news broke that Amazon would be laying off thousands of workers, reminding everyone of what was really going on.
At first glance, the two stories might seem like matter and antimatter, or at least two opposite realities. But they are the same story: The system that treats human beings as disposable commodities upholds and reproduces itself by sprinkling some fairy dust and hoping that we will forget the injustice that paid for it.
Then, of course, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto kingpin whose spectacular downfall, along with that of FTX, the company he founded, caused $32 billion to disappear, much of it belonging to hundreds of thousands of regular people.
Mr. Bankman-Fried embodies another pretension of plutocratic benevolence: that of the renegade, the people’s billionaire. Like many others, he hawked cryptocurrency as a fight against the establishment, against the big banks, against the powers that be, man. He has said his work was motivated by the ideals of effective altruism, a trendy school of thought that encourages people to go out and make as big a heap of money as they can so that they can use it to heal the world. But, as he admitted in an interview this week with Kelsey Piper of Vox, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims about the ethical nature of his pursuit were an example of “this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Finally, of course, this week there was Donald Trump (because let’s face it, there’s always Donald Trump), who has incarnated the most dangerous billionaire pretension of all: that of the hero who in all the world is the only one who can save us. He gamed the system so effectively that only he knows how to un-game it; he manipulated politicians so much that only he knows how to drain the swamp; he amassed so much money that only he is above corruption.
On Tuesday night he addressed a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago and, as expected, announced that he was going to run for president again. He said the usual things that politicians are supposed to say, about how he was doing it for America’s benefit. But this time it was no longer possible to imagine that even he believed it. After all, only a week had passed since America had voted in the midterm elections and rejected most of the high-profile candidates he endorsed — in the process, even Republican commentators agree, rejecting him. He dragged the party down so far that it did not regain the Senate and only barely regained the House.
Fearing even more disastrous outcomes, trusted advisers and allies encouraged him not to run again, or at least to delay his announcement. But they were wasting their time. Standing up there onstage, so low-energy that even Jeb Bush’s son felt compelled to comment, Mr. Trump took in the applause but offered no new ideas or directions. It was a variant of the performance that the others had been putting on, but with one crucial difference: Unlike Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who strain to show us how public-spirited they are, Mr. Trump could hardly be bothered to care.
It was a particularly unsubtle reminder that billionaires are not our saviors. They are our mistake.
TRUMP IS OUT FOR VENGEANCE — AND TO PROTECT HIMSELF FROM PROSECUTION
By George T. Conway III, The Washington Post
He was always going to run. Absent incarceration or interment, and perhaps only the latter, he inevitably would seek the presidency again. His narcissism, his megalomania, his delicate yet illimitable ego, would have it no other way.
Donald Trump craves the power. Even more, he craves the attention. And more than ever — after an unprecedented two impeachments, a humiliating reelection defeat that he can’t even admit, and amid multiple criminal investigations and civil suits — he seeks vengeance. The l’état c’est moi president who apparently tried to sic the IRS on his enemies (and perhaps succeeded), and who tried to extort Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden, can’t wait to get back on the job.
Trump won’t succeed, as his successive losses of the House, Senate, presidency and last week’s midterm results show. Too many Americans would crawl on broken glass to vote against him, no matter who his general election opponent may be. They have seen enough.
Legacy? Trump has none, other than his impeachments and the stain of Jan. 6, 2021. He’ll never be remembered for much else. Historians will perpetually rank him as among the worst — if not the worst — in the presidential pantheon. As they should, befitting a man who, despite having sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, did his level best to destroy it.
Trump can’t ruin a legacy he doesn’t have, but he could easily wreck something else: the Republican Party. Which is why so many in the GOP are, at long last, so alarmed. And why Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the right-wing donor class and so many Republican Party operatives seek an alternative. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, they hope, will save the day.
Who could beat Trump one-on-one? Certainly not the one Republican sure to run: former vice president Mike Pence, who’ll run for no better reason than that he has nothing else to do. Here I agree with Trump: Pence is weak. Sure, he did the right thing on Jan. 6, for which he deserves eternal credit. But it took a titanic struggle of conscience for him to do what his constitutional oath so manifestly required. And it took nearly two years for him to muster the backbone, as he did this week, to say he was angry at Trump — the man who all but set the mob after him.
DeSantis would have a chance to beat Trump one-on-one, but why should he try? He’s ambitious to be sure, but running against Trump would be a brutal mud bath. To beat Trump, an opponent would have to go after Trump hammer and tong, battering his ego to trigger him into narcissistic, self-defeating, unhinged rages. That would be fun to watch: Hey, Donald, where’s the wall? Where’s that check from Mexico? Why did you stand by your buddy Anthony S. Fauci for so long?
But does DeSantis have that in him? We don’t know yet. He’s not the accomplished orator some make him out to be. Most importantly, he’s only 44. He’ll be 48 when he serves out his new gubernatorial term in 2026. Why not just sit back and keep building his war chest? Even if DeSantis wins the 2024 nomination, he’ll wind up with the Always Trump 40 percent hating his guts. The alternatives for the GOP aren’t pretty: Another national defeat led by Trump, or intraparty civil war.
But if you think that’s great for the rest of us, I’ve got bad news for you. A big reason Trump announced his run is he fears criminal prosecution. He’s a desperate man, a threatened and rabid animal, who could face multiple indictments (the stolen classified documents, Georgia) over the next year.
He thinks running for president, and the specter of violence from his fringiest supporters, will protect him from the prosecutors. If he’s indicted, he promises “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.” And he’ll make good on that promise: As Sen. Mitch McConnell said last year, Trump was “determined” to “torch our institutions on the way out” in January 2021, merely because he lost an election.
So just imagine what Trump would do to stay out of jail.
By George T. Conway III, The Washington Post
He was always going to run. Absent incarceration or interment, and perhaps only the latter, he inevitably would seek the presidency again. His narcissism, his megalomania, his delicate yet illimitable ego, would have it no other way.
Donald Trump craves the power. Even more, he craves the attention. And more than ever — after an unprecedented two impeachments, a humiliating reelection defeat that he can’t even admit, and amid multiple criminal investigations and civil suits — he seeks vengeance. The l’état c’est moi president who apparently tried to sic the IRS on his enemies (and perhaps succeeded), and who tried to extort Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden, can’t wait to get back on the job.
Trump won’t succeed, as his successive losses of the House, Senate, presidency and last week’s midterm results show. Too many Americans would crawl on broken glass to vote against him, no matter who his general election opponent may be. They have seen enough.
Legacy? Trump has none, other than his impeachments and the stain of Jan. 6, 2021. He’ll never be remembered for much else. Historians will perpetually rank him as among the worst — if not the worst — in the presidential pantheon. As they should, befitting a man who, despite having sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, did his level best to destroy it.
Trump can’t ruin a legacy he doesn’t have, but he could easily wreck something else: the Republican Party. Which is why so many in the GOP are, at long last, so alarmed. And why Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the right-wing donor class and so many Republican Party operatives seek an alternative. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, they hope, will save the day.
Who could beat Trump one-on-one? Certainly not the one Republican sure to run: former vice president Mike Pence, who’ll run for no better reason than that he has nothing else to do. Here I agree with Trump: Pence is weak. Sure, he did the right thing on Jan. 6, for which he deserves eternal credit. But it took a titanic struggle of conscience for him to do what his constitutional oath so manifestly required. And it took nearly two years for him to muster the backbone, as he did this week, to say he was angry at Trump — the man who all but set the mob after him.
DeSantis would have a chance to beat Trump one-on-one, but why should he try? He’s ambitious to be sure, but running against Trump would be a brutal mud bath. To beat Trump, an opponent would have to go after Trump hammer and tong, battering his ego to trigger him into narcissistic, self-defeating, unhinged rages. That would be fun to watch: Hey, Donald, where’s the wall? Where’s that check from Mexico? Why did you stand by your buddy Anthony S. Fauci for so long?
But does DeSantis have that in him? We don’t know yet. He’s not the accomplished orator some make him out to be. Most importantly, he’s only 44. He’ll be 48 when he serves out his new gubernatorial term in 2026. Why not just sit back and keep building his war chest? Even if DeSantis wins the 2024 nomination, he’ll wind up with the Always Trump 40 percent hating his guts. The alternatives for the GOP aren’t pretty: Another national defeat led by Trump, or intraparty civil war.
But if you think that’s great for the rest of us, I’ve got bad news for you. A big reason Trump announced his run is he fears criminal prosecution. He’s a desperate man, a threatened and rabid animal, who could face multiple indictments (the stolen classified documents, Georgia) over the next year.
He thinks running for president, and the specter of violence from his fringiest supporters, will protect him from the prosecutors. If he’s indicted, he promises “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.” And he’ll make good on that promise: As Sen. Mitch McConnell said last year, Trump was “determined” to “torch our institutions on the way out” in January 2021, merely because he lost an election.
So just imagine what Trump would do to stay out of jail.
NO ONE FORCED REPUBLICANS TO DO ANY OF THESE THINGS
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx famously observed, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Our choices are shaped, and even bound, by the histories and institutions we inhabit. And yet they’re still our choices. We are moral agents, responsible for our decisions even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them.
And yet so much of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes the opposite: that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold; no choice but to apologize for his every transgression; no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; and now, no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.
But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.
Those objectives, for what it’s worth, are nothing new. To the extent that the Trump-era Republican Party has an agenda, it is what it has always been: to be a handmaiden to the total domination of capital, to facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth and to strengthen hierarchies of class and status. To those ends, Republicans in Washington have already announced plans to reduce social insurance, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and restrict abortion rights.
What’s striking, again, is the extent to which many political commentators refuse to accept the moral and political agency of Republican politicians and officials. If there is a threat to democracy, goes one argument, it’s because liberals and progressives have refused to compromise their priorities in its defense. And according to another, similar argument, which I wrote about last week, the Democratic Party’s rhetoric embracing democracy is, itself, undermining democracy.
As it stands, plenty of Republican politicians and officials are making live plans to undermine any election they might lose. According to a report in The Washington Post, “Republican officials and candidates in at least three battleground states are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day.”
It’s not that those mail ballots are illegal or illegitimate; the problem is that many have presumably been cast by Democrats. If Republicans can invalidate Democratic mail ballots while counting on their supporters to vote in person on Election Day, then they can forge an easier path to victory in closely divided states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Republicans have attacked ballot access for Native Americans in Arizona — a Democratic-leaning group in a contested swing state — and embarked on a project of voter intimidation in Florida. In August, the state’s new election police force arrested 20 people accused of voter fraud. Fifteen were Black voters charged with casting ballots illegally. Several said they thought they qualified to cast a vote under a state constitutional amendment that restored the right to vote to many former felons. And in interviews with investigators, all said they had received a voter registration card from their county election supervisors.
In the absence of any evidence of intent, the state’s case against these supposedly lawbreaking voters will fall apart. But that doesn’t mean the arrests were a failure. Some Floridians, accustomed to helping older family members cast ballots by mail, have refrained from giving assistance for fear of running afoul of the state election police.
The larger point is that we should not treat the Republican effort to suppress and intimidate voters — or invalidate elections — as if it were a force of nature or the automatic result of some mechanical process. Republican politicians in Florida chose to respond to hard-fought elections by burdening their opponents. Republican leaders in Washington, likewise, chose to elevate their most irresponsible colleagues into positions of influence and authority. And Republican politicians nationwide chose to embrace the lies and the conspiracy theories that undergird the idea that the only legitimate elections are the ones Republicans win.
Led by Donald Trump and his many acolytes, the Republican Party is poised to plunge this country into political and constitutional crisis over its refusal to share power or acknowledge defeat. We can treat this as some kind of an inevitability, the only possible outcome given the pieces at play, or we can treat it as what it is: a deliberate choice.
By Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx famously observed, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Our choices are shaped, and even bound, by the histories and institutions we inhabit. And yet they’re still our choices. We are moral agents, responsible for our decisions even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them.
And yet so much of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes the opposite: that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold; no choice but to apologize for his every transgression; no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; and now, no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.
But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.
Those objectives, for what it’s worth, are nothing new. To the extent that the Trump-era Republican Party has an agenda, it is what it has always been: to be a handmaiden to the total domination of capital, to facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth and to strengthen hierarchies of class and status. To those ends, Republicans in Washington have already announced plans to reduce social insurance, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and restrict abortion rights.
What’s striking, again, is the extent to which many political commentators refuse to accept the moral and political agency of Republican politicians and officials. If there is a threat to democracy, goes one argument, it’s because liberals and progressives have refused to compromise their priorities in its defense. And according to another, similar argument, which I wrote about last week, the Democratic Party’s rhetoric embracing democracy is, itself, undermining democracy.
As it stands, plenty of Republican politicians and officials are making live plans to undermine any election they might lose. According to a report in The Washington Post, “Republican officials and candidates in at least three battleground states are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day.”
It’s not that those mail ballots are illegal or illegitimate; the problem is that many have presumably been cast by Democrats. If Republicans can invalidate Democratic mail ballots while counting on their supporters to vote in person on Election Day, then they can forge an easier path to victory in closely divided states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Republicans have attacked ballot access for Native Americans in Arizona — a Democratic-leaning group in a contested swing state — and embarked on a project of voter intimidation in Florida. In August, the state’s new election police force arrested 20 people accused of voter fraud. Fifteen were Black voters charged with casting ballots illegally. Several said they thought they qualified to cast a vote under a state constitutional amendment that restored the right to vote to many former felons. And in interviews with investigators, all said they had received a voter registration card from their county election supervisors.
In the absence of any evidence of intent, the state’s case against these supposedly lawbreaking voters will fall apart. But that doesn’t mean the arrests were a failure. Some Floridians, accustomed to helping older family members cast ballots by mail, have refrained from giving assistance for fear of running afoul of the state election police.
The larger point is that we should not treat the Republican effort to suppress and intimidate voters — or invalidate elections — as if it were a force of nature or the automatic result of some mechanical process. Republican politicians in Florida chose to respond to hard-fought elections by burdening their opponents. Republican leaders in Washington, likewise, chose to elevate their most irresponsible colleagues into positions of influence and authority. And Republican politicians nationwide chose to embrace the lies and the conspiracy theories that undergird the idea that the only legitimate elections are the ones Republicans win.
Led by Donald Trump and his many acolytes, the Republican Party is poised to plunge this country into political and constitutional crisis over its refusal to share power or acknowledge defeat. We can treat this as some kind of an inevitability, the only possible outcome given the pieces at play, or we can treat it as what it is: a deliberate choice.
VOTERS CLEARLY CARE ABOUT THE ECONOMY, BUT WILL THE GOP’S PLANS MAKE THINGS BETTER?
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. That won't benefit voters or reduce inflation.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Polls indicate voters know that democracy is in peril, but they care more about the economy. But is electing Republican lawmakers the answer to either problem? If anything, a look at the GOP’s positions strongly suggests that their proposals will likely make things worse.
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. This is not a plan that will benefit voters or reduce inflation.
When Liz Truss, the brief British prime minister, announced a similar economic plan, England’s markets imploded. Truss was forced from office after 44 days, a tenure that the London tabloids said was shorter than the shelf life of a head of lettuce.
From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, the GOP has long promoted similar trickle-down economic policies. Many middle- and working-class voters have been duped into supporting a failed policy that goes against their own economic interests.
With Election Day looming, voters beware: Republicans are not your economic friend. If Republicans win back control of Congress, they plan to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, repeal the corporate tax increases President Joe Biden signed into law in August, and hollow out funding to the Internal Revenue Service.
Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, explained in March how cutting taxes will make inflation worse: “Putting more money in people’s pockets will increase demand for goods at a time of supply shortages. That will drive up prices and worsen the inflation that the governors claim to be so worried about. And it will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more than it planned.”
Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was more direct: “It is unlikely that any of the policies proposed by Republicans would meaningfully reduce inflation in 2023, when rapidly rising prices will still be a major problem for the economy and for consumers.”
The centerpiece of the Republican plan is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, rolled out an 11-point plan to “rescue America” that calls for sunsetting all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. In June, the Republican Study Committee released a plan that called for raising the eligibility age to collect full Social Security benefits from 67 to 70.
If Republicans return to power in Congress, they plan to use the looming debt-ceiling limit to shut down the government and force cuts to Social Security and Medicare. This is a reckless plan that could intentionally worsen the economy.
Republicans have spun a narrative that blames Biden for inflation and rising gas prices. (Never mind that oil companies are making record profits.)
Left unsaid is that under Trump, the national debt increased by $7.8 trillion. That was the third biggest increase in the national debt relative to the size of the economy of any president after George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln. The Grand Old Party is not as fiscally savvy as its members would want you to believe.
To be sure, during Trump’s one term, the government rightly boosted spending to offset the economic collapse from the pandemic. But Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, combined with wasteful spending throughout, helped to balloon the deficit by 50%.
Under Biden, the deficit was cut in half in the 2022 fiscal year, thanks largely to reductions in COVID-relief spending. Meanwhile, Biden’s inflation reduction bill, signed into law in August, is expected to reduce drug prices for senior citizens, while also combating climate change. Biden’s infrastructure bill is designed to build the economy up from the middle, rather than trickle down from the rich.
While those economic benefits will not come overnight, gas prices are dropping and wages are increasing at the fastest rate in decades. In a column in the Wall Street Journal, economist Alan Blinder explained that Biden was not to blame for inflation.
Inflation came about after the pandemic collapsed the global economy. As the economy has bounced back, increased consumer demand, supply-chain issues, and worker shortages have combined to increase inflation, while the war in Ukraine added to the spike in oil prices.
It is easy to blame Biden for the economy, but voters should know that the Republican plan is far from the answer.
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. That won't benefit voters or reduce inflation.
By The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board
Polls indicate voters know that democracy is in peril, but they care more about the economy. But is electing Republican lawmakers the answer to either problem? If anything, a look at the GOP’s positions strongly suggests that their proposals will likely make things worse.
If Republicans win control of the House, as polls indicate, they plan to gut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes. This is not a plan that will benefit voters or reduce inflation.
When Liz Truss, the brief British prime minister, announced a similar economic plan, England’s markets imploded. Truss was forced from office after 44 days, a tenure that the London tabloids said was shorter than the shelf life of a head of lettuce.
From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, the GOP has long promoted similar trickle-down economic policies. Many middle- and working-class voters have been duped into supporting a failed policy that goes against their own economic interests.
With Election Day looming, voters beware: Republicans are not your economic friend. If Republicans win back control of Congress, they plan to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, repeal the corporate tax increases President Joe Biden signed into law in August, and hollow out funding to the Internal Revenue Service.
Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, explained in March how cutting taxes will make inflation worse: “Putting more money in people’s pockets will increase demand for goods at a time of supply shortages. That will drive up prices and worsen the inflation that the governors claim to be so worried about. And it will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more than it planned.”
Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was more direct: “It is unlikely that any of the policies proposed by Republicans would meaningfully reduce inflation in 2023, when rapidly rising prices will still be a major problem for the economy and for consumers.”
The centerpiece of the Republican plan is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, rolled out an 11-point plan to “rescue America” that calls for sunsetting all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. In June, the Republican Study Committee released a plan that called for raising the eligibility age to collect full Social Security benefits from 67 to 70.
If Republicans return to power in Congress, they plan to use the looming debt-ceiling limit to shut down the government and force cuts to Social Security and Medicare. This is a reckless plan that could intentionally worsen the economy.
Republicans have spun a narrative that blames Biden for inflation and rising gas prices. (Never mind that oil companies are making record profits.)
Left unsaid is that under Trump, the national debt increased by $7.8 trillion. That was the third biggest increase in the national debt relative to the size of the economy of any president after George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln. The Grand Old Party is not as fiscally savvy as its members would want you to believe.
To be sure, during Trump’s one term, the government rightly boosted spending to offset the economic collapse from the pandemic. But Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, combined with wasteful spending throughout, helped to balloon the deficit by 50%.
Under Biden, the deficit was cut in half in the 2022 fiscal year, thanks largely to reductions in COVID-relief spending. Meanwhile, Biden’s inflation reduction bill, signed into law in August, is expected to reduce drug prices for senior citizens, while also combating climate change. Biden’s infrastructure bill is designed to build the economy up from the middle, rather than trickle down from the rich.
While those economic benefits will not come overnight, gas prices are dropping and wages are increasing at the fastest rate in decades. In a column in the Wall Street Journal, economist Alan Blinder explained that Biden was not to blame for inflation.
Inflation came about after the pandemic collapsed the global economy. As the economy has bounced back, increased consumer demand, supply-chain issues, and worker shortages have combined to increase inflation, while the war in Ukraine added to the spike in oil prices.
It is easy to blame Biden for the economy, but voters should know that the Republican plan is far from the answer.
IF TODAY’S GOP BAFFLES YOU, CONSIDER WHAT MOTIVATES ITS BASE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
How can so many people buy into false election fraud claims, climate change denialism or panic over White people being “replaced”? How can they vote for manifestly unfit Republicans such as Georgia U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker or Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano?
For answers, turn to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of White evangelical Christians, who make up the core of the GOP. It reveals a lot about what they think and why they vote the way they do.
A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.”
Half of White evangelical Protestants also think God intended America to be the promised land. Nearly two-thirds say immigrants are a threat, and 61 percent say “society has become too soft and feminine.” And they are the only discrete religious group polled to support overturning Roe v. Wade.
On race, only 19 percent of the group agrees that “the legacy of slavery and discrimination have limited Black Americans’ upward mobility.” They are the least likely to accept that African Americans disproportionately receive the death penalty. And here’s the kicker: Unlike a majority of Americans, “six in ten white evangelical Protestants (61%) agree that discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.”
Given these figures, it shouldn’t be surprising that while 58 percent of Americans think white supremacy is still a major problem, only 33 percent of White evangelical Protestants do, the lowest among religious groups. Similarly, 51 percent of the group believe that public teachers and librarians are “indoctrinating students with inappropriate curricula and books that wrongly portray America as a racist country,” compared with only 29 percent of Americans broadly.
And on immigration, only 30 percent of Americans buy into the “great replacement theory.” But 51 percent of White evangelical Protestants agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
As one might expect, this group is bolstering former president Donald Trump. “White evangelical Protestants are the only major religious group in which a majority of adherents say they view Trump favorably (63%), roughly similar to the share in 2021 (67%),” the survey finds. Likewise, 54 percent believe in the “big lie” of a stolen election, compared with 28 percent of all Americans.
In a nutshell, this group’s beliefs clash with the essence of the American experiment and conflict with objective facts, demography and economics. White evangelical Protestants’ outlook is warped by right-wing media and refracted through a prism of visceral anger and resentment.
It makes little sense to debate whether the MAGA movement radicalized White evangelical Protestants or the other way around. They are essentially one and the same.
Last year, Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge wrote for the New York Times, “In essence, many Americans are coming to the understanding that to be very religiously engaged and very politically conservative means that they are evangelical, even if they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.” In other words, Burge explained, more people are “conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power.” (This helps explain how evangelicals can embrace views that fly in the face of Christian theology; it’s not about the religion.)
The implications of the American Values Survey are profound. If millions of Americans think our country was best when White males were dominant and now think feminization plagues it, a great many would find comfort in the GOP’s toxic masculinity and in forced-birth laws that relegate women to the role of motherhood against their will. And if they dismiss the legacy of racism, many would favor policies that make it harder for minorities to vote and to access higher education (i.e., opposing affirmative action to rebalance college admissions in Whites’ favor).
These views also explain why so many Republicans seem perpetually angry and dissatisfied. What they want is unattainable. America is becoming less White, less male-dominated and less religious. Nothing politicians do or say will change this.
Moreover, White evangelicals are fundamentally out of step with the majority American opinion on everything from abortion to immigration to the legitimacy of the 2020 election. That, too, won’t change, no matter how angry they become.
Millions of White evangelical Protestants will therefore remain bonded with whatever cultlike figure can channel their anger. As long as he reaffirms and amplifies White evangelical Protestants’ fears, he can do no wrong. It also follows that a group that feels so besieged won’t much care about a candidate’s smarts, ethics or decency. Faced with a perceived existential threat, these Americans are inclined to support anyone who gives voice to their frustrations.
What endangers American democracy and democratic values goes far beyond one demagogue, one election or one set of policies. When so many Americans are driven by fear, resentment and antipathy toward inclusion, pluralistic democracy is at risk. Until we grapple with that reality, millions will remain vulnerable to cynical right-wing media and ruthlessly ambitious Republicans.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
How can so many people buy into false election fraud claims, climate change denialism or panic over White people being “replaced”? How can they vote for manifestly unfit Republicans such as Georgia U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker or Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano?
For answers, turn to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of White evangelical Christians, who make up the core of the GOP. It reveals a lot about what they think and why they vote the way they do.
A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.”
Half of White evangelical Protestants also think God intended America to be the promised land. Nearly two-thirds say immigrants are a threat, and 61 percent say “society has become too soft and feminine.” And they are the only discrete religious group polled to support overturning Roe v. Wade.
On race, only 19 percent of the group agrees that “the legacy of slavery and discrimination have limited Black Americans’ upward mobility.” They are the least likely to accept that African Americans disproportionately receive the death penalty. And here’s the kicker: Unlike a majority of Americans, “six in ten white evangelical Protestants (61%) agree that discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.”
Given these figures, it shouldn’t be surprising that while 58 percent of Americans think white supremacy is still a major problem, only 33 percent of White evangelical Protestants do, the lowest among religious groups. Similarly, 51 percent of the group believe that public teachers and librarians are “indoctrinating students with inappropriate curricula and books that wrongly portray America as a racist country,” compared with only 29 percent of Americans broadly.
And on immigration, only 30 percent of Americans buy into the “great replacement theory.” But 51 percent of White evangelical Protestants agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
As one might expect, this group is bolstering former president Donald Trump. “White evangelical Protestants are the only major religious group in which a majority of adherents say they view Trump favorably (63%), roughly similar to the share in 2021 (67%),” the survey finds. Likewise, 54 percent believe in the “big lie” of a stolen election, compared with 28 percent of all Americans.
In a nutshell, this group’s beliefs clash with the essence of the American experiment and conflict with objective facts, demography and economics. White evangelical Protestants’ outlook is warped by right-wing media and refracted through a prism of visceral anger and resentment.
It makes little sense to debate whether the MAGA movement radicalized White evangelical Protestants or the other way around. They are essentially one and the same.
Last year, Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge wrote for the New York Times, “In essence, many Americans are coming to the understanding that to be very religiously engaged and very politically conservative means that they are evangelical, even if they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.” In other words, Burge explained, more people are “conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power.” (This helps explain how evangelicals can embrace views that fly in the face of Christian theology; it’s not about the religion.)
The implications of the American Values Survey are profound. If millions of Americans think our country was best when White males were dominant and now think feminization plagues it, a great many would find comfort in the GOP’s toxic masculinity and in forced-birth laws that relegate women to the role of motherhood against their will. And if they dismiss the legacy of racism, many would favor policies that make it harder for minorities to vote and to access higher education (i.e., opposing affirmative action to rebalance college admissions in Whites’ favor).
These views also explain why so many Republicans seem perpetually angry and dissatisfied. What they want is unattainable. America is becoming less White, less male-dominated and less religious. Nothing politicians do or say will change this.
Moreover, White evangelicals are fundamentally out of step with the majority American opinion on everything from abortion to immigration to the legitimacy of the 2020 election. That, too, won’t change, no matter how angry they become.
Millions of White evangelical Protestants will therefore remain bonded with whatever cultlike figure can channel their anger. As long as he reaffirms and amplifies White evangelical Protestants’ fears, he can do no wrong. It also follows that a group that feels so besieged won’t much care about a candidate’s smarts, ethics or decency. Faced with a perceived existential threat, these Americans are inclined to support anyone who gives voice to their frustrations.
What endangers American democracy and democratic values goes far beyond one demagogue, one election or one set of policies. When so many Americans are driven by fear, resentment and antipathy toward inclusion, pluralistic democracy is at risk. Until we grapple with that reality, millions will remain vulnerable to cynical right-wing media and ruthlessly ambitious Republicans.
DON’T BLAME ‘BOTH SIDES.’ THE RIGHT IS DRIVING POLITICAL VIOLENCE.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
It should not be controversial to say that America has a major problem with right-wing political violence. The evidence continues to accumulate — yet the GOP continues to deny responsibility for this horrifying trend.
On Friday, a man enflamed by right-wing conspiracy theories (including QAnon) entered the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, fracturing Paul Pelosi’s skull. “Where is Nancy?” he reportedly shouted, echoing the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at President Donald Trump’s instigation. This comes after years of Republican demonization of the House speaker, a figure of hatred for the right rivaled only by Hillary Clinton.
The same day as the Pelosi attack, a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). Two days earlier, three men who were motivated by right-wing, anti-lockdown hysteria after covid-19 hit were convicted of aiding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). In August, another man died after attacking an FBI office because he was so upset about the bureau’s search of Mar-a-Lago. “We must respond with force,” he wrote on Trump’s Truth Social website.
Then there are all the terrible hate crimes, in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo, where gunmen were motivated by the kind of racist rhetoric — especially the “great replacement theory” — now openly espoused on Fox “News.”
Republican leaders exonerate themselves of any responsibility for political violence. “Violence is up across the board,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Sunday, arguing that it’s “unfair” to blame anti-Pelosi rhetoric for the assault on Pelosi’s husband.
Violence is unacceptable whether from the left or right, period. But we can’t allow GOP leaders to get away with this false moral equivalency. They are evading their responsibility for their extremist rhetoric that all too often motivates extremist actions.
There is little doubt about what is driving political violence: the ascendance of Trump. The former president and his followers use violent rhetoric of extremes: Trump calls President Biden an “enemy of the state,” attacks the FBI as “monsters,” refers to the “now Communist USA” and even wrote that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a “DEATH WISH” for disagreeing with him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has expressed support for executing Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) has tweeted that “the America Last Marxists … are radically and systematically DESTROYING our country.”
That type of extremist rhetoric used to be confined to fringe organizations such as the John Birch Society. Now it’s the GOP mainstream, with predictable consequences. The U.S. Capitol Police report that threats against members of Congress have risen more than tenfold since Trump’s election in 2016, up to 9,625 last year.
The sickness on the right was on display after news broke about the attack on Paul Pelosi. While leading Republicans condemned the horrific assault, the MAGA base seethed with sick jokes making light of the violence and insane conspiracy theories. (Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza suggested that the attack was “a romantic tryst that went awry.”)
There was, alas, no sign of the GOP taking responsibility for fomenting hatred. Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor of Arizona, blamed “leftist elected officials who have not enforced the laws.” Naturally, Republicans accuse Democrats of being “divisive” for citing Republican rhetoric as a contributing factor to political violence.
It’s true that, by calling out GOP extremism, Democrats do risk exacerbating the polarization of politics. But they can’t simply ignore this dangerous trend. And it’s not Democrats who are pushing our country to the brink: A New York Times study found that MAGA members of Congress who refused to accept the results of the 2020 election used polarizing language at nearly triple the rate of Democrats.
oSo please don’t accept the GOP framing of the assault on Paul Pelosi as evidence of a problem plaguing “both sides of the aisle.” Political violence in America is being driven primarily by the far right, not the far left, and the far right is much closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party than the far left is to the Democratic Party.
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
It should not be controversial to say that America has a major problem with right-wing political violence. The evidence continues to accumulate — yet the GOP continues to deny responsibility for this horrifying trend.
On Friday, a man enflamed by right-wing conspiracy theories (including QAnon) entered the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, fracturing Paul Pelosi’s skull. “Where is Nancy?” he reportedly shouted, echoing the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, at President Donald Trump’s instigation. This comes after years of Republican demonization of the House speaker, a figure of hatred for the right rivaled only by Hillary Clinton.
The same day as the Pelosi attack, a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). Two days earlier, three men who were motivated by right-wing, anti-lockdown hysteria after covid-19 hit were convicted of aiding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). In August, another man died after attacking an FBI office because he was so upset about the bureau’s search of Mar-a-Lago. “We must respond with force,” he wrote on Trump’s Truth Social website.
Then there are all the terrible hate crimes, in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo, where gunmen were motivated by the kind of racist rhetoric — especially the “great replacement theory” — now openly espoused on Fox “News.”
Republican leaders exonerate themselves of any responsibility for political violence. “Violence is up across the board,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Sunday, arguing that it’s “unfair” to blame anti-Pelosi rhetoric for the assault on Pelosi’s husband.
Violence is unacceptable whether from the left or right, period. But we can’t allow GOP leaders to get away with this false moral equivalency. They are evading their responsibility for their extremist rhetoric that all too often motivates extremist actions.
There is little doubt about what is driving political violence: the ascendance of Trump. The former president and his followers use violent rhetoric of extremes: Trump calls President Biden an “enemy of the state,” attacks the FBI as “monsters,” refers to the “now Communist USA” and even wrote that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a “DEATH WISH” for disagreeing with him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has expressed support for executing Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) has tweeted that “the America Last Marxists … are radically and systematically DESTROYING our country.”
That type of extremist rhetoric used to be confined to fringe organizations such as the John Birch Society. Now it’s the GOP mainstream, with predictable consequences. The U.S. Capitol Police report that threats against members of Congress have risen more than tenfold since Trump’s election in 2016, up to 9,625 last year.
The sickness on the right was on display after news broke about the attack on Paul Pelosi. While leading Republicans condemned the horrific assault, the MAGA base seethed with sick jokes making light of the violence and insane conspiracy theories. (Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza suggested that the attack was “a romantic tryst that went awry.”)
There was, alas, no sign of the GOP taking responsibility for fomenting hatred. Kari Lake, the GOP nominee for governor of Arizona, blamed “leftist elected officials who have not enforced the laws.” Naturally, Republicans accuse Democrats of being “divisive” for citing Republican rhetoric as a contributing factor to political violence.
It’s true that, by calling out GOP extremism, Democrats do risk exacerbating the polarization of politics. But they can’t simply ignore this dangerous trend. And it’s not Democrats who are pushing our country to the brink: A New York Times study found that MAGA members of Congress who refused to accept the results of the 2020 election used polarizing language at nearly triple the rate of Democrats.
oSo please don’t accept the GOP framing of the assault on Paul Pelosi as evidence of a problem plaguing “both sides of the aisle.” Political violence in America is being driven primarily by the far right, not the far left, and the far right is much closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party than the far left is to the Democratic Party.
RIGHT-WINGERS’ SHAMELESSNESS IS NOTHING TO ENVY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
During the Trump administration, it was fashionable among progressive cynics to declare that “nothing matters”: No misdeed, lie or blunder on President Donald Trump’s part would ever entail any consequences. But in the wake of his 2020 loss and the multipronged criminal investigations into him, we can see that that adage isn’t accurate.
What is true, however, is that “nothing matters” to fellow Republicans; they’ve become fortified by utter shamelessness, a quality Democrats, thankfully, do not yet possess.
Take Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s repeated refusal to recuse himself from considering matters directly related to the 2020 coup attempt, which we know his wife, Ginni Thomas, participated in (e.g., by egging on the White House chief of staff and soliciting state officials to reverse the will of the voters). He did it again Monday, refusing to sit out Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) appeal to be rescued from testifying to a grand jury about Trump’s efforts to “find” votes and reverse Georgia’s election results.
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted that Thomas violated part of the U.S. Code “requiring any ‘justice’ to recuse when his or her ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned’ or his or her ‘spouse is known by the justice to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.’ ”
Thomas’s utter contempt for the court’s already diminished reputation is bolstered by the knowledge that he has lifetime tenure and therefore faces no consequences for his injudicious conduct. Moreover, among those whose favorable opinion he covets — MAGA politicians, right-wing think tanks and publications with pretensions of intellectual seriousness — no one will object to actions that further their “cause” even at the expense of the court’s integrity. You’ll hear not a whisper of criticism, for example, from the thoroughly partisan Federalist Society, nor any GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Refusals to act on principle, to call out one’s own side and to enforce a code of behavior for all public servants are now matters of tribal identity for Republicans. Defending Trump’s behavior — be it absconding with sensitive documents or instigating a would-be coup — is the only true requirement to succeed in today’s GOP. One has to be willing to subordinate conscience, truth and fidelity to the Constitution to earn the MAGA stamp of approval.
We’ve seen this play out with other right-wing figures. Look how the party rallies around its Senate candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker, as unfit a nominee as either party has advanced in my lifetime. See the GOP’s deafening silence on Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) racist comments, or antisemitic gibes from Kayne West and Trump.
Aided by a right-wing media cocoon that insulates them from critical coverage and supported by an ends-justify-the-means MAGA movement, Republicans remain defiant. To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, they’ve been not just “defining deviancy down” but celebrating the decline.
There simply is no equivalent on the Democratic side. When a tape of shamefully racist comments among members of the Los Angeles City Council came to light, President Biden demanded that the miscreants resign. One member did. California Gov. Gavin Newsom now calls for two others to do the same.
When a group of 30 left-leaning House Democrats signed a letter urging “talks” with Russia to end the war — a position that aligned them with right-wing Russia apologists — condemnation from Democrats came swiftly. The group later withdrew the letter. Peer pressure and moral approbation serve their purpose, but only on one side of the political divide.
Democrats should not envy their opponents’ shamelessness. It’s not a superpower but, rather, a fatal flaw in character and a threat to decent, honorable democratic governance. There might be short-term gain to be had by enabling morally pernicious conduct. But the success of democracy and the favorable judgment of history depend on a strong conscience and an adherence to standards necessary for decent self-governance.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
During the Trump administration, it was fashionable among progressive cynics to declare that “nothing matters”: No misdeed, lie or blunder on President Donald Trump’s part would ever entail any consequences. But in the wake of his 2020 loss and the multipronged criminal investigations into him, we can see that that adage isn’t accurate.
What is true, however, is that “nothing matters” to fellow Republicans; they’ve become fortified by utter shamelessness, a quality Democrats, thankfully, do not yet possess.
Take Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s repeated refusal to recuse himself from considering matters directly related to the 2020 coup attempt, which we know his wife, Ginni Thomas, participated in (e.g., by egging on the White House chief of staff and soliciting state officials to reverse the will of the voters). He did it again Monday, refusing to sit out Sen. Lindsey O. Graham’s (R-S.C.) appeal to be rescued from testifying to a grand jury about Trump’s efforts to “find” votes and reverse Georgia’s election results.
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted that Thomas violated part of the U.S. Code “requiring any ‘justice’ to recuse when his or her ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned’ or his or her ‘spouse is known by the justice to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.’ ”
Thomas’s utter contempt for the court’s already diminished reputation is bolstered by the knowledge that he has lifetime tenure and therefore faces no consequences for his injudicious conduct. Moreover, among those whose favorable opinion he covets — MAGA politicians, right-wing think tanks and publications with pretensions of intellectual seriousness — no one will object to actions that further their “cause” even at the expense of the court’s integrity. You’ll hear not a whisper of criticism, for example, from the thoroughly partisan Federalist Society, nor any GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Refusals to act on principle, to call out one’s own side and to enforce a code of behavior for all public servants are now matters of tribal identity for Republicans. Defending Trump’s behavior — be it absconding with sensitive documents or instigating a would-be coup — is the only true requirement to succeed in today’s GOP. One has to be willing to subordinate conscience, truth and fidelity to the Constitution to earn the MAGA stamp of approval.
We’ve seen this play out with other right-wing figures. Look how the party rallies around its Senate candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker, as unfit a nominee as either party has advanced in my lifetime. See the GOP’s deafening silence on Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) racist comments, or antisemitic gibes from Kayne West and Trump.
Aided by a right-wing media cocoon that insulates them from critical coverage and supported by an ends-justify-the-means MAGA movement, Republicans remain defiant. To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, they’ve been not just “defining deviancy down” but celebrating the decline.
There simply is no equivalent on the Democratic side. When a tape of shamefully racist comments among members of the Los Angeles City Council came to light, President Biden demanded that the miscreants resign. One member did. California Gov. Gavin Newsom now calls for two others to do the same.
When a group of 30 left-leaning House Democrats signed a letter urging “talks” with Russia to end the war — a position that aligned them with right-wing Russia apologists — condemnation from Democrats came swiftly. The group later withdrew the letter. Peer pressure and moral approbation serve their purpose, but only on one side of the political divide.
Democrats should not envy their opponents’ shamelessness. It’s not a superpower but, rather, a fatal flaw in character and a threat to decent, honorable democratic governance. There might be short-term gain to be had by enabling morally pernicious conduct. But the success of democracy and the favorable judgment of history depend on a strong conscience and an adherence to standards necessary for decent self-governance.
REPUBLICANS’ INFLATION PLAN: TAX CUTS THAT’D MAKE LIZ TRUSS BLUSH
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans routinely declare that inflation is their “best” issue in the midterms. But there is no reason to think inflation would shrink under a GOP majority in the House or Senate. Indeed, Republicans are projecting they would make inflation worse.
The Post reports, “Republicans plan to push to extend key parts of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections, aiming to force President Biden to codify trillions of dollars worth of lower taxes touted by his predecessor.”
Wait, what happened to their hand-wringing over inflation? Do they expect voters to believe that tax cuts primarily for the rich wouldn’t be inflationary?
In fact, when the Trump tax cuts were first passed, Republicans insisted they would pay for themselves by boosting economic growth. (That didn’t happen, but it did spur stock buybacks, contrary to Republican claims.) At a moment when Republicans are hollering about fiscal irresponsibility, it is bewildering that they are doubling down on the same tax cuts.
Jim Kessler, head of the moderate Democratic Third Way think tank, tells me, “Tax cuts like that in the U.S. would contradict everything the Fed is doing and put the U.S. economy in an inflation-driven tailspin.”
Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, compares the Republican proposals to British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s disastrous tax proposal that sank the British pound, and led to Truss’s resignation, arguing, “At worst they could also cause a U.K.-style market meltdown. Either way they are completely at odds with the argument that deficits have fueled inflation.”
This should end any talk that the election is a choice between addressing inflation or protecting democracy. In reality, it’s about whether Republicans will be granted power to make inflation worse and to threaten democracy.
In a larger sense, this is a reminder that Republicans advance policy arguments (i.e., too much fiscal stimulus caused inflation) not because they believe them, but because they will say whatever can help them attain power. Had Biden resisted spending during the pandemic, they would have attacked him for failing to tame inflation and unemployment. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it to me: “Increases in the deficit will push inflation up, not down. This will result both from unpaid-for spending and any tax cuts that aren’t matched with spending cuts as well.”
Republicans’ angst about deficits was always phony given their track record when they controlled the White House. As ProPublica reported in January 2021, “The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office.” Moreover, “The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration. … And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.”
In other words, deficits become a problem only when Democrats are in charge.
It gets worse. William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, explains to me that the Republican push to extend Trump’s tax cuts could be seen as “cynical.” They were in control of Congress and the White House in 2017; they could have made them permanent. But, Gale notes, they “chose to make the individual provisions temporary, to keep the costs down.”
Moreover, he adds, “What is hypocritical is that they now want to repeal some of the revenue raisers they enacted in 2017 that have not taken effect yet,” such as the provision requiring businesses to amortize research and development expenses, rather than deduct them from taxable income. Republicans added the measure because they knew their tax cuts were a budget-buster.
As Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, tells me, it’s as if Republicans are watching the financial chaos in Britain, and “all it did was convince them to find someone to hold their beer.”
You can make the case that the Biden administration spent too much too quickly. You can even make the argument that the administration isn’t doing enough to tighten the purse strings now (though such arguments ignore that this spending alleviated human suffering during the pandemic and funded productivity-enhancing infrastructure). But you cannot denounce measures that help working- and middle-class people (e.g., college debt relief) as inflationary and then turn around to propose another economic stimulus in the form of an enormous tax cut.
Well, you could, but that would make you a hypocrite and unfit for public office. A Republican leader, in other words.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans routinely declare that inflation is their “best” issue in the midterms. But there is no reason to think inflation would shrink under a GOP majority in the House or Senate. Indeed, Republicans are projecting they would make inflation worse.
The Post reports, “Republicans plan to push to extend key parts of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections, aiming to force President Biden to codify trillions of dollars worth of lower taxes touted by his predecessor.”
Wait, what happened to their hand-wringing over inflation? Do they expect voters to believe that tax cuts primarily for the rich wouldn’t be inflationary?
In fact, when the Trump tax cuts were first passed, Republicans insisted they would pay for themselves by boosting economic growth. (That didn’t happen, but it did spur stock buybacks, contrary to Republican claims.) At a moment when Republicans are hollering about fiscal irresponsibility, it is bewildering that they are doubling down on the same tax cuts.
Jim Kessler, head of the moderate Democratic Third Way think tank, tells me, “Tax cuts like that in the U.S. would contradict everything the Fed is doing and put the U.S. economy in an inflation-driven tailspin.”
Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, compares the Republican proposals to British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s disastrous tax proposal that sank the British pound, and led to Truss’s resignation, arguing, “At worst they could also cause a U.K.-style market meltdown. Either way they are completely at odds with the argument that deficits have fueled inflation.”
This should end any talk that the election is a choice between addressing inflation or protecting democracy. In reality, it’s about whether Republicans will be granted power to make inflation worse and to threaten democracy.
In a larger sense, this is a reminder that Republicans advance policy arguments (i.e., too much fiscal stimulus caused inflation) not because they believe them, but because they will say whatever can help them attain power. Had Biden resisted spending during the pandemic, they would have attacked him for failing to tame inflation and unemployment. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it to me: “Increases in the deficit will push inflation up, not down. This will result both from unpaid-for spending and any tax cuts that aren’t matched with spending cuts as well.”
Republicans’ angst about deficits was always phony given their track record when they controlled the White House. As ProPublica reported in January 2021, “The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office.” Moreover, “The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration. … And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.”
In other words, deficits become a problem only when Democrats are in charge.
It gets worse. William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, explains to me that the Republican push to extend Trump’s tax cuts could be seen as “cynical.” They were in control of Congress and the White House in 2017; they could have made them permanent. But, Gale notes, they “chose to make the individual provisions temporary, to keep the costs down.”
Moreover, he adds, “What is hypocritical is that they now want to repeal some of the revenue raisers they enacted in 2017 that have not taken effect yet,” such as the provision requiring businesses to amortize research and development expenses, rather than deduct them from taxable income. Republicans added the measure because they knew their tax cuts were a budget-buster.
As Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, tells me, it’s as if Republicans are watching the financial chaos in Britain, and “all it did was convince them to find someone to hold their beer.”
You can make the case that the Biden administration spent too much too quickly. You can even make the argument that the administration isn’t doing enough to tighten the purse strings now (though such arguments ignore that this spending alleviated human suffering during the pandemic and funded productivity-enhancing infrastructure). But you cannot denounce measures that help working- and middle-class people (e.g., college debt relief) as inflationary and then turn around to propose another economic stimulus in the form of an enormous tax cut.
Well, you could, but that would make you a hypocrite and unfit for public office. A Republican leader, in other words.
REPUBLICANS’ SECRET ECONOMIC AGENDA? A GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
After refusing for months to divulge what they’d do if they regained control of Congress, Republicans have finally revealed some of their economic agenda.
Unfortunately, it might involve causing a global financial crisis, based on recent interviews with some GOP congressmen.
The GOP has not said how it would tackle inflation or other major economic challenges, including a recession. This is the party, after all, that had no platform in 2020; and when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was asked in January what Republicans would do if they regained the majority, he dodged: “That is a very good question,” he said, “and I’ll let you know when we take it back.”
Despite McConnell’s efforts, some details have been etched in by Republican lawmakers. To be clear, none of them have clarified their strategy for fighting inflation, unless you count shouting “SOCIALISM!” and “KEYSTONE!” over and over. But they have given a peek at other economic priorities.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other Republicans have recently backed proposals to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, as well as to extend or expand several other corporate tax breaks.
Never mind that Americans think corporations already pay too little in taxes, according to many polls. Cutting taxes further is also likely to make inflation worse, for the same reason that Republicans argue that increased government spending can also make inflation worse: giving people more cash to spend when there’s limited stuff to buy drives prices up.
The scariest part of the recently disclosed GOP economic agenda, however, has largely gone under the radar. It’s the plan to hold the debt ceiling hostage next year, which could easily precipitate a global financial catastrophe.
Republicans have withheld their support from raising the debt limit before, usually framing their hostage-taking as a commitment to fiscal restraint. But the debt ceiling has nothing to do with new spending; rather, it’s a somewhat arbitrary statutory cap on how much the government can borrow to pay off bills that it has already incurred, through tax and spending decisions that Congress has already made. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like going to a restaurant, ordering the lobster and a $500 bottle of wine, and then declaring yourself financially responsible because you skipped out on the check.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
If lawmakers dine-and-dash on behalf of Uncle Sam, they tarnish the creditworthiness of the United States and can make it more expensive for the federal government to borrow in the future because investors don’t trust us. Worse, they might accidentally blow up every other financial market on Earth, too.
That’s because U.S. debt is now viewed as the safest of safe assets. Virtually all other assets around the world are benchmarked against U.S. Treasury securities. If we default on our debt obligations — or even come close to default — that raises the question of the riskiness of everything else investors buy and can send shockwaves of panic through every other market.
Boom, financial crisis.
In a Bloomberg Government article last week, the four Republican lawmakers interested in serving as House Budget Committee chairman in the next Congress all said they’d refuse to raise the debt ceiling next year unless Democrats agree to entitlement cuts and work requirements on safety-net programs — that is, measures Dems would find abhorrent. This would set the stage for another high-stakes showdown.
Recall that when Republicans held the debt limit hostage in 2011, the United States’ credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history because we came perilously close to default. Since then, the GOP has become more politically unhinged, which means brinkmanship might well go further, which makes a debt default — even by accident — more likely.
Yet, in threatening this scenario, Rep. Jason T. Smith (Mo.), ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, says: “The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong.”
Forcing a debt limit crisis, as the world teeters on the verge of recession, is the opposite of what you would pursue if you care about strengthening the economy. But no matter: Republicans don’t care that they will destroy the economy.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
After refusing for months to divulge what they’d do if they regained control of Congress, Republicans have finally revealed some of their economic agenda.
Unfortunately, it might involve causing a global financial crisis, based on recent interviews with some GOP congressmen.
The GOP has not said how it would tackle inflation or other major economic challenges, including a recession. This is the party, after all, that had no platform in 2020; and when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was asked in January what Republicans would do if they regained the majority, he dodged: “That is a very good question,” he said, “and I’ll let you know when we take it back.”
Despite McConnell’s efforts, some details have been etched in by Republican lawmakers. To be clear, none of them have clarified their strategy for fighting inflation, unless you count shouting “SOCIALISM!” and “KEYSTONE!” over and over. But they have given a peek at other economic priorities.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other Republicans have recently backed proposals to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, as well as to extend or expand several other corporate tax breaks.
Never mind that Americans think corporations already pay too little in taxes, according to many polls. Cutting taxes further is also likely to make inflation worse, for the same reason that Republicans argue that increased government spending can also make inflation worse: giving people more cash to spend when there’s limited stuff to buy drives prices up.
The scariest part of the recently disclosed GOP economic agenda, however, has largely gone under the radar. It’s the plan to hold the debt ceiling hostage next year, which could easily precipitate a global financial catastrophe.
Republicans have withheld their support from raising the debt limit before, usually framing their hostage-taking as a commitment to fiscal restraint. But the debt ceiling has nothing to do with new spending; rather, it’s a somewhat arbitrary statutory cap on how much the government can borrow to pay off bills that it has already incurred, through tax and spending decisions that Congress has already made. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like going to a restaurant, ordering the lobster and a $500 bottle of wine, and then declaring yourself financially responsible because you skipped out on the check.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
If lawmakers dine-and-dash on behalf of Uncle Sam, they tarnish the creditworthiness of the United States and can make it more expensive for the federal government to borrow in the future because investors don’t trust us. Worse, they might accidentally blow up every other financial market on Earth, too.
That’s because U.S. debt is now viewed as the safest of safe assets. Virtually all other assets around the world are benchmarked against U.S. Treasury securities. If we default on our debt obligations — or even come close to default — that raises the question of the riskiness of everything else investors buy and can send shockwaves of panic through every other market.
Boom, financial crisis.
In a Bloomberg Government article last week, the four Republican lawmakers interested in serving as House Budget Committee chairman in the next Congress all said they’d refuse to raise the debt ceiling next year unless Democrats agree to entitlement cuts and work requirements on safety-net programs — that is, measures Dems would find abhorrent. This would set the stage for another high-stakes showdown.
Recall that when Republicans held the debt limit hostage in 2011, the United States’ credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history because we came perilously close to default. Since then, the GOP has become more politically unhinged, which means brinkmanship might well go further, which makes a debt default — even by accident — more likely.
Yet, in threatening this scenario, Rep. Jason T. Smith (Mo.), ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, says: “The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use to make sure that we do everything we can to make this economy strong.”
Forcing a debt limit crisis, as the world teeters on the verge of recession, is the opposite of what you would pursue if you care about strengthening the economy. But no matter: Republicans don’t care that they will destroy the economy.
THE MAGA GOP HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT ‘LIFE.’ ONLY POWER.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The cat’s been out of the bag for some time regarding Republicans’ insincere support for “life.” If “life” were the issue when it comes to abortion, the party would not put reproductive health and lives at risk with forced-birth laws. For that matter, a pro-life politician would not oppose effective gun-safety laws; would not oppose mask edicts or discourage vaccinations for the coronavirus; and would not push to cut Medicaid and hobble the Affordable Care Act. However, never has it been more apparent how utterly unprincipled the party is when it comes to an issue it has used for decades to woo its base.
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who supports forced birth even in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, is credibly accused (with documentary proof) of urging a woman he impregnated to get an abortion and then paying for it, as the Daily Beast first reported. Although Walker has denied the allegation, Republicans have let on that they don’t care anyway. Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, made that crystal clear:
Dana Loesch: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.” pic.twitter.com/gp3jbG5P1B — PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) October 4, 2022
She’s right, of course. All the GOP cares about is power. It certainly does not care about the character or quality of its candidates, about actual election results, about officials’ oaths or really any other policy matter. This was the party that had no platform in 2020, only unwavering loyalty to its leader.
Former Maine governor Paul LePage (R), who is running to win his old job back, seemed even more confused as to what his abortion position is meant to be. During a shambolic debate performance on Tuesday, the New York Times reported, LePage “repeatedly stumbled over a question about how he would handle the issue if voters returned him to office.” He didn’t understand the question, he said. Or it was a hypothetical. Or whatever. Easy to get lost when the issue is simply another weapon to wield in search of political office.
Such utterances can’t even be called hypocrisy; hypocrisy assumes one has beliefs. These candidates seem to believe in nothing but their own advancement — though they are quick to declare that whatever Democrats believe in poses an existential threat to America. We’re simply hearing them say out loud what we’ve long suspected they think privately: that voters are suckers, so they’ll tell them whatever they think the rubes will want to hear.
Whether it is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declaring that Jan. 6 was not an armed insurrection, or the scores of candidates parroting the “big lie,” or the forced-birth crowd dropping its states’ rights theory to push for a national ban, we see a party that is prepared to do and say anything to hold power, regardless of the harm to our democracy or national security.
A candidate such as J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, can condemn defeated former president Donald Trump, then pivot to pledge undying loyalty — and count on getting rewarded with the nomination for debasing himself.
Republican leaders and enablers (including pundits who dream up ex post facto excuses for policy shifts and inanities) have repeatedly shown that the party doesn’t believe what its candidates say and doesn’t care what lies they tell supporters. We should stop attributing sincerity or good faith to the MAGA GOP. Again and again, its members show their “beliefs” are all a smokescreen to attain and hold power.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The cat’s been out of the bag for some time regarding Republicans’ insincere support for “life.” If “life” were the issue when it comes to abortion, the party would not put reproductive health and lives at risk with forced-birth laws. For that matter, a pro-life politician would not oppose effective gun-safety laws; would not oppose mask edicts or discourage vaccinations for the coronavirus; and would not push to cut Medicaid and hobble the Affordable Care Act. However, never has it been more apparent how utterly unprincipled the party is when it comes to an issue it has used for decades to woo its base.
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who supports forced birth even in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, is credibly accused (with documentary proof) of urging a woman he impregnated to get an abortion and then paying for it, as the Daily Beast first reported. Although Walker has denied the allegation, Republicans have let on that they don’t care anyway. Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, made that crystal clear:
Dana Loesch: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.” pic.twitter.com/gp3jbG5P1B — PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) October 4, 2022
She’s right, of course. All the GOP cares about is power. It certainly does not care about the character or quality of its candidates, about actual election results, about officials’ oaths or really any other policy matter. This was the party that had no platform in 2020, only unwavering loyalty to its leader.
Former Maine governor Paul LePage (R), who is running to win his old job back, seemed even more confused as to what his abortion position is meant to be. During a shambolic debate performance on Tuesday, the New York Times reported, LePage “repeatedly stumbled over a question about how he would handle the issue if voters returned him to office.” He didn’t understand the question, he said. Or it was a hypothetical. Or whatever. Easy to get lost when the issue is simply another weapon to wield in search of political office.
Such utterances can’t even be called hypocrisy; hypocrisy assumes one has beliefs. These candidates seem to believe in nothing but their own advancement — though they are quick to declare that whatever Democrats believe in poses an existential threat to America. We’re simply hearing them say out loud what we’ve long suspected they think privately: that voters are suckers, so they’ll tell them whatever they think the rubes will want to hear.
Whether it is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declaring that Jan. 6 was not an armed insurrection, or the scores of candidates parroting the “big lie,” or the forced-birth crowd dropping its states’ rights theory to push for a national ban, we see a party that is prepared to do and say anything to hold power, regardless of the harm to our democracy or national security.
A candidate such as J.D. Vance, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, can condemn defeated former president Donald Trump, then pivot to pledge undying loyalty — and count on getting rewarded with the nomination for debasing himself.
Republican leaders and enablers (including pundits who dream up ex post facto excuses for policy shifts and inanities) have repeatedly shown that the party doesn’t believe what its candidates say and doesn’t care what lies they tell supporters. We should stop attributing sincerity or good faith to the MAGA GOP. Again and again, its members show their “beliefs” are all a smokescreen to attain and hold power.
THE WAR ON ABORTION RIGHTS MESHES PERFECTLY WITH MAGA AUTHORITARIANISM
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, in the 100 days, as of Sunday, since the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, nearly 80 million people find themselves in 13 states that, in effect, ban abortion. There will be a record number of abortion-related measures on the midterm ballot. It would be a mistake to see the focus on abortion as distinct from the MAGA war on democracy.
Pundits and politicians tend to observe a bright distinction between the Donald Trump MAGA movement’s assault on democracy and the right-wing evisceration of women’s reproductive rights. After all, some pro-democracy voices on the right are antiabortion. But simply because not all forced-birth advocates are MAGA authoritarian supporters, that doesn’t mean a critical point should be overlooked: The attack on women’s self-determination and autonomy is as much a part of MAGA’s fascistic affinities as is the cult’s fondness for violence and white Christian nationalism.
One need only look at right-wing regimes present and past to see that they invariably include appeals to hyper-masculinity and demands for women to be limited to their roles as women and mothers. Modern authoritarian regimes — such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary or President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — and European fascists of the 1930s alike have sought to compel motherhood and limit women’s participation in society.
“Fascism is a rejection of the notion of equality, of an expansive definition of the people. And it comes at a time where people are pushing the parameters of an existing definition, one that basically included males, often male property owners only,” Anne Wingenter, professor of history and women’s studies at Loyola University Chicago, explained in a radio interview in April. “It was pushback against expanding that definition to excluded groups. What we seem to be experiencing today, to me, looks a lot like an attempt to define down that notion of the people again. And some people get to be fully autonomous, and some don’t.”
That was certainly the pattern in 1930s fascist Italy. Wingenter explained, “[Benito] Mussolini was known for his kind of pithy little quotes. And he is on record as saying, ‘War is to man, as maternity is to woman.’ ” She continued, “The ideal woman in fascist Italy was the wife and mother of many children.”
The xenophobic right-wing movement in the United States today is obsessed with “replacement theory,” regarding women in the dominant group as essential to the preservation of white supremacy. There was a “kind of demographic panic in the wake of the World War I in Italy,” Wingenter said. Now, in the United States, it is the MAGA hysteria over white replacement. In both, part of the “solution” is for White mothers to have lots of children and forgo not only abortion but birth control.
We therefore should recognize, as Wingenter puts it, that those who “tolerate the removal of a whole series of rights for people, in the sense of a full ban on abortion,” strike not only at the rights of women to participate fully in society but to destroy the democratic ideal of equal rights and equal opportunity.
Mainstream media coverage has no problem recognizing the link between the MAGA anti-democratic movement and racism/white nationalism. One need only look at the Confederate flags carried through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or listen to right-wing fearmongering about immigrants to understand racism is intrinsic to the MAGA movement. However, when it comes to women’s rights, we see little acknowledgment in mainstream reporting and commentary that misogyny and deprivation of women’s rights are central to a movement playing largely on White male hysteria.
In sum, MAGA support for government intrusion into Americans’ most intimate decisions reflects an authoritarian outlook. It is not a coincidence that this targeting of women is occurring in tandem with a developing voter registration gender gap favoring women. They understand all too well that the GOP’s quest for a national abortion ban is about their reproductive rights — and also about their inclusion in society and ultimately the preservation of democracy.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, in the 100 days, as of Sunday, since the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, nearly 80 million people find themselves in 13 states that, in effect, ban abortion. There will be a record number of abortion-related measures on the midterm ballot. It would be a mistake to see the focus on abortion as distinct from the MAGA war on democracy.
Pundits and politicians tend to observe a bright distinction between the Donald Trump MAGA movement’s assault on democracy and the right-wing evisceration of women’s reproductive rights. After all, some pro-democracy voices on the right are antiabortion. But simply because not all forced-birth advocates are MAGA authoritarian supporters, that doesn’t mean a critical point should be overlooked: The attack on women’s self-determination and autonomy is as much a part of MAGA’s fascistic affinities as is the cult’s fondness for violence and white Christian nationalism.
One need only look at right-wing regimes present and past to see that they invariably include appeals to hyper-masculinity and demands for women to be limited to their roles as women and mothers. Modern authoritarian regimes — such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary or President Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil — and European fascists of the 1930s alike have sought to compel motherhood and limit women’s participation in society.
“Fascism is a rejection of the notion of equality, of an expansive definition of the people. And it comes at a time where people are pushing the parameters of an existing definition, one that basically included males, often male property owners only,” Anne Wingenter, professor of history and women’s studies at Loyola University Chicago, explained in a radio interview in April. “It was pushback against expanding that definition to excluded groups. What we seem to be experiencing today, to me, looks a lot like an attempt to define down that notion of the people again. And some people get to be fully autonomous, and some don’t.”
That was certainly the pattern in 1930s fascist Italy. Wingenter explained, “[Benito] Mussolini was known for his kind of pithy little quotes. And he is on record as saying, ‘War is to man, as maternity is to woman.’ ” She continued, “The ideal woman in fascist Italy was the wife and mother of many children.”
The xenophobic right-wing movement in the United States today is obsessed with “replacement theory,” regarding women in the dominant group as essential to the preservation of white supremacy. There was a “kind of demographic panic in the wake of the World War I in Italy,” Wingenter said. Now, in the United States, it is the MAGA hysteria over white replacement. In both, part of the “solution” is for White mothers to have lots of children and forgo not only abortion but birth control.
We therefore should recognize, as Wingenter puts it, that those who “tolerate the removal of a whole series of rights for people, in the sense of a full ban on abortion,” strike not only at the rights of women to participate fully in society but to destroy the democratic ideal of equal rights and equal opportunity.
Mainstream media coverage has no problem recognizing the link between the MAGA anti-democratic movement and racism/white nationalism. One need only look at the Confederate flags carried through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or listen to right-wing fearmongering about immigrants to understand racism is intrinsic to the MAGA movement. However, when it comes to women’s rights, we see little acknowledgment in mainstream reporting and commentary that misogyny and deprivation of women’s rights are central to a movement playing largely on White male hysteria.
In sum, MAGA support for government intrusion into Americans’ most intimate decisions reflects an authoritarian outlook. It is not a coincidence that this targeting of women is occurring in tandem with a developing voter registration gender gap favoring women. They understand all too well that the GOP’s quest for a national abortion ban is about their reproductive rights — and also about their inclusion in society and ultimately the preservation of democracy.
THE SUPREME COURT’S MAJORITY RECONVENES ITS ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
This week, a zealous band of Republican partisans gathered in Washington intent on advancing their campaign to undermine free and fair elections in this country. It isn’t the Proud Boys responding to President Donald Trump’s call to “stand back and stand by.” Nor is it the majority of House Republicans who sustain the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. It is the six-person, right-wing majority of the Supreme Court using a self-selected docket of cases to advance minority rule.
The Voting Rights Act, one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s greatest legacies, is a prime target. Five conservative justices joined in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder to gut the act’s core enforcement mechanism: the requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ignored the detailed record — and common sense — to make his own finding that racial discrimination was no longer a problem in the United States.
Not surprisingly, the decision opened the floodgates to the passage of voter-suppression laws across the South and in other states with Republican-majority legislatures.
Now, the act’s prohibition of voting practices that result in “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race is at risk. Merrill v. Milligan involves an Alabama redistricting plan that ensures that African Americans, who make up more than one-fourth of the state’s population, will constitute the majority in just one of its seven congressional districts. Having engaged in blatant racial gerrymandering, the state of Alabama now argues that race can’t be used as a factor to draw up a fairer map.
The most ominous case on the docket — Moore v. Harper — also involves gerrymandering.
The right-wing gang on the court ruled in 2019 that federal courts will not review cases of partisan gerrymandering — meaning, drawing congressional districts with the aim of helping one party win a disproportionate number of seats. The court’s opinion offered the reassurance that state courts would continue to curb extremes.
In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court did just that, striking down what it called an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander.” Now, North Carolina has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to ignore the state constitution and rule that the U.S. Constitution empowers the state legislature alone to determine how elections are run.
This wingnut argument — called the “independent state legislature theory” — ignores the entire history of elections in the United States. Yet, as The Post’s Ruth Marcus writes in her comprehensive review of the court’s threatening docket, three justices have already indicated they are sympathetic to it.
If the partisan GOP majority on the Supreme Court adopts this theory, it could have truly calamitous effects. Across the country, MAGA Republicans — inflamed by Trump’s “big lie” about the stolen 2020 election — are running candidates for governor and secretary of state and state legislatures. If the court rules in their favor and overrules state constitutions, then Republican majorities in state legislatures would be in position to follow Trump’s 2020 example: claim fraud without proof and replace the electors chosen by the popular vote with their own.
All of this builds on top of cases that have already neutered campaign finance laws and opened the sluice gates to unlimited — and often anonymous — campaign contributions. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo that money was speech and struck down limits on political spending by independent groups.
Then, in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United in 2010, the right-wing justices overturned any limits on campaign funding by corporations. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — a Reagan appointee — risibly declared that spending by corporations or others to oppose or support candidates would not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. In 2014, in McCutcheon v. FEC, another 5-4 decision, the court outlawed any limits on how much money an individual could give to candidates or campaign committees in any election cycle.
No limits on corporations. No limits on individuals. Unlimited independent spending by PACs or other nonprofits. The result: Big money corrupts our elections.
As OpenSecrets reports, non-party outside groups — think PACs and pop-up nonprofit fronts — have spent nearly $4.5 billion influencing elections since Citizens United. In the previous two decades, they spent a combined $750 million. Not surprisingly, this has led to the obscene, spiraling cost of elections.
This year’s grotesqueries featured AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, spending millions — including two separate $1 million contributions from Republican donors — through front groups to try to defeat progressive women of color in Democratic Party primaries.
The Supreme Court is the country’s least democratic branch of government. Its appointed, unelected justices serve lifetime terms. They select the cases they hear. And now, after a 40-year campaign by conservatives, the court has a six-person, transparently partisan majority. This session, they will continue to forward the right’s agenda — undermining civil rights, elevating religious doctrine, rolling back the power to regulate.
At the center of that will be their assault on democracy. The House Jan. 6 committee has exposed Trump’s multilayered campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, we need an independent inquiry to detail how right-wing justices have subverted our democracy, so we can determine what can be done to save it.
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
This week, a zealous band of Republican partisans gathered in Washington intent on advancing their campaign to undermine free and fair elections in this country. It isn’t the Proud Boys responding to President Donald Trump’s call to “stand back and stand by.” Nor is it the majority of House Republicans who sustain the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. It is the six-person, right-wing majority of the Supreme Court using a self-selected docket of cases to advance minority rule.
The Voting Rights Act, one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s greatest legacies, is a prime target. Five conservative justices joined in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder to gut the act’s core enforcement mechanism: the requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ignored the detailed record — and common sense — to make his own finding that racial discrimination was no longer a problem in the United States.
Not surprisingly, the decision opened the floodgates to the passage of voter-suppression laws across the South and in other states with Republican-majority legislatures.
Now, the act’s prohibition of voting practices that result in “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race is at risk. Merrill v. Milligan involves an Alabama redistricting plan that ensures that African Americans, who make up more than one-fourth of the state’s population, will constitute the majority in just one of its seven congressional districts. Having engaged in blatant racial gerrymandering, the state of Alabama now argues that race can’t be used as a factor to draw up a fairer map.
The most ominous case on the docket — Moore v. Harper — also involves gerrymandering.
The right-wing gang on the court ruled in 2019 that federal courts will not review cases of partisan gerrymandering — meaning, drawing congressional districts with the aim of helping one party win a disproportionate number of seats. The court’s opinion offered the reassurance that state courts would continue to curb extremes.
In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court did just that, striking down what it called an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander.” Now, North Carolina has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to ignore the state constitution and rule that the U.S. Constitution empowers the state legislature alone to determine how elections are run.
This wingnut argument — called the “independent state legislature theory” — ignores the entire history of elections in the United States. Yet, as The Post’s Ruth Marcus writes in her comprehensive review of the court’s threatening docket, three justices have already indicated they are sympathetic to it.
If the partisan GOP majority on the Supreme Court adopts this theory, it could have truly calamitous effects. Across the country, MAGA Republicans — inflamed by Trump’s “big lie” about the stolen 2020 election — are running candidates for governor and secretary of state and state legislatures. If the court rules in their favor and overrules state constitutions, then Republican majorities in state legislatures would be in position to follow Trump’s 2020 example: claim fraud without proof and replace the electors chosen by the popular vote with their own.
All of this builds on top of cases that have already neutered campaign finance laws and opened the sluice gates to unlimited — and often anonymous — campaign contributions. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo that money was speech and struck down limits on political spending by independent groups.
Then, in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United in 2010, the right-wing justices overturned any limits on campaign funding by corporations. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — a Reagan appointee — risibly declared that spending by corporations or others to oppose or support candidates would not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. In 2014, in McCutcheon v. FEC, another 5-4 decision, the court outlawed any limits on how much money an individual could give to candidates or campaign committees in any election cycle.
No limits on corporations. No limits on individuals. Unlimited independent spending by PACs or other nonprofits. The result: Big money corrupts our elections.
As OpenSecrets reports, non-party outside groups — think PACs and pop-up nonprofit fronts — have spent nearly $4.5 billion influencing elections since Citizens United. In the previous two decades, they spent a combined $750 million. Not surprisingly, this has led to the obscene, spiraling cost of elections.
This year’s grotesqueries featured AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, spending millions — including two separate $1 million contributions from Republican donors — through front groups to try to defeat progressive women of color in Democratic Party primaries.
The Supreme Court is the country’s least democratic branch of government. Its appointed, unelected justices serve lifetime terms. They select the cases they hear. And now, after a 40-year campaign by conservatives, the court has a six-person, transparently partisan majority. This session, they will continue to forward the right’s agenda — undermining civil rights, elevating religious doctrine, rolling back the power to regulate.
At the center of that will be their assault on democracy. The House Jan. 6 committee has exposed Trump’s multilayered campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, we need an independent inquiry to detail how right-wing justices have subverted our democracy, so we can determine what can be done to save it.
THE SUPREME COURT ISN’T LISTENING, AND IT’S NO SECRET WHY
By The New York Times Editorial Board
The Supreme Court’s authority within the American political system is both immense and fragile. Somebody has to provide the last word in interpreting the Constitution, and — this is the key — to do so in a way that is seen as fair and legitimate by the people at large.
What happens when a majority of Americans don’t see it that way?
A common response to this question is to say the justices shouldn’t care. They aren’t there to satisfy the majority or to be swayed by the shifting winds of public opinion. That is partly true: The court’s most important obligations include safeguarding the constitutional rights of vulnerable minorities who can’t always count on protection from the political process and acting independently of political interests.
But in the bigger picture, the court nearly always hews close to where the majority of the American people are. If it does diverge, it should take care to do so in a way that doesn’t appear partisan. That is the basis of the trust given to the court by the public.
That trust, in turn, is crucial to the court’s ability to exercise the vast power Americans have granted it. The nine justices have no control over money, as Congress does, or force, as the executive branch does. All they have is their black robes and the public trust. A court that does not keep that trust cannot perform its critical role in American government.
And yet as the justices prepare to open a new term on Monday, fewer Americans have confidence in the court than ever before recorded. In a Gallup poll taken in June, before the court overturned Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, only 25 percent of respondents said they had a high degree of confidence in the institution. That number is down from 50 percent in 2001 — just months after the court’s hugely controversial 5-to-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, in which a majority consisting only of Republican appointees effectively decided the result of the 2000 election in favor of the Republicans. This widespread lack of confidence and trust in the nation’s highest court is a crisis, and rebuilding it is more important than the outcome of any single ruling.
Chief Justice John Roberts recently suggested that the court’s low public opinion is nothing more than sour grapes by those on the short end of recent rulings. “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court,” he said in remarks at a judicial conference earlier in September.
This is disingenuous. The court’s biggest decisions have always angered one group of people or another. Conservatives were upset, for instance, by the rulings in Brown v. Board of Education, which barred racial segregation in schools, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, liberals were infuriated by Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates to dark money in politics. But overall public confidence in the court remained high until recently.
The actual cause of its historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party. This project was taking shape more quietly for decades, but it shifted into high gear in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and Senate Republicans refused to let Barack Obama choose his successor, obliterating the practice of deferring to presidents to fill vacancies on the court. Within four years, the court had a 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority, supercharging the Republican appointees’ efforts to discard the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.
As a result, the court’s legitimacy has been squandered in the service of partisan victories. The Dobbs decision in June, which overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminated American women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies and was a priority of the Republican Party for decades, is only the most glaring example. In cases involving money in politics, partisan gerrymandering and multiple suits challenging the Voting Rights Act, the court has ruled in ways that make it easier for Republicans and harder for Democrats to win elections. In 2018, the court ruled that public sector labor unions violated the First Amendment rights of nonmembers by requiring them to pay fees to support the unions’ work bargaining on their behalf, after decades of rulings in which the court had found the opposite to be true. That ruling further weakened organized labor, another Republican goal.
For most of the court’s history, it was difficult to predict how a case would turn out based on the party of the president who nominated the justices. Even into the 21st century, as the country grew more polarized, the court’s rulings remained largely in line with the views of the average American voter. That is no longer the case. The court’s rulings are now in line with the views of the average Republican voter.
In the process, the court has unmoored itself from both the Constitution it is sworn to protect and the American people it is privileged to serve. This could not be happening at a worse moment. Election deniers in the Republican Party are undermining the integrity of the American electoral system. Right-wing political violence is a present and growing threat.
It is precisely during times like these that the American people need the Supreme Court to play the role Chief Justice Roberts memorably articulated at his own confirmation hearing — that of an umpire calling balls and strikes, ensuring a fair playing field for all. Instead, the court’s right-wingers are calling balls for one team and strikes for the other.
As Justice Elena Kagan said in a talk this month at Northwestern University School of Law, “When courts become extensions of the political process, when people see them as extensions of the political process, when people see them as trying just to impose personal preferences on a society irrespective of the law, that’s when there’s a problem — and that’s when there ought to be a problem.”
By The New York Times Editorial Board
The Supreme Court’s authority within the American political system is both immense and fragile. Somebody has to provide the last word in interpreting the Constitution, and — this is the key — to do so in a way that is seen as fair and legitimate by the people at large.
What happens when a majority of Americans don’t see it that way?
A common response to this question is to say the justices shouldn’t care. They aren’t there to satisfy the majority or to be swayed by the shifting winds of public opinion. That is partly true: The court’s most important obligations include safeguarding the constitutional rights of vulnerable minorities who can’t always count on protection from the political process and acting independently of political interests.
But in the bigger picture, the court nearly always hews close to where the majority of the American people are. If it does diverge, it should take care to do so in a way that doesn’t appear partisan. That is the basis of the trust given to the court by the public.
That trust, in turn, is crucial to the court’s ability to exercise the vast power Americans have granted it. The nine justices have no control over money, as Congress does, or force, as the executive branch does. All they have is their black robes and the public trust. A court that does not keep that trust cannot perform its critical role in American government.
And yet as the justices prepare to open a new term on Monday, fewer Americans have confidence in the court than ever before recorded. In a Gallup poll taken in June, before the court overturned Roe v. Wade with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, only 25 percent of respondents said they had a high degree of confidence in the institution. That number is down from 50 percent in 2001 — just months after the court’s hugely controversial 5-to-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, in which a majority consisting only of Republican appointees effectively decided the result of the 2000 election in favor of the Republicans. This widespread lack of confidence and trust in the nation’s highest court is a crisis, and rebuilding it is more important than the outcome of any single ruling.
Chief Justice John Roberts recently suggested that the court’s low public opinion is nothing more than sour grapes by those on the short end of recent rulings. “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court,” he said in remarks at a judicial conference earlier in September.
This is disingenuous. The court’s biggest decisions have always angered one group of people or another. Conservatives were upset, for instance, by the rulings in Brown v. Board of Education, which barred racial segregation in schools, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, liberals were infuriated by Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates to dark money in politics. But overall public confidence in the court remained high until recently.
The actual cause of its historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party. This project was taking shape more quietly for decades, but it shifted into high gear in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and Senate Republicans refused to let Barack Obama choose his successor, obliterating the practice of deferring to presidents to fill vacancies on the court. Within four years, the court had a 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority, supercharging the Republican appointees’ efforts to discard the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.
As a result, the court’s legitimacy has been squandered in the service of partisan victories. The Dobbs decision in June, which overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminated American women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies and was a priority of the Republican Party for decades, is only the most glaring example. In cases involving money in politics, partisan gerrymandering and multiple suits challenging the Voting Rights Act, the court has ruled in ways that make it easier for Republicans and harder for Democrats to win elections. In 2018, the court ruled that public sector labor unions violated the First Amendment rights of nonmembers by requiring them to pay fees to support the unions’ work bargaining on their behalf, after decades of rulings in which the court had found the opposite to be true. That ruling further weakened organized labor, another Republican goal.
For most of the court’s history, it was difficult to predict how a case would turn out based on the party of the president who nominated the justices. Even into the 21st century, as the country grew more polarized, the court’s rulings remained largely in line with the views of the average American voter. That is no longer the case. The court’s rulings are now in line with the views of the average Republican voter.
In the process, the court has unmoored itself from both the Constitution it is sworn to protect and the American people it is privileged to serve. This could not be happening at a worse moment. Election deniers in the Republican Party are undermining the integrity of the American electoral system. Right-wing political violence is a present and growing threat.
It is precisely during times like these that the American people need the Supreme Court to play the role Chief Justice Roberts memorably articulated at his own confirmation hearing — that of an umpire calling balls and strikes, ensuring a fair playing field for all. Instead, the court’s right-wingers are calling balls for one team and strikes for the other.
As Justice Elena Kagan said in a talk this month at Northwestern University School of Law, “When courts become extensions of the political process, when people see them as extensions of the political process, when people see them as trying just to impose personal preferences on a society irrespective of the law, that’s when there’s a problem — and that’s when there ought to be a problem.”
TRUMP’S UNHINGED RAGE IN OHIO SHOWS THE DANGER OF A GOP CONGRESS
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Donald Trump’s weekend rally in Ohio had no shortage of dark and disturbing moments: He mocked GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance for “kissing my ass,” called for Singapore-style executions of drug dealers and enjoyed a moment of ritualistic crowd adulation set to what sounded like a QAnon song.
But Trump also delivered a deeply serious message with real-world implications. He fully expects a GOP Congress to use its power to place him outside the reach of any and all investigations and prosecutions, now and into the future.
At bottom, this was an effort to strike a new kind of bargain with Republicans: He delivers them his base, and they reward him by placing him beyond accountability and above the law.
At the rally, Trump uncorked a long, angry rant about the investigations he is facing. These probes are scrutinizing his hoarding of national security secrets, his scheming to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 loss, and his incitement of mob violence against the U.S. government.
“I’ve been harassed, investigated, defamed, slandered and persecuted like no other president,” Trump seethed, ripping into the “unhinged persecution” he supposedly faces. He also said:
What they’ve done, the radical Democrats and the deep state, is a form of political repression unlike anything our nation has ever seen. It’s a disgrace. And J.D., you gotta get it stopped.
J.D., you gotta get it stopped. Trump repeated other versions of this formulation throughout his speech.
These are not idle ravings. They are better understood as a directive, as a declaration of what Trump actually does expect a GOP-controlled Congress to do for him. And you will hear this more as Trump holds rallies for other House and Senate candidates.
In this regard, Republicans will have many options in Congress in 2023, even if they control only the House. Most obviously, a GOP House could use hearings, employed in bad faith under the guise of “oversight,” solely to harass those conducting investigations or potential prosecutions of Trump. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has telegraphed this.
But there’s more. A GOP-controlled House could revive a House rule enabling Republicans to target the salaries of individual federal officials — say, Attorney General Merrick Garland — or groups of federal employees, in an attempt to subvert those investigations and prosecutions.
Such tactics would be thwarted by a Democratic Senate or a presidential veto. But House Republicans could push for government shutdowns to leverage targeted defunding of investigations or prosecutions. They could threaten debt ceiling breaches (and economic disaster) toward that end.
In fact, Republicans are actively preparing for such scenarios. When they call for “defunding the FBI” in retaliation for the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, they’re clumsily expressing a very real intention to use maximal congressional power against any investigative activity involving Trump. Some Republicans have gone so far as to float specific defunding tactics.
This alone is good reason for Democrats to act legislatively in the lame-duck session to disable the debt limit for good, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein suggests they do.
So the stakes couldn’t be higher this fall. And on Saturday, Trump’s expectations of this implied pact with a GOP Congress were made explicit.
For instance, at one point, Trump noted that he’s outpolling other Republicans and sneered that without him on the ballot, “Republicans are not doing too well.” Translation: Nice midterm candidates you got there, Republicans. Be a shame if my base didn’t turn out for them.
Meanwhile, Trump cast the 74 million people who voted for him as victims of the investigations against him. The meaning is plain: If Republicans don’t maximize efforts to derail those investigations, he’ll cast them as sellouts, and his base will respond accordingly.
And Trump described investigations into his conduct by declaring that the United States has “weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never, ever before,” depicting this as a symptom of our “decline.” The implication: Efforts to hold him accountable are a sign we’re slipping into banana republic status.
You want real banana republic stuff? Try Trump’s rampant corruption, his enlisting of the MAGA movement and large swaths of the GOP behind the destruction of democracy, and his efforts to remain unaccountable to the law via tactics such as mob-speak threats of retaliatory street violence. As Shay Khatiri notes at the Bulwark, the bending of the law in the face of strongmen’s threats is an actual hallmark of banana republics.
Keeping the law at bay is exactly what Trump will demand of a GOP Congress. All throughout his presidency, Republicans understood that they were tolerating or running interference for his racism, authoritarianism and corruption in exchange for tax cuts for the rich and the nomination and appointment of right-wing judges. Now, Trump is proposing a new bargain: his base in exchange for absolute impunity.
By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
Donald Trump’s weekend rally in Ohio had no shortage of dark and disturbing moments: He mocked GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance for “kissing my ass,” called for Singapore-style executions of drug dealers and enjoyed a moment of ritualistic crowd adulation set to what sounded like a QAnon song.
But Trump also delivered a deeply serious message with real-world implications. He fully expects a GOP Congress to use its power to place him outside the reach of any and all investigations and prosecutions, now and into the future.
At bottom, this was an effort to strike a new kind of bargain with Republicans: He delivers them his base, and they reward him by placing him beyond accountability and above the law.
At the rally, Trump uncorked a long, angry rant about the investigations he is facing. These probes are scrutinizing his hoarding of national security secrets, his scheming to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 loss, and his incitement of mob violence against the U.S. government.
“I’ve been harassed, investigated, defamed, slandered and persecuted like no other president,” Trump seethed, ripping into the “unhinged persecution” he supposedly faces. He also said:
What they’ve done, the radical Democrats and the deep state, is a form of political repression unlike anything our nation has ever seen. It’s a disgrace. And J.D., you gotta get it stopped.
J.D., you gotta get it stopped. Trump repeated other versions of this formulation throughout his speech.
These are not idle ravings. They are better understood as a directive, as a declaration of what Trump actually does expect a GOP-controlled Congress to do for him. And you will hear this more as Trump holds rallies for other House and Senate candidates.
In this regard, Republicans will have many options in Congress in 2023, even if they control only the House. Most obviously, a GOP House could use hearings, employed in bad faith under the guise of “oversight,” solely to harass those conducting investigations or potential prosecutions of Trump. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has telegraphed this.
But there’s more. A GOP-controlled House could revive a House rule enabling Republicans to target the salaries of individual federal officials — say, Attorney General Merrick Garland — or groups of federal employees, in an attempt to subvert those investigations and prosecutions.
Such tactics would be thwarted by a Democratic Senate or a presidential veto. But House Republicans could push for government shutdowns to leverage targeted defunding of investigations or prosecutions. They could threaten debt ceiling breaches (and economic disaster) toward that end.
In fact, Republicans are actively preparing for such scenarios. When they call for “defunding the FBI” in retaliation for the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, they’re clumsily expressing a very real intention to use maximal congressional power against any investigative activity involving Trump. Some Republicans have gone so far as to float specific defunding tactics.
This alone is good reason for Democrats to act legislatively in the lame-duck session to disable the debt limit for good, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein suggests they do.
So the stakes couldn’t be higher this fall. And on Saturday, Trump’s expectations of this implied pact with a GOP Congress were made explicit.
For instance, at one point, Trump noted that he’s outpolling other Republicans and sneered that without him on the ballot, “Republicans are not doing too well.” Translation: Nice midterm candidates you got there, Republicans. Be a shame if my base didn’t turn out for them.
Meanwhile, Trump cast the 74 million people who voted for him as victims of the investigations against him. The meaning is plain: If Republicans don’t maximize efforts to derail those investigations, he’ll cast them as sellouts, and his base will respond accordingly.
And Trump described investigations into his conduct by declaring that the United States has “weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never, ever before,” depicting this as a symptom of our “decline.” The implication: Efforts to hold him accountable are a sign we’re slipping into banana republic status.
You want real banana republic stuff? Try Trump’s rampant corruption, his enlisting of the MAGA movement and large swaths of the GOP behind the destruction of democracy, and his efforts to remain unaccountable to the law via tactics such as mob-speak threats of retaliatory street violence. As Shay Khatiri notes at the Bulwark, the bending of the law in the face of strongmen’s threats is an actual hallmark of banana republics.
Keeping the law at bay is exactly what Trump will demand of a GOP Congress. All throughout his presidency, Republicans understood that they were tolerating or running interference for his racism, authoritarianism and corruption in exchange for tax cuts for the rich and the nomination and appointment of right-wing judges. Now, Trump is proposing a new bargain: his base in exchange for absolute impunity.
HOW LOW CAN THEY GO?
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will be remembered for many things.
He injected obscenities into The New York Times’s White House coverage. He turned conspiracy theory into Republican orthodoxy. And he cut out the middleman on ugliness, happily doing the political wet work himself.
The Bush family had retainers, like Lee Atwater, who would hand off the dirty tricks and the scaremongering Willie Horton stuff to outside groups, and use direct mail and radio ads.
Trump dispensed with the idea that the candidate was above it all. He was excited to show he was beneath it all — the naked id of the Republican Party.
His soulless followers, like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are happy to mud-wrestle and perform Grand Guignol as well.
In some ways, it’s easier to battle racism, sexism, xenophobia and fakery when the principals are gleefully spewing it. You can fight back on the record and in real time.
In other ways, however, having it all out in the open sends a foul stench through American politics, intensifying the brutish and bleak mood of the country.
Politicians who purport to be guardians of American “values” are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.
I asked Trump during the 2016 campaign why he had gone so dark. “I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1,” he replied, “and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?”
As it turned out, he was spinning up the mob, laying the groundwork for a violent attack on the Capitol. Trump riled up the mob again on Thursday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. If he’s indicted on a charge of spiriting away classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president said, there will be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”
Trump created the cynical and boorish template for other presidential hopefuls on the right.
It can be amusing to mock elites. But there’s something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha’s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory.
It was reported that a woman who said her name was Perla offered the migrants in Texas three months of rent and work in Boston. But then they ended up, as one put it, “on this little island.”
This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people’s misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don’t want to do anymore.
With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people.
The contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.
They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they’re being cruel.
As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who “made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower.”
The callousness of DeSantis’s manipulations is clear.
Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will be remembered for many things.
He injected obscenities into The New York Times’s White House coverage. He turned conspiracy theory into Republican orthodoxy. And he cut out the middleman on ugliness, happily doing the political wet work himself.
The Bush family had retainers, like Lee Atwater, who would hand off the dirty tricks and the scaremongering Willie Horton stuff to outside groups, and use direct mail and radio ads.
Trump dispensed with the idea that the candidate was above it all. He was excited to show he was beneath it all — the naked id of the Republican Party.
His soulless followers, like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, are happy to mud-wrestle and perform Grand Guignol as well.
In some ways, it’s easier to battle racism, sexism, xenophobia and fakery when the principals are gleefully spewing it. You can fight back on the record and in real time.
In other ways, however, having it all out in the open sends a foul stench through American politics, intensifying the brutish and bleak mood of the country.
Politicians who purport to be guardians of American “values” are rewarded for being inhumane. The nastier, the better. Republican pols have gone from kissing babies and rope-line handshakes to full-on viciousness.
I asked Trump during the 2016 campaign why he had gone so dark. “I guess because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1,” he replied, “and I said, why don’t I just keep the same thing going?”
As it turned out, he was spinning up the mob, laying the groundwork for a violent attack on the Capitol. Trump riled up the mob again on Thursday in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt. If he’s indicted on a charge of spiriting away classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president said, there will be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”
Trump created the cynical and boorish template for other presidential hopefuls on the right.
It can be amusing to mock elites. But there’s something exceedingly creepy — and blatantly opportunistic — about DeSantis chartering two planes to send some 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelan, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard. The lawyers for some migrants said that they were deceived about their destination, and Martha’s Vineyard officials said they had no notice. Abbott sent two busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home at the Naval Observatory.
It was reported that a woman who said her name was Perla offered the migrants in Texas three months of rent and work in Boston. But then they ended up, as one put it, “on this little island.”
This caper to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic elites ended up being compared to human trafficking. The Republicans are exploiting people’s misery for a political game. The migrants simply want to work, which a bunch of Americans don’t want to do anymore.
With their pre-midterm publicity stunts, as with their draconian push to outlaw abortion, the Republicans are increasingly letting politics take precedence over people.
The contentions of Republicans about geographical unfairness and Democratic inaction are undercut by their meanspirited behavior.
They are willing to make life worse for vulnerable, exhausted people who are already in a terrible position — and chortle while they’re being cruel.
As Blake Hounshell noted in The Times, DeSantis is courting Trump donors by adopting the racially charged playbook of Trump, who “made frequent and aggressive political use of Latino migrants during his run for the presidency in 2016 and long thereafter, casting many of them as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ during his presidential announcement at Trump Tower.”
The callousness of DeSantis’s manipulations is clear.
Ugliness is what the G.O.P. is wearing this fall.
CENSORSHIP IS THE REFUGE OF THE WEAK
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Some threats to freedom of expression in America, like online harassment and disinformation, are amorphous or hard to pin down; others are alarmingly overt. Consider these recent examples of censorship in practice: A student newspaper and journalism program in Nebraska shut down for writing about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and pride month. Oklahoma’s top education official seeking to revoke the teaching certificate of an English teacher who shared a QR code that directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online collection of banned books. Lawmakers in Missouri passing a law that makes school librarians vulnerable to prosecution for the content in their collections.
In Florida today it may be illegal for teachers to even talk about whom they love or marry thanks to the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Of course, it goes far beyond sex: The Sunshine State’s Republican commissioner of education rejected 28 math textbooks this year for including verboten content.
This year alone, 137 gag order bills, which would restrict the discussions of topics such as race, gender, sexuality and American history in kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, have been introduced in 36 state legislatures, according to a report released last month by PEN America, a free speech organization. That’s a sharp increase from 2021, when 54 bills were introduced in 22 states. Only seven of those bills became law in 2022, but they are some of the strictest to date, and the sheer number of bills introduced reflects a growing enthusiasm on the right for censorship as a political weapon and instrument of social control.
These new measures are far more punitive than past efforts, with heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions that dare to offer courses covering the forbidden content. Teachers can be fired and even face criminal charges. Lawsuits have already started to trickle through the courts asking for broad interpretations of the new statutes. For the first time, the PEN report noted, some bills have also targeted nonpublic schools and universities in addition to public schools.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Republican lawmakers around the country were introducing legislation they said would protect free speech on college campuses. Now, they’re using the coercive power of the state to restrict what people can talk about, learn about or discuss in public, and exposing them to lawsuits and other repercussions for doing so. That’s a clear threat to the ideals of a pluralistic political culture, in which challenging ideas are welcomed and discussed.
How and what to teach American students has been contested ground since the earliest days of public education, and the content of that instruction is something about which Americans can respectfully disagree. But the Supreme Court has limited the government’s power to censor school libraries, if not curriculums. “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1982 decision.
There may not even be wide disagreement over what American students are being taught. Despite the moral panic over teaching about gender and race, American parents overwhelmingly say they are satisfied with the instruction their children receive. A poll from National Public Radio and Ipsos earlier this year found that just 18 percent of parents said their child’s school “taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values,” while 19 percent said the same about race and racism. Only 14 percent felt that way about American history.
And yet, some Republican candidates are using the threat of censorship as a show of strength, evidence of their power to muzzle political opponents. Last year in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin won the governorship after a campaign in which he demagogued the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Beloved” by the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. Other candidates are looking to make issues around censorship a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the midterm elections in races from Texas to New Jersey.
Some want to extend censorship far beyond the classroom. In Virginia, a Republican state representative tried to get a court to declare as obscene two young adult books that are frequently banned in schools, “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah Maas. The case was dismissed on Aug. 30, but if it had been successful, it could have made it illegal for bookstores to sell the books to children without parental consent.
Right-wing lawmakers are also looking to restrict what Americans can say about abortion. Model legislation from the National Right to Life Committee, which is circulating in state legislatures, aims to forbid Americans to give “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.” That prohibition would extend to hosting websites that contain such information.
Even when such bills fail, these efforts to censor create a climate of fear. Across the country, libraries in small towns are being threatened with closure and library staff members are being harassed and intimidated. The Times reports that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.” The American Library Association has documented nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries or library systems that have faced attempted censorship.
Only right-wing legislators are currently trying to write censorship into law. This is not only deeply undemocratic; it is an act of weakness masquerading as strength. A political project convinced of the superiority of its ideas doesn’t need the power of the state to shield itself from competition. Free expression isn’t just a feature of democracy; it is a necessary prerequisite.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Some threats to freedom of expression in America, like online harassment and disinformation, are amorphous or hard to pin down; others are alarmingly overt. Consider these recent examples of censorship in practice: A student newspaper and journalism program in Nebraska shut down for writing about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and pride month. Oklahoma’s top education official seeking to revoke the teaching certificate of an English teacher who shared a QR code that directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online collection of banned books. Lawmakers in Missouri passing a law that makes school librarians vulnerable to prosecution for the content in their collections.
In Florida today it may be illegal for teachers to even talk about whom they love or marry thanks to the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Of course, it goes far beyond sex: The Sunshine State’s Republican commissioner of education rejected 28 math textbooks this year for including verboten content.
This year alone, 137 gag order bills, which would restrict the discussions of topics such as race, gender, sexuality and American history in kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, have been introduced in 36 state legislatures, according to a report released last month by PEN America, a free speech organization. That’s a sharp increase from 2021, when 54 bills were introduced in 22 states. Only seven of those bills became law in 2022, but they are some of the strictest to date, and the sheer number of bills introduced reflects a growing enthusiasm on the right for censorship as a political weapon and instrument of social control.
These new measures are far more punitive than past efforts, with heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions that dare to offer courses covering the forbidden content. Teachers can be fired and even face criminal charges. Lawsuits have already started to trickle through the courts asking for broad interpretations of the new statutes. For the first time, the PEN report noted, some bills have also targeted nonpublic schools and universities in addition to public schools.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Republican lawmakers around the country were introducing legislation they said would protect free speech on college campuses. Now, they’re using the coercive power of the state to restrict what people can talk about, learn about or discuss in public, and exposing them to lawsuits and other repercussions for doing so. That’s a clear threat to the ideals of a pluralistic political culture, in which challenging ideas are welcomed and discussed.
How and what to teach American students has been contested ground since the earliest days of public education, and the content of that instruction is something about which Americans can respectfully disagree. But the Supreme Court has limited the government’s power to censor school libraries, if not curriculums. “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1982 decision.
There may not even be wide disagreement over what American students are being taught. Despite the moral panic over teaching about gender and race, American parents overwhelmingly say they are satisfied with the instruction their children receive. A poll from National Public Radio and Ipsos earlier this year found that just 18 percent of parents said their child’s school “taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values,” while 19 percent said the same about race and racism. Only 14 percent felt that way about American history.
And yet, some Republican candidates are using the threat of censorship as a show of strength, evidence of their power to muzzle political opponents. Last year in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin won the governorship after a campaign in which he demagogued the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Beloved” by the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. Other candidates are looking to make issues around censorship a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the midterm elections in races from Texas to New Jersey.
Some want to extend censorship far beyond the classroom. In Virginia, a Republican state representative tried to get a court to declare as obscene two young adult books that are frequently banned in schools, “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah Maas. The case was dismissed on Aug. 30, but if it had been successful, it could have made it illegal for bookstores to sell the books to children without parental consent.
Right-wing lawmakers are also looking to restrict what Americans can say about abortion. Model legislation from the National Right to Life Committee, which is circulating in state legislatures, aims to forbid Americans to give “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.” That prohibition would extend to hosting websites that contain such information.
Even when such bills fail, these efforts to censor create a climate of fear. Across the country, libraries in small towns are being threatened with closure and library staff members are being harassed and intimidated. The Times reports that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.” The American Library Association has documented nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries or library systems that have faced attempted censorship.
Only right-wing legislators are currently trying to write censorship into law. This is not only deeply undemocratic; it is an act of weakness masquerading as strength. A political project convinced of the superiority of its ideas doesn’t need the power of the state to shield itself from competition. Free expression isn’t just a feature of democracy; it is a necessary prerequisite.
HOW REACTIONARY IS MAGA? TRY THE FIRST CENTURY B.C.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: They have come to resurrect Caesar.
MAGA Republican leaders take umbrage at being accused of “semi-fascism,” which is understandable: Twentieth-century dictators such as Mussolini and the German guy with the mustache gave fascism a bad name. But the MAGA crowd isn’t disavowing totalitarianism, per se. It’s just their taste in authoritarian figures skews toward the classics. They’re old-school — 1st century B.C. old. “Hail, Caesar” goes down so much easier than “Heil Hitler.”
J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, is one resident of this newly platted Caesarian section, as a recent profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed. It referred to a year-old interview Vance gave on a far-right podcast in which he spoke approvingly of Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who argues for an American Julius Caesar to take power.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said, referencing the era preceding Caesar’s dictatorship. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
The podcast’s host, Jack Murphy, endorsed this sentiment, discussing possible “extra-constitutional” remedies to be taken “if we want to re-found the country.” (He told Vance he thought voting an “ineffectual” way to “rip out this leadership class.”)
Vance, who said he had been “radicalized” by the actions of “malevolent and evil” political opponents, described what “wild” actions he had in mind at another point in the podcast. He wants to “seize the institutions of the left” and purge political opponents with “de-Nazification, de-Ba’athification.”
Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s bans on certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.
Hail, Caesar!
Vance is far from the only emperor-curious MAGA leader. Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro called Mike Pence a “traitor to the American Caesar of Trump” because the former vice president refused to help overturn the 2020 election. Another former Trump adviser, Michael Anton, hosted a Claremont Institute podcast with Yarvin about the desirability of an “American Caesar.”
Meanwhile, various tactics that would qualify as “extra-constitutional” have been proliferating on the MAGA right.
This week, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed during the lame-duck Republican Congress after the 2020 election, turned the bedrock American principle of equal justice on its head. Cannon, granting Trump’s request for a “special master” to shield the government documents hoarded at his residence, said Trump’s need for protection from “stigma” was “in a league of its own” because of his “former position as president.” A judge granting extraordinary legal powers to the man who appointed her to spare him “reputational harm”? Hail, Caesar!
Last week, the House Jan. 6 committee wrote to Trump ally Newt Gingrich, outlining how the former House speaker encouraged Trump TV ads promoting false election-fraud claims, and how he suggested a “call-to-action” to intimidate election officials. “The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich wrote to Trump advisers, at a time when election officials desperately feared violence. Hail, Caesar!
Some MAGA Republicans have a novel solution to resolve pesky constitutional restraints: Rewrite the Constitution. As Carl Hulse reports in the New York Times, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) introduced legislation seeking to compel Congress to call a constitutional convention — the first since the framers wrote it — to overhaul the United States’ founding document. The effort likely isn’t going anywhere, but it shows the contempt MAGA Republicans have for the constitutional order. Hail, Caesar!
Others in the MAGA movement simply reinterpret the Constitution to their own liking. County law-enforcement officials self-styling as “constitutional sheriffs” have assigned themselves power to decide what the law is, according to their own politics. One such sheriff in Michigan sought warrants in July to seize vote-counting machines to try to validate Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, Reuters reported last week. Armed lawmen going rogue to undermine elections? Hail, Caesar!
A few weeks from now, the Supreme Court will open its new term, in which it will decide whether to use a North Carolina case to allow state legislatures to redraw election maps — and potentially to overturn the outcome of elections and to disregard state constitutions — without any review by state courts. The high court blessing a radical legal theory that mocks the will of the voters? For MAGA Republicans, all roads lead to Roman imperialism.
Hail, Caesar!
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: They have come to resurrect Caesar.
MAGA Republican leaders take umbrage at being accused of “semi-fascism,” which is understandable: Twentieth-century dictators such as Mussolini and the German guy with the mustache gave fascism a bad name. But the MAGA crowd isn’t disavowing totalitarianism, per se. It’s just their taste in authoritarian figures skews toward the classics. They’re old-school — 1st century B.C. old. “Hail, Caesar” goes down so much easier than “Heil Hitler.”
J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, is one resident of this newly platted Caesarian section, as a recent profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed. It referred to a year-old interview Vance gave on a far-right podcast in which he spoke approvingly of Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who argues for an American Julius Caesar to take power.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said, referencing the era preceding Caesar’s dictatorship. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
The podcast’s host, Jack Murphy, endorsed this sentiment, discussing possible “extra-constitutional” remedies to be taken “if we want to re-found the country.” (He told Vance he thought voting an “ineffectual” way to “rip out this leadership class.”)
Vance, who said he had been “radicalized” by the actions of “malevolent and evil” political opponents, described what “wild” actions he had in mind at another point in the podcast. He wants to “seize the institutions of the left” and purge political opponents with “de-Nazification, de-Ba’athification.”
Vance suggested that former president Donald Trump, once elected in 2024, should fire all civil servants and replace them with “our people,” defy court orders blocking such an illegal action, and then “do what Viktor Orban has done,” referring to the Hungarian dictator’s bans on certain topics from school curricula. Vance justified such “outside-the-box” authoritarian actions by reasoning that the United States is “far gone” and not “a real constitutional republic” anymore.
Hail, Caesar!
Vance is far from the only emperor-curious MAGA leader. Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro called Mike Pence a “traitor to the American Caesar of Trump” because the former vice president refused to help overturn the 2020 election. Another former Trump adviser, Michael Anton, hosted a Claremont Institute podcast with Yarvin about the desirability of an “American Caesar.”
Meanwhile, various tactics that would qualify as “extra-constitutional” have been proliferating on the MAGA right.
This week, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed during the lame-duck Republican Congress after the 2020 election, turned the bedrock American principle of equal justice on its head. Cannon, granting Trump’s request for a “special master” to shield the government documents hoarded at his residence, said Trump’s need for protection from “stigma” was “in a league of its own” because of his “former position as president.” A judge granting extraordinary legal powers to the man who appointed her to spare him “reputational harm”? Hail, Caesar!
Last week, the House Jan. 6 committee wrote to Trump ally Newt Gingrich, outlining how the former House speaker encouraged Trump TV ads promoting false election-fraud claims, and how he suggested a “call-to-action” to intimidate election officials. “The goal is to arouse the country’s anger,” Gingrich wrote to Trump advisers, at a time when election officials desperately feared violence. Hail, Caesar!
Some MAGA Republicans have a novel solution to resolve pesky constitutional restraints: Rewrite the Constitution. As Carl Hulse reports in the New York Times, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) introduced legislation seeking to compel Congress to call a constitutional convention — the first since the framers wrote it — to overhaul the United States’ founding document. The effort likely isn’t going anywhere, but it shows the contempt MAGA Republicans have for the constitutional order. Hail, Caesar!
Others in the MAGA movement simply reinterpret the Constitution to their own liking. County law-enforcement officials self-styling as “constitutional sheriffs” have assigned themselves power to decide what the law is, according to their own politics. One such sheriff in Michigan sought warrants in July to seize vote-counting machines to try to validate Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, Reuters reported last week. Armed lawmen going rogue to undermine elections? Hail, Caesar!
A few weeks from now, the Supreme Court will open its new term, in which it will decide whether to use a North Carolina case to allow state legislatures to redraw election maps — and potentially to overturn the outcome of elections and to disregard state constitutions — without any review by state courts. The high court blessing a radical legal theory that mocks the will of the voters? For MAGA Republicans, all roads lead to Roman imperialism.
Hail, Caesar!
SCHOOL IS FOR MAKING CITIZENS
By Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray
Ms. McGhee is the author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” and creator of the “Sum of Us” podcast. Dr. Ray is the author of “On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care.”
Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us.
That broader purpose is currently under attack. According to PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free expression, legislatures in 36 states have proposed 137 bills that would limit teaching about race, gender and American history. Nineteen censorship bills have become law in the past two years. In our increasingly diverse nation, insulating students from lessons about racism will create a generation ill equipped to participate in a multiracial democracy. When partisan politicians ban the teaching of our country’s full history, children are purposely made ignorant of how American society works. And the costs of this ignorance to American democracy will be borne by us all.
Fortunately, our shared American history offers models of the kind of education that can unite students and communities to produce a solidarity dividend — a positive public good that we can create only by working together across racial and socioeconomic lines. Black people in Jim Crow Mississippi lived under racial authoritarianism so strict and violent that it is hard to imagine today. But lies and omissions about history were essential to the program of Jim Crow subjugation. Lost Cause mythology, which downplayed slavery as a cause of the Civil War, replaced factual history. Students, regardless of race, were taught that Black people were inferior. And many white employers thought Black people should learn only enough for proficiency in menial Jim Crow jobs.
That’s why the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent volunteers to the Mississippi Delta during the 1964 Freedom Summer, to found schools in poor Black communities that offered a truthful education that was explicit about racial oppression and the denial of political rights.
This multiracial group of volunteers made plain the distance between American reality and its ideals. As a result, these Freedom Schools made citizens. According to William Sturkey, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, once the S.N.C.C. volunteers left, Freedom School students changed their state by organizing voter registration drives and civil rights protests and by charting a more equitable future in terms of housing, jobs and health care. They earned advanced degrees and were elected to office.
The broader civil rights movement helped transform the nation — in ways that even benefited the white Southerners who were so deeply opposed. As Gavin Wright recounts in “Sharing the Prize,” civil rights gains helped create more robust economies and local democracies, benefiting all citizens. These gains were possible precisely because people learned how to confront the nation’s failures.
Every student deserves the kind of myth-shattering and empowering education that the Freedom Schools provided. Such education doesn’t shy away from America’s ugly truths and contradictions. Stories of racial progress should be coupled with data on abiding racial inequalities in employment, life expectancy and incarceration. Discussions of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should include the contradiction between their hypothetical opposition to slavery and the fact that they both enslaved people.
Honest education isn’t all bad news. In fact, the deeper you go into our history, the more you can find new heroes to celebrate. As Freedom School participants learned by looking at the people who taught them, there is a tradition of American heroism, by people of all races, that is as real as the tradition of oppression and injustice. We can’t understand one without the other. Teaching age-appropriate but full history today allows white students to ask themselves: Do I want to be like the hundreds of protesters in the black and white photograph, yelling at Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old Black girl, as she tried to integrate a public school? Or do I want to be like the hundreds of white students who boarded buses for the South to register Black voters during Freedom Summer?
Contemporary attacks on teaching true history are authoritarian attempts to impose a sanitized curriculum. America’s book banners and anti-critical race theory zealots are following a path well worn by authoritarian regimes in Russia and Hungary, which have issued laws targeting the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In the current U.S. debates, both the authoritarians and those people committed to multiracial democracy recognize that education is inherently political, because it enables students to understand, question and change their world. For the latter, this is the point; freedom comes from having the tools to comprehend a range of good and bad experiences and weigh the options for charting their future. Despite wails to the contrary from activist groups like Moms for Liberty, who claim accurate teaching of America’s history will harm white children, research shows that all students benefit from reading accurate but critical accounts. Lessons about racism make students more likely to engage and empathize across race. Such cross-racial solidarity is essential for members of our most diverse generation.
Perhaps that’s why many young people are rightfully suspicious of grown-ups who want to keep the truth from them. A white teenager in Nevada spoke out against censorship at her rural county school board meeting.
“Discussions of lessons based around our country and society’s true history are absolutely not making me, as a white person, feel attacked or guilty,” she said. “In fact, being able to talk about hard topics such as racial inequality and slavery allowed me to feel proud of how far our society has come and hopeful that we can continue to progress.”
This position recalls a letter home from a Freedom Summer volunteer explaining her students’ eagerness for knowledge. She wrote that her students “know that they have been cheated and they want anything and everything that we can give them.” Schools shouldn’t cheat kids by denying them the tools to navigate the world as it exists — and to create a better one for all of us.
The people who resist an honest teaching of history have an economic agenda, too. They attack our children’s freedom to learn in order to create “universal public school distrust,” as Christopher Rufo, one of the leading architects of the effort to censor the teaching of race in the classroom and an advocate of school vouchers, put it. When white parents — and the tax dollars that often move with them — abandon public schools out of fear of integrated curriculums, it drains the pool of public resources from our schools. It is no surprise that some recent campaigns to pack school boards, sue districts and spread book bans are reportedly funded by some of the same secret money groups that espouse low-tax, small-government economics, while financially backing the nomination of conservative judges.
If an educated citizenry makes democracy possible, attacking schools becomes a proxy war to limit democracy. This is a battle that our parents and grandparents fought and won. Now the struggle for an honest education — and the democracy it makes possible — must be ours as well.
By Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray
Ms. McGhee is the author of “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” and creator of the “Sum of Us” podcast. Dr. Ray is the author of “On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care.”
Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us.
That broader purpose is currently under attack. According to PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free expression, legislatures in 36 states have proposed 137 bills that would limit teaching about race, gender and American history. Nineteen censorship bills have become law in the past two years. In our increasingly diverse nation, insulating students from lessons about racism will create a generation ill equipped to participate in a multiracial democracy. When partisan politicians ban the teaching of our country’s full history, children are purposely made ignorant of how American society works. And the costs of this ignorance to American democracy will be borne by us all.
Fortunately, our shared American history offers models of the kind of education that can unite students and communities to produce a solidarity dividend — a positive public good that we can create only by working together across racial and socioeconomic lines. Black people in Jim Crow Mississippi lived under racial authoritarianism so strict and violent that it is hard to imagine today. But lies and omissions about history were essential to the program of Jim Crow subjugation. Lost Cause mythology, which downplayed slavery as a cause of the Civil War, replaced factual history. Students, regardless of race, were taught that Black people were inferior. And many white employers thought Black people should learn only enough for proficiency in menial Jim Crow jobs.
That’s why the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sent volunteers to the Mississippi Delta during the 1964 Freedom Summer, to found schools in poor Black communities that offered a truthful education that was explicit about racial oppression and the denial of political rights.
This multiracial group of volunteers made plain the distance between American reality and its ideals. As a result, these Freedom Schools made citizens. According to William Sturkey, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, once the S.N.C.C. volunteers left, Freedom School students changed their state by organizing voter registration drives and civil rights protests and by charting a more equitable future in terms of housing, jobs and health care. They earned advanced degrees and were elected to office.
The broader civil rights movement helped transform the nation — in ways that even benefited the white Southerners who were so deeply opposed. As Gavin Wright recounts in “Sharing the Prize,” civil rights gains helped create more robust economies and local democracies, benefiting all citizens. These gains were possible precisely because people learned how to confront the nation’s failures.
Every student deserves the kind of myth-shattering and empowering education that the Freedom Schools provided. Such education doesn’t shy away from America’s ugly truths and contradictions. Stories of racial progress should be coupled with data on abiding racial inequalities in employment, life expectancy and incarceration. Discussions of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should include the contradiction between their hypothetical opposition to slavery and the fact that they both enslaved people.
Honest education isn’t all bad news. In fact, the deeper you go into our history, the more you can find new heroes to celebrate. As Freedom School participants learned by looking at the people who taught them, there is a tradition of American heroism, by people of all races, that is as real as the tradition of oppression and injustice. We can’t understand one without the other. Teaching age-appropriate but full history today allows white students to ask themselves: Do I want to be like the hundreds of protesters in the black and white photograph, yelling at Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old Black girl, as she tried to integrate a public school? Or do I want to be like the hundreds of white students who boarded buses for the South to register Black voters during Freedom Summer?
Contemporary attacks on teaching true history are authoritarian attempts to impose a sanitized curriculum. America’s book banners and anti-critical race theory zealots are following a path well worn by authoritarian regimes in Russia and Hungary, which have issued laws targeting the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In the current U.S. debates, both the authoritarians and those people committed to multiracial democracy recognize that education is inherently political, because it enables students to understand, question and change their world. For the latter, this is the point; freedom comes from having the tools to comprehend a range of good and bad experiences and weigh the options for charting their future. Despite wails to the contrary from activist groups like Moms for Liberty, who claim accurate teaching of America’s history will harm white children, research shows that all students benefit from reading accurate but critical accounts. Lessons about racism make students more likely to engage and empathize across race. Such cross-racial solidarity is essential for members of our most diverse generation.
Perhaps that’s why many young people are rightfully suspicious of grown-ups who want to keep the truth from them. A white teenager in Nevada spoke out against censorship at her rural county school board meeting.
“Discussions of lessons based around our country and society’s true history are absolutely not making me, as a white person, feel attacked or guilty,” she said. “In fact, being able to talk about hard topics such as racial inequality and slavery allowed me to feel proud of how far our society has come and hopeful that we can continue to progress.”
This position recalls a letter home from a Freedom Summer volunteer explaining her students’ eagerness for knowledge. She wrote that her students “know that they have been cheated and they want anything and everything that we can give them.” Schools shouldn’t cheat kids by denying them the tools to navigate the world as it exists — and to create a better one for all of us.
The people who resist an honest teaching of history have an economic agenda, too. They attack our children’s freedom to learn in order to create “universal public school distrust,” as Christopher Rufo, one of the leading architects of the effort to censor the teaching of race in the classroom and an advocate of school vouchers, put it. When white parents — and the tax dollars that often move with them — abandon public schools out of fear of integrated curriculums, it drains the pool of public resources from our schools. It is no surprise that some recent campaigns to pack school boards, sue districts and spread book bans are reportedly funded by some of the same secret money groups that espouse low-tax, small-government economics, while financially backing the nomination of conservative judges.
If an educated citizenry makes democracy possible, attacking schools becomes a proxy war to limit democracy. This is a battle that our parents and grandparents fought and won. Now the struggle for an honest education — and the democracy it makes possible — must be ours as well.
CONSERVATIVES THINK EDUCATION IS A THREAT. THEY’RE RIGHT.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
The conservative campaign against education is many things. As a political matter, it’s about intensifying the culture war so moral panic drives Republican votes. As a policy matter, its long-term goals include dismantling public education. As a personal matter, it’s often motivated by fear that the American system of education is a threat to people’s children — that the wrong ideas, even ideas themselves, are impossibly dangerous.
On that last point, conservatives are absolutely right: Education is indeed a threat to many things they believe.
Consider some recent news from the front. In a Texas school district, police officers showed up to a high school library to “investigate” a graphic novel about a bullied gay teen. In Oklahoma, a teacher was investigated for responding to a draconian school censorship law by covering up her classroom library with a sign saying, “Books the state doesn’t want you to read”; she then resigned.
In another Texas district, a middle school deemed portions of a book by the man for whom the school was named — a grandson of former slaves who learned to read at age 98 — to be “inappropriate.” The reasons are unclear; perhaps his tribute to the importance of reading was too inflammatory.
It’s not just teachers. Librarians have come under attack, too. In a Michigan town, librarians were targeted with a torrent of abuse after residents learned that the library contained books on LGBTQ themes; the town then decided to defund its only library. Problem solved!
Meanwhile, Fox News has been on a tear, vilifying school teachers as lazy, stupid, anti-White Marxists trying to “groom” children for sexual abuse.
In some red states, teenagers have taken it upon themselves to organize sex-education classes. Conservatives who dominate in those places are terrified that if the teens learn how their bodies work and what sex is, they might develop ideas that undermine the “traditional” view of sex.
And once again, the conservatives are right. If you teach a girl that she has the right to make her own choices about sex, that having sex doesn’t turn her into chewed-up gum no one would want to touch, or that she ought to question why society labels men who have sex “players” but women who have sex “sluts,” she might begin to free herself from the shame and fear that perpetuates certain hierarchies of power. Who knows where that might take her?
Now, are school teachers more likely to be liberals, even in conservative areas? You bet they are. Think about the kind of person who goes into teaching. You have to be committed to the welfare of children, be skilled at providing care, and believe in the institution of schools (most of which are public). You have to care about equality, because it’s inherent in the practice. You have to love books and learning. And you have to be willing to work incredibly hard for low pay.
There are some conservatives who meet all those requirements, but most of the people who do — who are disproportionately women — are going to be liberals. That makes conservatives suspicious of the entire profession, regardless of what is actually being taught.
Then there are all the ways that, in Stephen Colbert’s immortal words, reality has a well-known liberal bias. If you’re going to teach science, you have to teach about evolution and climate change, even if some people would prefer to tell themselves both are sinister hoaxes.
And even if you train teachers to say the slaveholders who signed the Constitution actually hated slavery, or pass laws forbidding any mention of “gender fluidity,” what if your kids go on to college? Then they’ll be exposed to all manner of new ideas as they cultivate their capacity for critical thinking. They’ll probably meet people from different parts of the country and different backgrounds. They very well could decide that their parents are small-minded, and arrive at a set of beliefs that alienates them from the people who raised them.
These fears are intensified because we now live in an interconnected culture where shielding your children from ideas you don’t like has become almost impossible. If you’re 50 years old, you might have gone through school never meeting someone who was openly gay, or who wasn’t Christian, or who didn’t think the Civil War was about state’s rights. But if your kids have an internet connection, they have all kinds of exposure to different people and different ideas.
And the more conservative you are, the more likely it is that education will lead your kids toward experiences and beliefs that differ from yours — not because your kids are being victimized by propaganda, but just because of the nature of becoming educated.
If you’re an average consumer of Fox News and conservative media, you typically can’t do much about the things you’re told to be angry about every day; the rage is an end in itself. But in their war on education, conservatives have found a way to connect the national to the local, linking the things Tucker Carlson tells you are terribly threatening with what’s going on right down the street.
The threat is real. Conservatives can’t keep their kids from having their minds opened forever. And they know it.
By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
The conservative campaign against education is many things. As a political matter, it’s about intensifying the culture war so moral panic drives Republican votes. As a policy matter, its long-term goals include dismantling public education. As a personal matter, it’s often motivated by fear that the American system of education is a threat to people’s children — that the wrong ideas, even ideas themselves, are impossibly dangerous.
On that last point, conservatives are absolutely right: Education is indeed a threat to many things they believe.
Consider some recent news from the front. In a Texas school district, police officers showed up to a high school library to “investigate” a graphic novel about a bullied gay teen. In Oklahoma, a teacher was investigated for responding to a draconian school censorship law by covering up her classroom library with a sign saying, “Books the state doesn’t want you to read”; she then resigned.
In another Texas district, a middle school deemed portions of a book by the man for whom the school was named — a grandson of former slaves who learned to read at age 98 — to be “inappropriate.” The reasons are unclear; perhaps his tribute to the importance of reading was too inflammatory.
It’s not just teachers. Librarians have come under attack, too. In a Michigan town, librarians were targeted with a torrent of abuse after residents learned that the library contained books on LGBTQ themes; the town then decided to defund its only library. Problem solved!
Meanwhile, Fox News has been on a tear, vilifying school teachers as lazy, stupid, anti-White Marxists trying to “groom” children for sexual abuse.
In some red states, teenagers have taken it upon themselves to organize sex-education classes. Conservatives who dominate in those places are terrified that if the teens learn how their bodies work and what sex is, they might develop ideas that undermine the “traditional” view of sex.
And once again, the conservatives are right. If you teach a girl that she has the right to make her own choices about sex, that having sex doesn’t turn her into chewed-up gum no one would want to touch, or that she ought to question why society labels men who have sex “players” but women who have sex “sluts,” she might begin to free herself from the shame and fear that perpetuates certain hierarchies of power. Who knows where that might take her?
Now, are school teachers more likely to be liberals, even in conservative areas? You bet they are. Think about the kind of person who goes into teaching. You have to be committed to the welfare of children, be skilled at providing care, and believe in the institution of schools (most of which are public). You have to care about equality, because it’s inherent in the practice. You have to love books and learning. And you have to be willing to work incredibly hard for low pay.
There are some conservatives who meet all those requirements, but most of the people who do — who are disproportionately women — are going to be liberals. That makes conservatives suspicious of the entire profession, regardless of what is actually being taught.
Then there are all the ways that, in Stephen Colbert’s immortal words, reality has a well-known liberal bias. If you’re going to teach science, you have to teach about evolution and climate change, even if some people would prefer to tell themselves both are sinister hoaxes.
And even if you train teachers to say the slaveholders who signed the Constitution actually hated slavery, or pass laws forbidding any mention of “gender fluidity,” what if your kids go on to college? Then they’ll be exposed to all manner of new ideas as they cultivate their capacity for critical thinking. They’ll probably meet people from different parts of the country and different backgrounds. They very well could decide that their parents are small-minded, and arrive at a set of beliefs that alienates them from the people who raised them.
These fears are intensified because we now live in an interconnected culture where shielding your children from ideas you don’t like has become almost impossible. If you’re 50 years old, you might have gone through school never meeting someone who was openly gay, or who wasn’t Christian, or who didn’t think the Civil War was about state’s rights. But if your kids have an internet connection, they have all kinds of exposure to different people and different ideas.
And the more conservative you are, the more likely it is that education will lead your kids toward experiences and beliefs that differ from yours — not because your kids are being victimized by propaganda, but just because of the nature of becoming educated.
If you’re an average consumer of Fox News and conservative media, you typically can’t do much about the things you’re told to be angry about every day; the rage is an end in itself. But in their war on education, conservatives have found a way to connect the national to the local, linking the things Tucker Carlson tells you are terribly threatening with what’s going on right down the street.
The threat is real. Conservatives can’t keep their kids from having their minds opened forever. And they know it.
HOW THE LEGAL HISTORY OF WITCHES IMPACTS ABORTION
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision.
by Robert I. Field, For The Philadelphia Inquirer
Robert I. Field is a professor of law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law and a professor of health management and policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University.
Should history guide our understanding of abortion rights today?
It did for Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade and declared that the United States Constitution does not protect the right to abortion.
Since that decision was issued in late June, total bans have taken effect in eight states, bans after the sixth week of pregnancy have taken effect in another four, and more bans may follow. Abortion remains legal in Pennsylvania, but the legislature passed a bill in early July to ask voters to amend the state constitution to permit new restrictions.
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision, paying particular attention to cases and treatises in England from the late 1600s and early 1700s.
One of Alito’s go-to authorities from that era was Sir Matthew Hale, an English judge and legal commentator, who considered abortion after quickening, the time when the fetus’s movements can be felt, a “great crime.” Alito also referenced statements of Hale’s that, he felt, reflected similar attitudes toward pre-quickening abortions and abortions using a “potion” given to the mother, analogous to medication abortion today.
As it turns out, Alito made an interesting choice in relying on Hale. Abortion was far from the only legal issue concerning women that he considered as a judge and legal commentator. Among the others was one on which he had an especially strong opinion: witches.
What did a guiding light of reproductive jurisprudence from more than 300 years ago have to say on that topic? In 1662, he presided over a trial in which two women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, were charged with “bewitching” seven other people. Hale’s attitude toward that offense reflected the same no-nonsense posture as his attitude toward abortion. He upheld the jury’s convictions of both and sentenced them to death.
In his opinion in the case, Hale made it clear that he had no patience for the practice of witchcraft or doubt about its existence. As his position was described in a contemporary account, “[T]hat there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all, for first, the Scriptures had affirmed as much.” Moreover, “[T]he wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.” The defendants never confessed, and they were hanged soon after the trial concluded.
Of course, this get-tough attitude toward witches was not limited to the common law as applied in England. It was also part of the law as applied in the colonies that were to become the United States. In Salem, Mass., 30 years later, more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 20 were killed.
Hale also had strong opinions on other issues affecting women. He saw no basis for prosecuting husbands for raping their wives, stating in one case, “For the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” That opinion had more staying power. It wasn’t finally repudiated in all states until 1993.
Some might think that the attitudes of someone like Hale are the product of a bygone era, much closer to Shakespeare’s time than to our own — hardly fundamental to an “essential” historical inquiry that guides jurisprudence today. We now know they would be wrong.
If attitudes from that era are to be a point of reference for the law on abortion, we should understand the full mindset they embodied. That historical inquiry could be quite revealing.
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision.
by Robert I. Field, For The Philadelphia Inquirer
Robert I. Field is a professor of law at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law and a professor of health management and policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University.
Should history guide our understanding of abortion rights today?
It did for Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overruled Roe v. Wade and declared that the United States Constitution does not protect the right to abortion.
Since that decision was issued in late June, total bans have taken effect in eight states, bans after the sixth week of pregnancy have taken effect in another four, and more bans may follow. Abortion remains legal in Pennsylvania, but the legislature passed a bill in early July to ask voters to amend the state constitution to permit new restrictions.
Alito saw historical inquiry as “essential” to his analysis. He looked far back in legal history to support his decision, paying particular attention to cases and treatises in England from the late 1600s and early 1700s.
One of Alito’s go-to authorities from that era was Sir Matthew Hale, an English judge and legal commentator, who considered abortion after quickening, the time when the fetus’s movements can be felt, a “great crime.” Alito also referenced statements of Hale’s that, he felt, reflected similar attitudes toward pre-quickening abortions and abortions using a “potion” given to the mother, analogous to medication abortion today.
As it turns out, Alito made an interesting choice in relying on Hale. Abortion was far from the only legal issue concerning women that he considered as a judge and legal commentator. Among the others was one on which he had an especially strong opinion: witches.
What did a guiding light of reproductive jurisprudence from more than 300 years ago have to say on that topic? In 1662, he presided over a trial in which two women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, were charged with “bewitching” seven other people. Hale’s attitude toward that offense reflected the same no-nonsense posture as his attitude toward abortion. He upheld the jury’s convictions of both and sentenced them to death.
In his opinion in the case, Hale made it clear that he had no patience for the practice of witchcraft or doubt about its existence. As his position was described in a contemporary account, “[T]hat there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all, for first, the Scriptures had affirmed as much.” Moreover, “[T]he wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.” The defendants never confessed, and they were hanged soon after the trial concluded.
Of course, this get-tough attitude toward witches was not limited to the common law as applied in England. It was also part of the law as applied in the colonies that were to become the United States. In Salem, Mass., 30 years later, more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 20 were killed.
Hale also had strong opinions on other issues affecting women. He saw no basis for prosecuting husbands for raping their wives, stating in one case, “For the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” That opinion had more staying power. It wasn’t finally repudiated in all states until 1993.
Some might think that the attitudes of someone like Hale are the product of a bygone era, much closer to Shakespeare’s time than to our own — hardly fundamental to an “essential” historical inquiry that guides jurisprudence today. We now know they would be wrong.
If attitudes from that era are to be a point of reference for the law on abortion, we should understand the full mindset they embodied. That historical inquiry could be quite revealing.
THE ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT IS IN DENIAL
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It is always painful to grapple with realities that contravene your most deeply held beliefs.
A major theme of recent feminist writing has been the chasm between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and many women’s depressing experience of casual sex. I’ve met many idealistic Jews, raised to always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, who’ve been floored when they saw the occupation of Palestine up close. Plenty of people convinced themselves that because the impetus behind pandemic school closures was noble, the results wouldn’t be devastating.
Perhaps some in the anti-abortion movement are wrestling with a similarly discomfiting gap between intentions and effects right now. That, at least, is the most sympathetic reading of the angry denial of prominent abortion opponents when confronted with a predictable consequence of abortion bans: delayed care for traumatic pregnancy complications.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last month, there’s been a steady barrage of horror stories, including several of women refused abortions for life-threatening pregnancy emergencies. Rakhi Dimino, a doctor in Texas, where most abortions have been illegal since last year, told PBS that more patients are coming to her with sepsis or hemorrhaging “than I’ve ever seen before.”
Some foes of abortion appear unbothered by such suffering; Idaho’s Republican Party recently rejected language from its party platform that would allow for abortions when a pregnant woman’s life is at stake. Others, however, seem to be struggling to reconcile their conviction that abortion bans are good for women with these evidently not-good outcomes. The result is frantic and sometimes paranoid deflection.
Recently NPR reported on the ordeal of Elizabeth Weller, a Houston woman whose water broke at 18 weeks. With little amniotic fluid left, her fetus had almost no chance of survival. Continuing the pregnancy put Weller at risk of infection and hemorrhage. She decided to terminate, but when her doctor arrived at the hospital to perform the procedure, she wasn’t allowed to because of Texas’s abortion ban. The fetus still had a heartbeat, and Weller didn’t yet show signs of severe medical distress. She waited for days, getting sicker, until a hospital ethics board ruled that she could be induced.
Weller’s story is at once shocking and, to anyone who has followed the issue closely, predictable. Even before the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, there were instances of egregious miscarriage mismanagement at Catholic hospitals, which operate under guidelines prohibiting abortion.
A 2008 article in The American Journal of Public Health detailed cases in which “Catholic-owned hospital ethics committees denied approval of uterine evacuation while fetal heart tones were still present, forcing physicians to delay care or transport miscarrying patients to non-Catholic-owned facilities.” According to a report by a Michigan health official obtained by The Guardian, one Catholic hospital subjected five women to dangerous delays in the treatment of miscarriages over just 17 months. In 2013 one of the women, Tamesha Means, sued the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, though her case was dismissed.
In fact, one reason Catholic hospital policies around abortion and miscarriage haven’t been even more devastating is that, with Roe standing, other hospitals served as a release valve. In a 2016 A.C.L.U. report, for example, several doctors described caring for patients transferred from Catholic hospitals that wouldn’t treat their pregnancy-related emergencies. One doctor, David Eisenberg, recalled a patient who was transferred to his hospital from a Catholic institution 10 days after her water broke. Her sepsis was so severe it left her with a cognitive injury. “To this day, I have never seen someone so sick — because we would never wait that long before evacuating the uterus,” he said.
I believe abortion laws put people’s health at grave risk, but that’s far from the only reason I oppose them. But dismissing an argument because of the motive of the person making it is a classic logical fallacy, the sort of thing you resort to when you’d rather not deal with the argument itself.
Members of the anti-abortion movement claim that abortion is never medically necessary. If they can’t bear to look clearly at the world they’ve made, maybe it’s because then they’d have to admit that what they’ve been saying has never been true.
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It is always painful to grapple with realities that contravene your most deeply held beliefs.
A major theme of recent feminist writing has been the chasm between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and many women’s depressing experience of casual sex. I’ve met many idealistic Jews, raised to always give Israel the benefit of the doubt, who’ve been floored when they saw the occupation of Palestine up close. Plenty of people convinced themselves that because the impetus behind pandemic school closures was noble, the results wouldn’t be devastating.
Perhaps some in the anti-abortion movement are wrestling with a similarly discomfiting gap between intentions and effects right now. That, at least, is the most sympathetic reading of the angry denial of prominent abortion opponents when confronted with a predictable consequence of abortion bans: delayed care for traumatic pregnancy complications.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned last month, there’s been a steady barrage of horror stories, including several of women refused abortions for life-threatening pregnancy emergencies. Rakhi Dimino, a doctor in Texas, where most abortions have been illegal since last year, told PBS that more patients are coming to her with sepsis or hemorrhaging “than I’ve ever seen before.”
Some foes of abortion appear unbothered by such suffering; Idaho’s Republican Party recently rejected language from its party platform that would allow for abortions when a pregnant woman’s life is at stake. Others, however, seem to be struggling to reconcile their conviction that abortion bans are good for women with these evidently not-good outcomes. The result is frantic and sometimes paranoid deflection.
Recently NPR reported on the ordeal of Elizabeth Weller, a Houston woman whose water broke at 18 weeks. With little amniotic fluid left, her fetus had almost no chance of survival. Continuing the pregnancy put Weller at risk of infection and hemorrhage. She decided to terminate, but when her doctor arrived at the hospital to perform the procedure, she wasn’t allowed to because of Texas’s abortion ban. The fetus still had a heartbeat, and Weller didn’t yet show signs of severe medical distress. She waited for days, getting sicker, until a hospital ethics board ruled that she could be induced.
Weller’s story is at once shocking and, to anyone who has followed the issue closely, predictable. Even before the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, there were instances of egregious miscarriage mismanagement at Catholic hospitals, which operate under guidelines prohibiting abortion.
A 2008 article in The American Journal of Public Health detailed cases in which “Catholic-owned hospital ethics committees denied approval of uterine evacuation while fetal heart tones were still present, forcing physicians to delay care or transport miscarrying patients to non-Catholic-owned facilities.” According to a report by a Michigan health official obtained by The Guardian, one Catholic hospital subjected five women to dangerous delays in the treatment of miscarriages over just 17 months. In 2013 one of the women, Tamesha Means, sued the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, though her case was dismissed.
In fact, one reason Catholic hospital policies around abortion and miscarriage haven’t been even more devastating is that, with Roe standing, other hospitals served as a release valve. In a 2016 A.C.L.U. report, for example, several doctors described caring for patients transferred from Catholic hospitals that wouldn’t treat their pregnancy-related emergencies. One doctor, David Eisenberg, recalled a patient who was transferred to his hospital from a Catholic institution 10 days after her water broke. Her sepsis was so severe it left her with a cognitive injury. “To this day, I have never seen someone so sick — because we would never wait that long before evacuating the uterus,” he said.
I believe abortion laws put people’s health at grave risk, but that’s far from the only reason I oppose them. But dismissing an argument because of the motive of the person making it is a classic logical fallacy, the sort of thing you resort to when you’d rather not deal with the argument itself.
Members of the anti-abortion movement claim that abortion is never medically necessary. If they can’t bear to look clearly at the world they’ve made, maybe it’s because then they’d have to admit that what they’ve been saying has never been true.
IT’S NO WONDER RIGHT-WING JUSTICES DIDN’T WEIGH DOBBS’S AWFUL IMPACT ON WOMEN
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
With so many disturbing aspects of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade — the shoddy history, the contempt for stare decisis, etc. — it is easy to forget that one of the most heinous came from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
During oral arguments, Julie Rikelman, counsel for Jackson’s Women Health, had the temerity to spell out the ramifications that bans would have on the health and future of women denied an abortion. Roberts cut her off and plunged ahead in his search for justification for a 15-week limit on the procedure.
In short, women were irrelevant to him; damage done to their right to life and liberty was brushed off. After all, if you insist on using 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was adopted — and women couldn’t vote) to determine our deeply held values, of course you’ll decide women’s lives are secondary.
The Dobbs defenders dismiss victims of the case’s outcome as statistically insignificant. They insist that incidents of raped children are “hoaxes.” They play down the real-world results of Dobbs despite real-world examples and uncontroverted data documenting harm to women denied abortions.
The definitive examination of abortion denial, Diana Greene Foster’s 2020 “The Turnaway Study,” looked at the lives of about 1,100 women over five years. Foster and a slew of researchers compared women denied abortion services because they were past the gestational limit with women at the same stage of pregnancy who got an abortion.
Especially with state legislators now deciding how much latitude to give women in controlling their own lives, you would think some of them might be interested in the results of the study, including the myths it obliterates and the suffering and maternal deaths it documents:
The best available evidence tells us that forcing women to give birth against their will isn’t just monstrous on its face but will have horrific practical consequences. More women (especially poor women and women of color) will die, have serious health problems, wind up in poverty and on public assistance, have longer exposure to abusive partners, and see their education and life goals short-circuited. The bans will inflict hardship on existing children, too, who could become orphaned, lose sufficient care or fall into poverty. No wonder forced-birth hard-liners don’t want to listen to the facts — and the chief justice of the United States wants to gloss right over them.
The most definitive data unmistakably refute the claim that abortion bans are “good” for women. Few things could be more barbaric than robbing women of control over a critical life decision and forcing them to endure the bleak outcomes we know will follow.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
With so many disturbing aspects of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade — the shoddy history, the contempt for stare decisis, etc. — it is easy to forget that one of the most heinous came from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
During oral arguments, Julie Rikelman, counsel for Jackson’s Women Health, had the temerity to spell out the ramifications that bans would have on the health and future of women denied an abortion. Roberts cut her off and plunged ahead in his search for justification for a 15-week limit on the procedure.
In short, women were irrelevant to him; damage done to their right to life and liberty was brushed off. After all, if you insist on using 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was adopted — and women couldn’t vote) to determine our deeply held values, of course you’ll decide women’s lives are secondary.
The Dobbs defenders dismiss victims of the case’s outcome as statistically insignificant. They insist that incidents of raped children are “hoaxes.” They play down the real-world results of Dobbs despite real-world examples and uncontroverted data documenting harm to women denied abortions.
The definitive examination of abortion denial, Diana Greene Foster’s 2020 “The Turnaway Study,” looked at the lives of about 1,100 women over five years. Foster and a slew of researchers compared women denied abortion services because they were past the gestational limit with women at the same stage of pregnancy who got an abortion.
Especially with state legislators now deciding how much latitude to give women in controlling their own lives, you would think some of them might be interested in the results of the study, including the myths it obliterates and the suffering and maternal deaths it documents:
- Less than 10 percent of women consider adoption, blowing a hole in antiabortion advocates’ notion of that option as an obvious, simple solution.
- Time limits on abortion are not effective in preventing already rare “late term” abortions; the primary cause for delaying until the second trimester is late discovery of pregnancy (usually in young women with no pregnancy symptoms and irregular periods). How can women seek an early abortion if they don’t know they’re pregnant? Difficulty finding a provider also pushes abortions later — and bans and restrictions often add to delays by forcing women to plan travel out of state.
- Forced-birth activists’ insistence that abortions are dangerous and/or harmful to women is utterly false. Much greater harm to women’s physical health, family situation, economic condition and life trajectory comes from being denied an abortion. Also, some 95 percent of women who had abortions are glad they did.
- Waiting periods mostly create only later-term abortions. The study documents that the vast majority of women have already considered their decision.
- Since poverty or lack of resources for existing children motivate a large share of abortions, the best “prevention” would be robust economic, social and educational assistance for pregnant women. Unfortunately, the forced-birth crowd largely isn’t interested.
- Roughly 60 percent of women who get abortions have one or more children already, and many women plan to have children later, once they are ready. Abortion bans mean more unwanted pregnancies and fewer later, wanted pregnancies when the woman is confident she can parent.
- Women rarely regret their abortions. After their abortion, 90 percent of women in the study felt “relief.” In the short run, women denied abortions experienced the greater emotional stress, and women who had abortions had long-term mental health outcomes no different than those of women who were denied. Physical health among those denied abortions was far worse; two in the study died.
The best available evidence tells us that forcing women to give birth against their will isn’t just monstrous on its face but will have horrific practical consequences. More women (especially poor women and women of color) will die, have serious health problems, wind up in poverty and on public assistance, have longer exposure to abusive partners, and see their education and life goals short-circuited. The bans will inflict hardship on existing children, too, who could become orphaned, lose sufficient care or fall into poverty. No wonder forced-birth hard-liners don’t want to listen to the facts — and the chief justice of the United States wants to gloss right over them.
The most definitive data unmistakably refute the claim that abortion bans are “good” for women. Few things could be more barbaric than robbing women of control over a critical life decision and forcing them to endure the bleak outcomes we know will follow.
THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN WOMEN BECOME SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The horror stories from state abortion bans are piling up: Women facing dangerous delays in care for miscarriages. Doctors violating their training and waiting until their patient is at death’s door before performing an abortion. Pharmacists struggling to understand whether filling prescriptions for drugs that are used both for abortions and for post-miscarriage treatment opens them up to criminal charges.
Episodes in which women are needlessly denied treatment will become commonplace. The Advocate reports this disturbing account from Louisiana:
A woman who was 16 weeks pregnant had her water break, and her doctor wanted to perform a dilation and evacuation, a type of abortion procedure, to take out the fetus, which was not viable. But the doctor consulted with an attorney, who advised against it. … [T]he woman preferred the abortion, but instead “was forced to go through a painful, hours-long labor to deliver a nonviable fetus, despite her wishes and best medical advice.”
Hospitals and their lawyers are being forced to interpret statutory terms that don’t correspond to medical practice and language. These laws often demand a degree of certainty doctors can’t provide. Katie McHugh, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Indiana, tells me doctors must now tell patients that a given procedure is “what she would medically recommend,” but then inform the patient she can’t receive that treatment in her state. In other words, doctors in some states are becoming travel agents for abortion services.
In many states, the substantial risk to mental health (e.g., depression, suicidal ideation) might not “count” as a valid exception to abortion bans. And are the risks associated with traveling long distances for women determined to seek an abortion factored into the calculation? Definitive answers are nonexistent.
Most egregiously, McHugh adds, these laws do not envision chronic conditions. A pregnant woman at risk of liver failure, for example, may face debilitating conditions or even death down the road if she gives birth. But if state law requires imminent risk of death to perform the procedure, she may have to carry the pregnancy to term against her wishes and doctor’s advice. This is barbaric.
Katie Watson, a lawyer and ethicist at Northwestern University, tells me that without an abortion ban, a doctor telling a patient to wait for treatment until she becomes really sick would qualify as malpractice. She also warns that state laws may be “criminalizing” miscarriages since medications used to clear the uterus after a miscarriage, such as mifepristone and misoprostol, are also used for an abortion. Miscarrying women — and their doctors — could face intense scrutiny.
One thing is certain, Watson says: “More babies will be born, and more women will die.” That’s just reality in a country with high maternal death rates. And that will fall disproportionately on Black women, who are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy than White women.
Meanwhile, pregnant minors face larger risks to physical health (e.g., an increased need for a Caesarean section) and moral trauma above and beyond what an adult victim would face. This is especially true for rape victims.
In short, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has thrown out the basic premise of medicine: to minimize health risks. The ruling generated chaos among doctors, lawyers and patients, who must now wrestle with incoherent restrictions or bans.
As Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, the court’s disastrous jurisprudence creates “a kind of uncertainty that makes it difficult to advise people on what their rights are and to advise institutions on what they can do to secure those rights when courts take them away.”
She continued:
The resulting uncertainty is already having devastating consequences, as we hear from those who are unable to travel for care, the struggles of those trying to manage their care at home, and the nightmares faced by those who do travel for care, including the 10-year-old rape victim who was forced to obtain an abortion from an out-of-state provider. That is the world we are now living in. …
People are rightfully unsure about what their rights are on any given day; politicians and advocates are claiming broader and broader authority over individuals, and broadcasting plans to restrict other rights related to autonomy, personhood, family, and home that so many people rely on.
Decades of litigation have only just begun. Dobbs abolished federal constitutional protection for abortion, but state laws and constitutions may offer relief. The Post reports that multiple states will have measures on their ballots in November that could extend or protect abortion rights. This includes Michigan, where more than enough signatures were submitted to add a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion rights.
Meanwhile, litigation in state courts in Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia will test various legal theories to overturn abortion bans, including:
Doctors, courts, patients and prosecutors are in uncharted waters. Indeed, mass confusion might be a feature, not a bug, for forced-birth advocates since uncertainty chills abortion care.
It’s no wonder the Supreme Court doesn’t leave any other fundamental rights to be decided at the state level. Imagine if, for example, protections from unreasonable search and seizure were in the hands of state lawmakers. Now, women must fend for themselves without constitutional armor to shield their cherished rights. That’s the essence of what it means to be a second-class citizen.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
The horror stories from state abortion bans are piling up: Women facing dangerous delays in care for miscarriages. Doctors violating their training and waiting until their patient is at death’s door before performing an abortion. Pharmacists struggling to understand whether filling prescriptions for drugs that are used both for abortions and for post-miscarriage treatment opens them up to criminal charges.
Episodes in which women are needlessly denied treatment will become commonplace. The Advocate reports this disturbing account from Louisiana:
A woman who was 16 weeks pregnant had her water break, and her doctor wanted to perform a dilation and evacuation, a type of abortion procedure, to take out the fetus, which was not viable. But the doctor consulted with an attorney, who advised against it. … [T]he woman preferred the abortion, but instead “was forced to go through a painful, hours-long labor to deliver a nonviable fetus, despite her wishes and best medical advice.”
Hospitals and their lawyers are being forced to interpret statutory terms that don’t correspond to medical practice and language. These laws often demand a degree of certainty doctors can’t provide. Katie McHugh, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Indiana, tells me doctors must now tell patients that a given procedure is “what she would medically recommend,” but then inform the patient she can’t receive that treatment in her state. In other words, doctors in some states are becoming travel agents for abortion services.
In many states, the substantial risk to mental health (e.g., depression, suicidal ideation) might not “count” as a valid exception to abortion bans. And are the risks associated with traveling long distances for women determined to seek an abortion factored into the calculation? Definitive answers are nonexistent.
Most egregiously, McHugh adds, these laws do not envision chronic conditions. A pregnant woman at risk of liver failure, for example, may face debilitating conditions or even death down the road if she gives birth. But if state law requires imminent risk of death to perform the procedure, she may have to carry the pregnancy to term against her wishes and doctor’s advice. This is barbaric.
Katie Watson, a lawyer and ethicist at Northwestern University, tells me that without an abortion ban, a doctor telling a patient to wait for treatment until she becomes really sick would qualify as malpractice. She also warns that state laws may be “criminalizing” miscarriages since medications used to clear the uterus after a miscarriage, such as mifepristone and misoprostol, are also used for an abortion. Miscarrying women — and their doctors — could face intense scrutiny.
One thing is certain, Watson says: “More babies will be born, and more women will die.” That’s just reality in a country with high maternal death rates. And that will fall disproportionately on Black women, who are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy than White women.
Meanwhile, pregnant minors face larger risks to physical health (e.g., an increased need for a Caesarean section) and moral trauma above and beyond what an adult victim would face. This is especially true for rape victims.
In short, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has thrown out the basic premise of medicine: to minimize health risks. The ruling generated chaos among doctors, lawyers and patients, who must now wrestle with incoherent restrictions or bans.
As Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, the court’s disastrous jurisprudence creates “a kind of uncertainty that makes it difficult to advise people on what their rights are and to advise institutions on what they can do to secure those rights when courts take them away.”
She continued:
The resulting uncertainty is already having devastating consequences, as we hear from those who are unable to travel for care, the struggles of those trying to manage their care at home, and the nightmares faced by those who do travel for care, including the 10-year-old rape victim who was forced to obtain an abortion from an out-of-state provider. That is the world we are now living in. …
People are rightfully unsure about what their rights are on any given day; politicians and advocates are claiming broader and broader authority over individuals, and broadcasting plans to restrict other rights related to autonomy, personhood, family, and home that so many people rely on.
Decades of litigation have only just begun. Dobbs abolished federal constitutional protection for abortion, but state laws and constitutions may offer relief. The Post reports that multiple states will have measures on their ballots in November that could extend or protect abortion rights. This includes Michigan, where more than enough signatures were submitted to add a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion rights.
Meanwhile, litigation in state courts in Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia will test various legal theories to overturn abortion bans, including:
- Claiming that the laws are unconstitutionally vague, as is the basis for suits in Arizona, Louisiana and Oklahoma, where doctors or patients are unable to determine what’s legal and what’s not.
- Arguing that abortion bans would infringe upon a doctor’s religious beliefs if their religious views prioritize preventing harm to people’s health.
- Claiming that bans would deprive Black women’s equal protection, since forced-birth policies will burden them.
- Making the case that bans amount to a denial of all women’s equal protection, since they are uniquely being denied proper reproductive care, unlike any other patient category.
- Focusing on the arbitrary loss of life or liberty, in violation of due process.
Doctors, courts, patients and prosecutors are in uncharted waters. Indeed, mass confusion might be a feature, not a bug, for forced-birth advocates since uncertainty chills abortion care.
It’s no wonder the Supreme Court doesn’t leave any other fundamental rights to be decided at the state level. Imagine if, for example, protections from unreasonable search and seizure were in the hands of state lawmakers. Now, women must fend for themselves without constitutional armor to shield their cherished rights. That’s the essence of what it means to be a second-class citizen.
THE ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT’S CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN IS WORSE THAN I IMAGINED
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of women being denied care for miscarriages and otherwise having their lives endangered because of state abortion bans.
The Washington Post reported on a woman who had to travel to Michigan after a doctor in her home state refused to end an ectopic pregnancy because of the presence of fetal cardiac activity. (Ectopic pregnancies, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus, never lead to a live birth and are the leading cause of first-trimester maternal death.)
In an interview with The Associated Press, a doctor described a patient who was miscarrying in Texas and had developed a uterine infection. She couldn’t get the necessary treatment — an immediate abortion — as long as the fetus displayed signs of life. “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine,” The A.P. reported, all because, as the doctor said, “we were essentially 24 hours behind.”
A doctor in Wisconsin, Carley Zeal, told The New York Times about caring for a woman having a miscarriage who had been denied treatment at a hospital. By the time she found Dr. Zeal, The Times reported, “the woman had been bleeding intermittently for days,” which the doctor said put her at “increased risk of hemorrhage or infection.”
Some in the anti-abortion movement insist that the doctors refusing to treat these women are mistaken about what the laws in their states say. “To the extent that doctors or attorneys are confused about whether necessary women’s health care is forbidden under pro-life laws, the fault lies in large part with pro-abortion activists, who have been intentionally muddying the waters,” tweeted Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a writer for National Review and the co-author of “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”
If that was the case, one might think abortion opponents would be eager to see their laws clarified. After all, the suffering caused by mismanaged miscarriages doesn’t serve the cause of fetal life. Ultimately, it will likely be detrimental to the anti-abortion movement. In Ireland, it was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who developed septicemia after being refused a termination while she was miscarrying, that spurred the successful campaign for legalized abortion there. Preventing such deaths should be as urgent a priority for those opposed to legal abortion as for those who champion it.
But it isn’t. Last week, the Biden administration released guidance that under federal law, hospitals must provide abortions when they’re necessary to stabilize patients suffering medical emergencies, or transfer them to a hospital that will. Texas is suing to prevent that policy from going into effect, saying it would “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
Idaho’s Republican Party recently changed its platform to call for the criminalization of all abortions without exception. According to a blog post by Idaho Reports, a public policy television program, some delegates shared concerns about ectopic pregnancies and proposed an exemption in the platform when a woman’s life is in “lethal danger.” The exemption proposal was voted down, 412-164.
In The Times, the president of Texas Right to Life, John Seago, acknowledged that abortion bans could delay intervention during miscarriages. Doctors, he said, cannot decide that “I want to cause the death of the child today because I believe that they’re going to pass away eventually.”
I thought I was sufficiently cynical about the anti-abortion movement, but I admit to being taken aback by this blithe, public disregard for the lives of women, including women suffering the loss of wanted pregnancies.
I suspect that part of what’s happening is the right following its own rhetoric to its logical conclusion. It’s common for abortion opponents to claim that abortion is never medically necessary. Among conservative elites, this argument relies on semantic trickery, defining the termination of pregnancy to save a woman’s life as something other than abortion. Hence when the president of Americans United for Life testified before Congress, she argued, about the high-profile case of the 10-year-old rape victim, “If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion.”
This stance allows some abortion opponents to avoid reckoning with the consequences of the laws they support. Others, however, see those consequences fully and are fine with them. Scott Herndon, an Idaho Republican who recently unseated an incumbent state senator, was the politician who proposed the abortion criminalization language in his party’s platform. A website he runs, Abolish Abortion Idaho, says, of legislation he pushes, “Doctors may not intentionally kill the child in their medical attempts to treat the mother.”
On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Herndon posted a Facebook video arguing for murder prosecutions for abortion patients as well as abortion providers. “This body inside the mother’s body is not her body, and we need to get over the lie that mothers are not accountable,” he said. Men like him are making laws now. Don’t expect mercy.
By Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
It’s getting hard to keep track of all the stories of women being denied care for miscarriages and otherwise having their lives endangered because of state abortion bans.
The Washington Post reported on a woman who had to travel to Michigan after a doctor in her home state refused to end an ectopic pregnancy because of the presence of fetal cardiac activity. (Ectopic pregnancies, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus, never lead to a live birth and are the leading cause of first-trimester maternal death.)
In an interview with The Associated Press, a doctor described a patient who was miscarrying in Texas and had developed a uterine infection. She couldn’t get the necessary treatment — an immediate abortion — as long as the fetus displayed signs of life. “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine,” The A.P. reported, all because, as the doctor said, “we were essentially 24 hours behind.”
A doctor in Wisconsin, Carley Zeal, told The New York Times about caring for a woman having a miscarriage who had been denied treatment at a hospital. By the time she found Dr. Zeal, The Times reported, “the woman had been bleeding intermittently for days,” which the doctor said put her at “increased risk of hemorrhage or infection.”
Some in the anti-abortion movement insist that the doctors refusing to treat these women are mistaken about what the laws in their states say. “To the extent that doctors or attorneys are confused about whether necessary women’s health care is forbidden under pro-life laws, the fault lies in large part with pro-abortion activists, who have been intentionally muddying the waters,” tweeted Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a writer for National Review and the co-author of “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.”
If that was the case, one might think abortion opponents would be eager to see their laws clarified. After all, the suffering caused by mismanaged miscarriages doesn’t serve the cause of fetal life. Ultimately, it will likely be detrimental to the anti-abortion movement. In Ireland, it was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who developed septicemia after being refused a termination while she was miscarrying, that spurred the successful campaign for legalized abortion there. Preventing such deaths should be as urgent a priority for those opposed to legal abortion as for those who champion it.
But it isn’t. Last week, the Biden administration released guidance that under federal law, hospitals must provide abortions when they’re necessary to stabilize patients suffering medical emergencies, or transfer them to a hospital that will. Texas is suing to prevent that policy from going into effect, saying it would “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
Idaho’s Republican Party recently changed its platform to call for the criminalization of all abortions without exception. According to a blog post by Idaho Reports, a public policy television program, some delegates shared concerns about ectopic pregnancies and proposed an exemption in the platform when a woman’s life is in “lethal danger.” The exemption proposal was voted down, 412-164.
In The Times, the president of Texas Right to Life, John Seago, acknowledged that abortion bans could delay intervention during miscarriages. Doctors, he said, cannot decide that “I want to cause the death of the child today because I believe that they’re going to pass away eventually.”
I thought I was sufficiently cynical about the anti-abortion movement, but I admit to being taken aback by this blithe, public disregard for the lives of women, including women suffering the loss of wanted pregnancies.
I suspect that part of what’s happening is the right following its own rhetoric to its logical conclusion. It’s common for abortion opponents to claim that abortion is never medically necessary. Among conservative elites, this argument relies on semantic trickery, defining the termination of pregnancy to save a woman’s life as something other than abortion. Hence when the president of Americans United for Life testified before Congress, she argued, about the high-profile case of the 10-year-old rape victim, “If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion.”
This stance allows some abortion opponents to avoid reckoning with the consequences of the laws they support. Others, however, see those consequences fully and are fine with them. Scott Herndon, an Idaho Republican who recently unseated an incumbent state senator, was the politician who proposed the abortion criminalization language in his party’s platform. A website he runs, Abolish Abortion Idaho, says, of legislation he pushes, “Doctors may not intentionally kill the child in their medical attempts to treat the mother.”
On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Herndon posted a Facebook video arguing for murder prosecutions for abortion patients as well as abortion providers. “This body inside the mother’s body is not her body, and we need to get over the lie that mothers are not accountable,” he said. Men like him are making laws now. Don’t expect mercy.
REPUBLICANS’ HASTY ATTACKS ON WOMEN SHOW THEY WERE NEVER PRO-LIFE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just when it seemed that forced-birth advocates could not be any more cruel or disdainful of women’s lives, Texas’s Ken Paxton stepped up to confirm this crowd is anything but pro-life. The Post reports that the Republican state attorney general “sued the Biden administration over federal rules that require abortions be provided in medical emergencies to save the life of the mother, even in states with near-total bans.”
Texas Republicans are apparently outraged by the administration’s recent reminder that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, emergency rooms must screen, stabilize and treat patients at risk of death before transferring them to another facility. In the case of pregnancy complications (e.g., preeclampsia, premature rupture of the membranes), an emergency abortion may be recommended to prevent serious permanent injury or death. How could any public official who claims to be “pro-life” seek to impede such a lifesaving intervention?
As White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday, “This is yet another example of an extreme and radical Republican elected official. It is unthinkable that this public official would sue to block women from receiving life-saving care in emergency rooms, a right protected under U.S. law.”
Perhaps “unthinkable” is the wrong word. Defenders of women’s fundamental right to access abortion have long argued that the forced-birth crowd is not “pro-life.” History and the experiences of other countries show that when abortion is restricted, maternal mortality increases. A truly “pro-life” politician would support birth control, prenatal care, Medicaid extension, child-care subsidies and other government initiatives. By and large, the right-wing abortion cops aren’t in favor of any of that.
Instead, forced birth has always been about controlling women and compelling them to prioritize motherhood above all other roles, regardless of any serious health conditions. No other patient in distress — and certainly no man — would ever expect lifesaving measures to hinge on doctors and hospital lawyers’ agreement on interpretation of a state law seeking to outlaw a necessary medical procedure.
Rochelle Garza, Paxton’s Democratic opponent in Texas’s attorney general race, spoke for many outraged women when she tweeted, “What he’s advocating for is femicide — the intentional killing of women by withholding life-saving care. This lawsuit does not reflect Texans’ values and we will not sit idly by while Paxton turns our state into a morgue.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing ordeal of the 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio forced to travel to Indiana to get an abortion became even more excruciating, thanks to Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita. The Republican went on Fox News on Wednesday to say his office is investigating Caitlin Bernard, the Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who provided the abortion. “We’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure,” Rokita said. He also repeated baseless claims that Bernard had “a history of failing to report” child abuse cases.
As it turns out, Bernard filed the appropriate report in a timely manner. Her attorney said in a statement, “She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client, including Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, and know that the facts will all come out in due time.” It sounds like she has a powerful case.
Rokita’s incendiary remarks, not unlike defeated former president Donald Trump’s smear of Georgia election workers, could reasonably have been expected to unleash the right-wing mob on the doctor, either virtually or in person. The reckless attack surely added to the victim’s stress. Public targeting of a rape victim and her doctor likely will deter other victims from coming forward.
The episode is yet another example reflecting the forced-birth movement’s utter disregard for the well-being of women and girls. Rokita, like Paxton, treats them as pawns in a power grab to keep his supporters infuriated and himself in office.
It cannot be said strongly enough: In denying women have any interest in protecting their bodily integrity and intimate decision-making, the right-wing Supreme Court set up millions of women, their families, and their doctors for abuse, disrespect and physical and mental harm.
Indiana’s legislature has been called back into special session on July 25 to consider further restrictions on abortion care. Have Republicans not inflicted enough humiliation, and not endangered enough women, girls and doctors? Oh no, I fear they are only getting started.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just when it seemed that forced-birth advocates could not be any more cruel or disdainful of women’s lives, Texas’s Ken Paxton stepped up to confirm this crowd is anything but pro-life. The Post reports that the Republican state attorney general “sued the Biden administration over federal rules that require abortions be provided in medical emergencies to save the life of the mother, even in states with near-total bans.”
Texas Republicans are apparently outraged by the administration’s recent reminder that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, emergency rooms must screen, stabilize and treat patients at risk of death before transferring them to another facility. In the case of pregnancy complications (e.g., preeclampsia, premature rupture of the membranes), an emergency abortion may be recommended to prevent serious permanent injury or death. How could any public official who claims to be “pro-life” seek to impede such a lifesaving intervention?
As White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday, “This is yet another example of an extreme and radical Republican elected official. It is unthinkable that this public official would sue to block women from receiving life-saving care in emergency rooms, a right protected under U.S. law.”
Perhaps “unthinkable” is the wrong word. Defenders of women’s fundamental right to access abortion have long argued that the forced-birth crowd is not “pro-life.” History and the experiences of other countries show that when abortion is restricted, maternal mortality increases. A truly “pro-life” politician would support birth control, prenatal care, Medicaid extension, child-care subsidies and other government initiatives. By and large, the right-wing abortion cops aren’t in favor of any of that.
Instead, forced birth has always been about controlling women and compelling them to prioritize motherhood above all other roles, regardless of any serious health conditions. No other patient in distress — and certainly no man — would ever expect lifesaving measures to hinge on doctors and hospital lawyers’ agreement on interpretation of a state law seeking to outlaw a necessary medical procedure.
Rochelle Garza, Paxton’s Democratic opponent in Texas’s attorney general race, spoke for many outraged women when she tweeted, “What he’s advocating for is femicide — the intentional killing of women by withholding life-saving care. This lawsuit does not reflect Texans’ values and we will not sit idly by while Paxton turns our state into a morgue.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing ordeal of the 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio forced to travel to Indiana to get an abortion became even more excruciating, thanks to Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita. The Republican went on Fox News on Wednesday to say his office is investigating Caitlin Bernard, the Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who provided the abortion. “We’re gathering the evidence as we speak, and we’re going to fight this to the end, including looking at her licensure,” Rokita said. He also repeated baseless claims that Bernard had “a history of failing to report” child abuse cases.
As it turns out, Bernard filed the appropriate report in a timely manner. Her attorney said in a statement, “She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client, including Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, and know that the facts will all come out in due time.” It sounds like she has a powerful case.
Rokita’s incendiary remarks, not unlike defeated former president Donald Trump’s smear of Georgia election workers, could reasonably have been expected to unleash the right-wing mob on the doctor, either virtually or in person. The reckless attack surely added to the victim’s stress. Public targeting of a rape victim and her doctor likely will deter other victims from coming forward.
The episode is yet another example reflecting the forced-birth movement’s utter disregard for the well-being of women and girls. Rokita, like Paxton, treats them as pawns in a power grab to keep his supporters infuriated and himself in office.
It cannot be said strongly enough: In denying women have any interest in protecting their bodily integrity and intimate decision-making, the right-wing Supreme Court set up millions of women, their families, and their doctors for abuse, disrespect and physical and mental harm.
Indiana’s legislature has been called back into special session on July 25 to consider further restrictions on abortion care. Have Republicans not inflicted enough humiliation, and not endangered enough women, girls and doctors? Oh no, I fear they are only getting started.
‘PRO-LIFE’? WOMEN’S SUFFERING IS FORCED-BIRTH ZEALOTS’ DOING.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just as advocates of abortion access warned, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is resulting in increased pain, anguish and risk of death for pregnant women. It’s forcing health-care providers into a Catch-22 where they increasingly must navigate between their professional obligation to provide appropriate medical care and their fear of criminal prosecution and loss of their medical licenses.
The Post reports that “the standard of care for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other common complications is being scrutinized, delayed — even denied — jeopardizing maternal health, according to the accounts of doctors in multiple states where new laws have gone into effect.”
Forced-birth zealots have set up a system in which doctors in states with draconian and/or hopelessly vague abortion bans are compelled to defer medically recommended abortion until the woman is at imminent risk of death. In those states, too, pharmacists resist filling a prescription for medication to resolve miscarriages — because exactly the same drug is used for abortion.
The new legal thicket can delay access to medical abortions (generally available up to 10 or 11 weeks) and thereby require women to undergo more expensive and risky surgery. Confusion about the legal status of treating ectopic pregnancies — virtually none of which would result in a live birth — can put women’s health in grave danger. (The Post reports: “Delaying treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is so dangerous it would amount to malpractice, said Pamela Parker, an OB/GYN in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.”)
Lauren Thaxton, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Texas at Austin, tells me that because medical risks associated with pregnancy (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, cardiac conditions) might develop later in pregnancy, possibly manifesting suddenly, these new, stringent requirements prevent doctors and patients from responsible planning that would weigh the risk of death and risk to the woman’s long-term health.
Doctors may be at the mercy of hospital lawyers, who themselves may not be able to predict how imprecise state laws, written in nonmedical terms, might be applied. While doctors are used to assessing what they might reasonably expect, state laws might demand a level of certainty to perform an abortion that simply does not apply in medical settings.
If, for example, a woman suffers a ruptured membrane (water breaking) before 22 to 24 weeks, the chance of the fetus’s survival is negligible while the woman faces risk of infection or hemorrhaging, Thaxton explains. A responsible OB/GYN almost certainly would not delay or deny an abortion; under Texas’s rigid six-week abortion ban, that might be precisely what the doctor is compelled to do.
The impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on girls should make all but the most heartless forced-birth advocates shudder. “New bans in nearly a dozen states do not make exceptions for rape or incest, leaving young adolescents — already among the most restricted in their abortion options — with less access to the procedure,” the New York Times reports. “Even in states with exemptions for rape and incest, requirements involving police reports and parental consent can be prohibitive for children and teenagers.”
The disastrous episode involving a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio could be repeated countless times as abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest multiply.
Even before Dobbs’s full impact is known, Americans are already expressing deep opposition to a new legal landscape that puts consideration of women’s well-being, even their lives, at the bottom of the list. In the latest Fox News poll, 60 percent oppose the court’s overturning of Roe, and the new regimen in many states is hugely unpopular. Only 9 percent would ban abortion if the woman’s life is at risk and only 11 percent if her health is endangered or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Pro-women’s-life-and-health advocates have an opportunity to focus voters’ attention on state ballot measures regarding abortion rights (in Kansas next month, in Michigan in November), and on the abortion stances of candidates in state and local elections.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort to take up a bill that would guarantee women’s right to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. Now we are beginning to see just how tyrannical and radical is the mind-set of forced-birth crusaders.
Congress would be well advised to hold hearings not only in Washington but also in states where bans are going into effect to educate state lawmakers, governors and voters about the the post-Roe world the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have imposed on Americans.
It behooves the media, the medical profession and anyone defending the dignity, health and life of women to demand that Republicans face up to the consequences of their handiwork — and to demand accountability for the damage they are causing.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Just as advocates of abortion access warned, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is resulting in increased pain, anguish and risk of death for pregnant women. It’s forcing health-care providers into a Catch-22 where they increasingly must navigate between their professional obligation to provide appropriate medical care and their fear of criminal prosecution and loss of their medical licenses.
The Post reports that “the standard of care for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other common complications is being scrutinized, delayed — even denied — jeopardizing maternal health, according to the accounts of doctors in multiple states where new laws have gone into effect.”
Forced-birth zealots have set up a system in which doctors in states with draconian and/or hopelessly vague abortion bans are compelled to defer medically recommended abortion until the woman is at imminent risk of death. In those states, too, pharmacists resist filling a prescription for medication to resolve miscarriages — because exactly the same drug is used for abortion.
The new legal thicket can delay access to medical abortions (generally available up to 10 or 11 weeks) and thereby require women to undergo more expensive and risky surgery. Confusion about the legal status of treating ectopic pregnancies — virtually none of which would result in a live birth — can put women’s health in grave danger. (The Post reports: “Delaying treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is so dangerous it would amount to malpractice, said Pamela Parker, an OB/GYN in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.”)
Lauren Thaxton, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Texas at Austin, tells me that because medical risks associated with pregnancy (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, cardiac conditions) might develop later in pregnancy, possibly manifesting suddenly, these new, stringent requirements prevent doctors and patients from responsible planning that would weigh the risk of death and risk to the woman’s long-term health.
Doctors may be at the mercy of hospital lawyers, who themselves may not be able to predict how imprecise state laws, written in nonmedical terms, might be applied. While doctors are used to assessing what they might reasonably expect, state laws might demand a level of certainty to perform an abortion that simply does not apply in medical settings.
If, for example, a woman suffers a ruptured membrane (water breaking) before 22 to 24 weeks, the chance of the fetus’s survival is negligible while the woman faces risk of infection or hemorrhaging, Thaxton explains. A responsible OB/GYN almost certainly would not delay or deny an abortion; under Texas’s rigid six-week abortion ban, that might be precisely what the doctor is compelled to do.
The impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on girls should make all but the most heartless forced-birth advocates shudder. “New bans in nearly a dozen states do not make exceptions for rape or incest, leaving young adolescents — already among the most restricted in their abortion options — with less access to the procedure,” the New York Times reports. “Even in states with exemptions for rape and incest, requirements involving police reports and parental consent can be prohibitive for children and teenagers.”
The disastrous episode involving a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio could be repeated countless times as abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest multiply.
Even before Dobbs’s full impact is known, Americans are already expressing deep opposition to a new legal landscape that puts consideration of women’s well-being, even their lives, at the bottom of the list. In the latest Fox News poll, 60 percent oppose the court’s overturning of Roe, and the new regimen in many states is hugely unpopular. Only 9 percent would ban abortion if the woman’s life is at risk and only 11 percent if her health is endangered or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Pro-women’s-life-and-health advocates have an opportunity to focus voters’ attention on state ballot measures regarding abortion rights (in Kansas next month, in Michigan in November), and on the abortion stances of candidates in state and local elections.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort to take up a bill that would guarantee women’s right to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. Now we are beginning to see just how tyrannical and radical is the mind-set of forced-birth crusaders.
Congress would be well advised to hold hearings not only in Washington but also in states where bans are going into effect to educate state lawmakers, governors and voters about the the post-Roe world the Supreme Court’s conservative justices have imposed on Americans.
It behooves the media, the medical profession and anyone defending the dignity, health and life of women to demand that Republicans face up to the consequences of their handiwork — and to demand accountability for the damage they are causing.
A 10-YEAR-OLD RAPE VICTIM’S PLIGHT SHOWS WHY POLITICIANS SHOULD STAY OUT OF ABORTION
By Jennifer Rubin, The New York Times
President Biden last week channeled the horror that many felt regarding the news of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to go out of state to obtain an abortion. "Imagine being that little girl,” he said, decrying the suggestion from antiabortion zealots that she should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s child. “I can’t think of anything as much more extreme.”
Well, now, we have something even more extreme: Right-wing Ohio politicians accusing the child of making a false allegation to get an abortion. Think about that. They thought a 10-year-old was simply promiscuous and looking for an excuse to end her pregnancy? The mind reels.
The Columbus Dispatch reports, “Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost appeared on Fox News this week, casting doubt on the veracity of Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s account that a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim needed to travel to Indiana for an abortion.” Yost repeated the accusation during an interview with USA Today: “Every day that goes by, the more likely that this is a fabrication. I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. . . . And shame on the Indianapolis paper that ran this thing on a single source who has an obvious axe to grind.”
The shame was his. After the alleged rapist was arrested on Tuesday, I reached out to Yost’s office to see if he would apologize for his comments. He did not respond.
Yost wasn’t alone in casting aspersions on the victim’s account. The Dispatch reported:
Rep. Jim Jordan ... also cast doubt on the veracity of the story this week and shared an article about Yost’s comments that no evidence had been found.
“Another lie,” he tweeted. “Anyone surprised?”
After news of the arrest broke, Jordan tweeted that the man charged “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
No response from his office either.
As a preliminary matter, it is grossly inappropriate — and arguably a violation of prosecutors’ code of ethics — to publicly (and with zero basis) demean a victim’s account. The American Bar Association rules state: “The prosecutor should not make, cause to be made, or authorize or condone the making of, a public statement that the prosecutor knows or reasonably should know will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing a criminal proceeding or heightening public condemnation of the accused.”
In the case of sexual violence, Yost’s conduct is especially egregious given the aversion that many victims already feel about going to law enforcement. And in the case of a child, it is nothing short of barbaric. Yost’s remarks could encourage abusers to tell their victims, “No one’s going to believe you.”
Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade tells me: “This is the new world we live in. To get an abortion under a rape exception to the law, a victim must prove there was a rape, and must do so more quickly than a pregnancy will permit.” She continues, “Instead of diligently investigating the rape, a Republican official is incentivized to signal to his supporters that he cares more about preventing the abortion than prosecuting the rapist. Rape victims will be twice victimized.”
The rape victim in Ohio was put in this position because the state’s GOP legislature passed a six-week abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed it. While DeWine did not insult the victim upon learning of the case, his statement gave no indication that he understood the law he signed was responsible for the victim’s extended trauma. “This is a horrible, horrible tragedy for a 10-year-old to be assaulted, for a 10-year-old to be raped,” DeWine said on July 6. “As a father and as a grandfather, it’s just gut-wrenching to even think about it.”
Not gut-wrenching enough, however, to spare her the delay and ordeal of out-of-state travel to terminate the pregnancy.
The entire episode should underscore the forced-birth cohort’s monstrous dehumanization of women. They do not trust women, their families, doctors or clergy to make decisions that involve serious risks of mental and emotional harm. These politicians would deny women and girls the autonomy to make life decisions that will have life-changing consequences for them and their families. Even worse, too many politicians fail to demonstrate any respect for victims who report sexual assault.
If there were ever an advertisement against allowing politicians to override intimate health decisions of women and girls, this is it. Do Ohioans really want to sign over control of their lives to the likes of Yost, DeWine and Jordan? The voters can answer that question in November.
By Jennifer Rubin, The New York Times
President Biden last week channeled the horror that many felt regarding the news of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to go out of state to obtain an abortion. "Imagine being that little girl,” he said, decrying the suggestion from antiabortion zealots that she should be forced to give birth to her rapist’s child. “I can’t think of anything as much more extreme.”
Well, now, we have something even more extreme: Right-wing Ohio politicians accusing the child of making a false allegation to get an abortion. Think about that. They thought a 10-year-old was simply promiscuous and looking for an excuse to end her pregnancy? The mind reels.
The Columbus Dispatch reports, “Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost appeared on Fox News this week, casting doubt on the veracity of Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s account that a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim needed to travel to Indiana for an abortion.” Yost repeated the accusation during an interview with USA Today: “Every day that goes by, the more likely that this is a fabrication. I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. . . . And shame on the Indianapolis paper that ran this thing on a single source who has an obvious axe to grind.”
The shame was his. After the alleged rapist was arrested on Tuesday, I reached out to Yost’s office to see if he would apologize for his comments. He did not respond.
Yost wasn’t alone in casting aspersions on the victim’s account. The Dispatch reported:
Rep. Jim Jordan ... also cast doubt on the veracity of the story this week and shared an article about Yost’s comments that no evidence had been found.
“Another lie,” he tweeted. “Anyone surprised?”
After news of the arrest broke, Jordan tweeted that the man charged “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
No response from his office either.
As a preliminary matter, it is grossly inappropriate — and arguably a violation of prosecutors’ code of ethics — to publicly (and with zero basis) demean a victim’s account. The American Bar Association rules state: “The prosecutor should not make, cause to be made, or authorize or condone the making of, a public statement that the prosecutor knows or reasonably should know will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing a criminal proceeding or heightening public condemnation of the accused.”
In the case of sexual violence, Yost’s conduct is especially egregious given the aversion that many victims already feel about going to law enforcement. And in the case of a child, it is nothing short of barbaric. Yost’s remarks could encourage abusers to tell their victims, “No one’s going to believe you.”
Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade tells me: “This is the new world we live in. To get an abortion under a rape exception to the law, a victim must prove there was a rape, and must do so more quickly than a pregnancy will permit.” She continues, “Instead of diligently investigating the rape, a Republican official is incentivized to signal to his supporters that he cares more about preventing the abortion than prosecuting the rapist. Rape victims will be twice victimized.”
The rape victim in Ohio was put in this position because the state’s GOP legislature passed a six-week abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed it. While DeWine did not insult the victim upon learning of the case, his statement gave no indication that he understood the law he signed was responsible for the victim’s extended trauma. “This is a horrible, horrible tragedy for a 10-year-old to be assaulted, for a 10-year-old to be raped,” DeWine said on July 6. “As a father and as a grandfather, it’s just gut-wrenching to even think about it.”
Not gut-wrenching enough, however, to spare her the delay and ordeal of out-of-state travel to terminate the pregnancy.
The entire episode should underscore the forced-birth cohort’s monstrous dehumanization of women. They do not trust women, their families, doctors or clergy to make decisions that involve serious risks of mental and emotional harm. These politicians would deny women and girls the autonomy to make life decisions that will have life-changing consequences for them and their families. Even worse, too many politicians fail to demonstrate any respect for victims who report sexual assault.
If there were ever an advertisement against allowing politicians to override intimate health decisions of women and girls, this is it. Do Ohioans really want to sign over control of their lives to the likes of Yost, DeWine and Jordan? The voters can answer that question in November.
IT’S THE CRUELTY THAT WILL UNDO THE FORCED BIRTH CRUSADE
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When abortion rights advocates accused antiabortion proponents of being disturbingly indifferent to women and even aspiring to cruelly force women to give birth, they were labeled hysterics or exaggerators. But now, just as they were proved correct about the right’s ambition to reverse Roe v. Wade, these advocates can say they had the forced-birth crowd pegged all along. The proof is already here.
Two Republican governors, Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, were asked on Sunday news talk shows about the case of a 10-year-old girl impregnated by her rapist. Are they really insisting that, regardless of the physical harm that giving birth could cause someone so young, the child be further tormented and forced to have the baby? Yes.
Reeves said these are such a “small, minor” number of cases. He wouldn’t say there should be an exception. Noem defended forced birth, insisting, “I don’t believe a tragic situation should be perpetuated by another tragedy.” The tragedy of forcing a 10-year-old to undergo a pregnancy and the pain of childbirth does not register with Noem.
These are not anomalies. Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn (R) said, soon after the decision overturning Roe was announced, that, in his view, a 12-year-old impregnated by incest should be forced to complete her pregnancy. Herschel Walker, a Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, would agree apparently since he wants no exceptions. Not even to save the woman’s life. Ohio state Rep. Jean Schmidt has called forcing a 13-year-old rape victim to give birth an “opportunity.”
Indeed, the number of states contemplating abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest might shock you. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a Democrat — just signed an abortion law with no exception for rape or incest. In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) seemed open to making an exception, but its absence won’t slow down implementation of the abortion ban in his state.
The New York Times reports, “There are no allowances for victims of rape or incest in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee or Texas.” In Idaho, a woman would have to file a police report to obtain an abortion, something virtually impossible for incest victims and others who live in fear of their attackers.
The monstrous cruelty of such bills shows how little many conservatives care about the well-being of women and girls who have already experienced the unbelievable trauma of sexual violence.
But it gets worse. Many states no longer consider exceptions for the health of the woman or create dangerous uncertainty. In the real medical world, where doctors and patients make decisions based on probabilities, the result of such abortion laws can be deadly for women. If abortion is legal only with the “imminent” risk of death, women can be left in peril, facing what can become fatal complications later in pregnancy — when the chances of survival have declined.
In Tennessee, for example, doctors are supposed to prove the woman couldn’t have lived without an abortion. (They must prove “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”)
NBC News reports:Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban provides exceptions for emergencies when continuing the pregnancy will “create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” for the mother. Oklahoma’s recent ban, the most restrictive in the country, is focused on life-threatening situations.
Mental health is almost never seen as enough of a reason to justify an abortion under the laws, said Carol Sanger, professor of law at Columbia University and the author of “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in 21st-Century America.”
Republican candidates for governor in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and joined with antiabortion groups to seek bans “that would not allow the procedure even if the mother’s health were endangered,” The Post reports.
Forced-birth advocates can hardly be called “pro-life” when they are willing to gamble with the lives and health of women. To say women will die because of abortion laws or will suffer untold harm, both mental and physical, is not hyperbole. It’s reality for women who are now deprived of the right to make their own decision about their health and even their lives.
When you treat women like less than competent adults, and insist that others, who may have little or no competency, weigh the risks to her health and life, you wind up not with a culture of life but a culture of devaluing women’s lives.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
When abortion rights advocates accused antiabortion proponents of being disturbingly indifferent to women and even aspiring to cruelly force women to give birth, they were labeled hysterics or exaggerators. But now, just as they were proved correct about the right’s ambition to reverse Roe v. Wade, these advocates can say they had the forced-birth crowd pegged all along. The proof is already here.
Two Republican governors, Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, were asked on Sunday news talk shows about the case of a 10-year-old girl impregnated by her rapist. Are they really insisting that, regardless of the physical harm that giving birth could cause someone so young, the child be further tormented and forced to have the baby? Yes.
Reeves said these are such a “small, minor” number of cases. He wouldn’t say there should be an exception. Noem defended forced birth, insisting, “I don’t believe a tragic situation should be perpetuated by another tragedy.” The tragedy of forcing a 10-year-old to undergo a pregnancy and the pain of childbirth does not register with Noem.
These are not anomalies. Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn (R) said, soon after the decision overturning Roe was announced, that, in his view, a 12-year-old impregnated by incest should be forced to complete her pregnancy. Herschel Walker, a Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, would agree apparently since he wants no exceptions. Not even to save the woman’s life. Ohio state Rep. Jean Schmidt has called forcing a 13-year-old rape victim to give birth an “opportunity.”
Indeed, the number of states contemplating abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest might shock you. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a Democrat — just signed an abortion law with no exception for rape or incest. In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) seemed open to making an exception, but its absence won’t slow down implementation of the abortion ban in his state.
The New York Times reports, “There are no allowances for victims of rape or incest in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee or Texas.” In Idaho, a woman would have to file a police report to obtain an abortion, something virtually impossible for incest victims and others who live in fear of their attackers.
The monstrous cruelty of such bills shows how little many conservatives care about the well-being of women and girls who have already experienced the unbelievable trauma of sexual violence.
But it gets worse. Many states no longer consider exceptions for the health of the woman or create dangerous uncertainty. In the real medical world, where doctors and patients make decisions based on probabilities, the result of such abortion laws can be deadly for women. If abortion is legal only with the “imminent” risk of death, women can be left in peril, facing what can become fatal complications later in pregnancy — when the chances of survival have declined.
In Tennessee, for example, doctors are supposed to prove the woman couldn’t have lived without an abortion. (They must prove “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”)
NBC News reports:Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban provides exceptions for emergencies when continuing the pregnancy will “create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” for the mother. Oklahoma’s recent ban, the most restrictive in the country, is focused on life-threatening situations.
Mental health is almost never seen as enough of a reason to justify an abortion under the laws, said Carol Sanger, professor of law at Columbia University and the author of “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in 21st-Century America.”
Republican candidates for governor in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and joined with antiabortion groups to seek bans “that would not allow the procedure even if the mother’s health were endangered,” The Post reports.
Forced-birth advocates can hardly be called “pro-life” when they are willing to gamble with the lives and health of women. To say women will die because of abortion laws or will suffer untold harm, both mental and physical, is not hyperbole. It’s reality for women who are now deprived of the right to make their own decision about their health and even their lives.
When you treat women like less than competent adults, and insist that others, who may have little or no competency, weigh the risks to her health and life, you wind up not with a culture of life but a culture of devaluing women’s lives.
ANOTHER STEP TOWARD CLIMATE APOCALYPSE
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. Also a temperate heat wave and an Arctic heat wave, with temperatures reaching the high 80s in northern Norway. The megadrought in the Western United States has reduced Lake Mead to a small fraction of its former size, and it now threatens to become a “dead pool” that can no longer supply water to major cities. Climate change is already doing immense damage, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we experience huge catastrophes that take thousands of lives.
And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court just voted to limit the Biden administration’s ability to do anything about it.
For party fealty is, of course, what this is all about. Anyone who believes that the recent series of blockbuster court rulings reflects any consistent legal theory is being willfully naïve: Clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests. If states want to ban abortion, well, that’s their prerogative. If New York has a law restricting the concealed carrying of firearms, well, that’s unconstitutional.
And partisanship is the central problem of climate policy. Yes, Joe Manchin stands in the way of advancing the Biden climate agenda. But if there were even a handful of Republican senators willing to support climate action, Manchin wouldn’t matter, and neither would the Supreme Court: Simple legislation could establish regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions and provide subsidies and maybe even impose taxes to encourage the transition to a green economy. So ultimately our paralysis in the face of what looks more and more like a looming apocalypse comes down to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action.
The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key G.O.P. tenet?
It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008 John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations. One study — from a few years back, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed — found that most conservative parties do support climate action and that the Republican Party “is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” And yes, the G.O.P. is still into climate denial; it may sometimes admit that climate change is real while insisting that nothing can be done about it, but it reverts to denial every time there’s a cold snap.
So what explains the Republican climate difference? One natural answer is “follow the money”: In the 2020 election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 84 percent of its political contributions to Republicans; for coal mining, the number was 96 percent.
But I suspect that money is only part of the story; in fact, to some extent the causation may run the other way, with the fossil fuel sector backing Republicans because they’re anti-environment rather than the other way around.
My skepticism about a simple follow-the-money story comes from a couple of observations. One is that Republicans have staked out anti-science positions on other issues, like Covid vaccination, where the monetary considerations are far less obvious: As far as I know, the coronavirus isn’t a major source of campaign contributions.
Also, while the Republican position on climate is an outlier compared with “normal” conservative parties, it’s actually typical for right-wing populist parties. (Side note: I hate the use of the word “populist” here, because Republicans have shown no inclination toward policies that would actually help workers. But I guess we’re stuck with it.)
In other words, the politics of climate policy look a lot like the politics of authoritarian government and minority rights: The Republican Party looks more like Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice than like the center-right parties other countries call conservative.
Why, exactly, are authoritarian right-wing parties anti-environment? That’s a discussion for another day. What’s important right now is that the United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. Also a temperate heat wave and an Arctic heat wave, with temperatures reaching the high 80s in northern Norway. The megadrought in the Western United States has reduced Lake Mead to a small fraction of its former size, and it now threatens to become a “dead pool” that can no longer supply water to major cities. Climate change is already doing immense damage, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we experience huge catastrophes that take thousands of lives.
And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court just voted to limit the Biden administration’s ability to do anything about it.
For party fealty is, of course, what this is all about. Anyone who believes that the recent series of blockbuster court rulings reflects any consistent legal theory is being willfully naïve: Clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests. If states want to ban abortion, well, that’s their prerogative. If New York has a law restricting the concealed carrying of firearms, well, that’s unconstitutional.
And partisanship is the central problem of climate policy. Yes, Joe Manchin stands in the way of advancing the Biden climate agenda. But if there were even a handful of Republican senators willing to support climate action, Manchin wouldn’t matter, and neither would the Supreme Court: Simple legislation could establish regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions and provide subsidies and maybe even impose taxes to encourage the transition to a green economy. So ultimately our paralysis in the face of what looks more and more like a looming apocalypse comes down to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action.
The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key G.O.P. tenet?
It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008 John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations. One study — from a few years back, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed — found that most conservative parties do support climate action and that the Republican Party “is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” And yes, the G.O.P. is still into climate denial; it may sometimes admit that climate change is real while insisting that nothing can be done about it, but it reverts to denial every time there’s a cold snap.
So what explains the Republican climate difference? One natural answer is “follow the money”: In the 2020 election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 84 percent of its political contributions to Republicans; for coal mining, the number was 96 percent.
But I suspect that money is only part of the story; in fact, to some extent the causation may run the other way, with the fossil fuel sector backing Republicans because they’re anti-environment rather than the other way around.
My skepticism about a simple follow-the-money story comes from a couple of observations. One is that Republicans have staked out anti-science positions on other issues, like Covid vaccination, where the monetary considerations are far less obvious: As far as I know, the coronavirus isn’t a major source of campaign contributions.
Also, while the Republican position on climate is an outlier compared with “normal” conservative parties, it’s actually typical for right-wing populist parties. (Side note: I hate the use of the word “populist” here, because Republicans have shown no inclination toward policies that would actually help workers. But I guess we’re stuck with it.)
In other words, the politics of climate policy look a lot like the politics of authoritarian government and minority rights: The Republican Party looks more like Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice than like the center-right parties other countries call conservative.
Why, exactly, are authoritarian right-wing parties anti-environment? That’s a discussion for another day. What’s important right now is that the United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.
THE SUPREME COURT SABOTAGES EFFORTS TO PROTECT PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY
By The New York Times Editorial Board
On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with its 6-3 ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, curtailed the power of the agency to protect the environment, and specifically to require the reductions in emissions that are urgently necessary to limit global warming.
The court’s ruling constrains any effort to tighten restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. It also threatens the Biden administration’s ability to impose new limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. As the three members of the court’s liberal minority wrote in a stinging dissent, the majority’s decision strips the E.P.A. of the power “to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”
The Biden administration, already struggling to persuade Congress to invest in renewable energy and compelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to push for increased production of fossil fuels, once again finds its ambitious goals for confronting climate change slipping beyond reach. The court’s adversarial posture means that the administration must double down on its efforts to win congressional support for its spending plans. President Biden and Democratic leaders should also press to pass legislation clarifying the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate emissions.
Thursday’s ruling also has consequences far beyond environmental regulation. It threatens the ability of federal agencies to issue rules of any kind, including the regulations that ensure the safety of food, medicines and other consumer products, that protect workers from injuries and that prevent financial panics.
In 1984, an earlier generation of conservative Supreme Court justices formalized a doctrine of deference to the judgment of regulatory agencies, modestly concluding that judges were neither experts nor elected officials, and therefore ought to leave such decisions in other hands. In Thursday’s decision, the court asserted that the policy of deference applies only to supposedly unimportant regulations. When it comes to “major questions” of regulatory policy, the court said, it would not hesitate to second-guess regulators — and to strike rules that it decided did not have a clear congressional warrant.
The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule.
The West Virginia case has its origins in 2015, when the E.P.A. imposed new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The agency determined that it was impossible for those plants to reduce emissions to what it regarded as a safe level while producing the same amount of electricity. Burning coal is simply too dirty. Accordingly, it directed companies to cut emissions by reducing output or by shifting to other forms of power generation.
The rule never took effect. The court stayed its implementation in 2016, and the Trump administration withdrew it in 2019. But the litigants, including the states of West Virginia and North Dakota and a pair of coal companies, pressed ahead with a lawsuit to make sure the rule stayed dead.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, agreed with their claim that the E.P.A. did not have the authority to require companies to shift resources to other kinds of power generation. Mr. Roberts wrote that the court’s longstanding policy in such cases of deference to the agency’s own assessment of its authority did not apply because the stakes were too high. It is a theory long championed by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who explained in a concurring opinion that “administrative agencies must be able to point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ when they claim the power to make decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
The E.P.A. clearly has the legal authority to set an acceptable standard for emissions, in this case of carbon dioxide, and then to impose restrictions on emitters, in this case coal-fired power plants. The court did not contest these facts. Instead, it ruled that the Clean Air Act does not provide the E.P.A. with sufficient authority to achieve those emissions standards.
Chief Justice Roberts described this conclusion as a defense of congressional authority — an assertion of the primacy of elected officials. But constraining the power of regulatory agencies should not be understood as a shift in the locus of decision-making; rather, it effectively prevents good decisions from being made.
Congress has decided, and with good reason, that regulatory agencies staffed by experts are the best available mechanism for a representative democracy to make decisions in areas of technical complexity. The E.P.A. is the entity that Congress relies upon to figure out how clean the air should be, and how to get there. Asserting that it lacks the power to perform its basic responsibilities is simply sabotage.
It is a telling fact that power producers, in response to market forces, have achieved the shift to cleaner energy that the E.P.A. sought to require in 2015, validating the agency’s assessment of what it could reasonably mandate.
Chief Justice Roberts’s predecessors recognized their own limitations. In the 1984 ruling that formalized the court’s policy of regulatory deference, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government.” Both points are important. The court lacks technical expertise and an electoral mandate. Thursday’s decision asserting a more muscular role is thus a blow to both the public interest and democracy.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with its 6-3 ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, curtailed the power of the agency to protect the environment, and specifically to require the reductions in emissions that are urgently necessary to limit global warming.
The court’s ruling constrains any effort to tighten restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. It also threatens the Biden administration’s ability to impose new limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. As the three members of the court’s liberal minority wrote in a stinging dissent, the majority’s decision strips the E.P.A. of the power “to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”
The Biden administration, already struggling to persuade Congress to invest in renewable energy and compelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to push for increased production of fossil fuels, once again finds its ambitious goals for confronting climate change slipping beyond reach. The court’s adversarial posture means that the administration must double down on its efforts to win congressional support for its spending plans. President Biden and Democratic leaders should also press to pass legislation clarifying the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate emissions.
Thursday’s ruling also has consequences far beyond environmental regulation. It threatens the ability of federal agencies to issue rules of any kind, including the regulations that ensure the safety of food, medicines and other consumer products, that protect workers from injuries and that prevent financial panics.
In 1984, an earlier generation of conservative Supreme Court justices formalized a doctrine of deference to the judgment of regulatory agencies, modestly concluding that judges were neither experts nor elected officials, and therefore ought to leave such decisions in other hands. In Thursday’s decision, the court asserted that the policy of deference applies only to supposedly unimportant regulations. When it comes to “major questions” of regulatory policy, the court said, it would not hesitate to second-guess regulators — and to strike rules that it decided did not have a clear congressional warrant.
The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule.
The West Virginia case has its origins in 2015, when the E.P.A. imposed new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The agency determined that it was impossible for those plants to reduce emissions to what it regarded as a safe level while producing the same amount of electricity. Burning coal is simply too dirty. Accordingly, it directed companies to cut emissions by reducing output or by shifting to other forms of power generation.
The rule never took effect. The court stayed its implementation in 2016, and the Trump administration withdrew it in 2019. But the litigants, including the states of West Virginia and North Dakota and a pair of coal companies, pressed ahead with a lawsuit to make sure the rule stayed dead.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, agreed with their claim that the E.P.A. did not have the authority to require companies to shift resources to other kinds of power generation. Mr. Roberts wrote that the court’s longstanding policy in such cases of deference to the agency’s own assessment of its authority did not apply because the stakes were too high. It is a theory long championed by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who explained in a concurring opinion that “administrative agencies must be able to point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ when they claim the power to make decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
The E.P.A. clearly has the legal authority to set an acceptable standard for emissions, in this case of carbon dioxide, and then to impose restrictions on emitters, in this case coal-fired power plants. The court did not contest these facts. Instead, it ruled that the Clean Air Act does not provide the E.P.A. with sufficient authority to achieve those emissions standards.
Chief Justice Roberts described this conclusion as a defense of congressional authority — an assertion of the primacy of elected officials. But constraining the power of regulatory agencies should not be understood as a shift in the locus of decision-making; rather, it effectively prevents good decisions from being made.
Congress has decided, and with good reason, that regulatory agencies staffed by experts are the best available mechanism for a representative democracy to make decisions in areas of technical complexity. The E.P.A. is the entity that Congress relies upon to figure out how clean the air should be, and how to get there. Asserting that it lacks the power to perform its basic responsibilities is simply sabotage.
It is a telling fact that power producers, in response to market forces, have achieved the shift to cleaner energy that the E.P.A. sought to require in 2015, validating the agency’s assessment of what it could reasonably mandate.
Chief Justice Roberts’s predecessors recognized their own limitations. In the 1984 ruling that formalized the court’s policy of regulatory deference, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government.” Both points are important. The court lacks technical expertise and an electoral mandate. Thursday’s decision asserting a more muscular role is thus a blow to both the public interest and democracy.
THE SUPREME COURT DECLARES WAR ON MODERN AMERICA
By Jennifer Rubin
It gives me no joy to say that my prediction in April that the Supreme Court was set to launch a war on modern America — on its social and legal progress over decades — was accurate. In a tone more reminiscent of a MAGA rally than a high court, the majority Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning the right to abortion drips with disdain for women’s concerns about personal autonomy and for the principle of stare decisis.
As bad as this particular opinion is, the broader picture is about much more than abortion.
The right-wing court wants to lock 21st-century America into the Founders’ world or, at the latest, the late 19th century, conveniently skipping past the parts of history that disfavor its cramped view of individual rights. Women, minorities, gay people and others once had little political, economic or social power. And so they will again, if the court gets its way.
Look carefully at the court’s language hopscotching through history. “Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right [to abortion] was entirely unknown in American law,” the opinion proclaims. The past 50 years when Roe v. Wade followed a line of previous cases concerning personal autonomy (“privacy”) don’t count, it seems.
The court also leaps past the part of American history when abortion was generally legal up to “quickening.” (Oops, the majority gave it away: “We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after ‘quickening’ — i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy.” After quickening, even in the majority’s telling.)
Why bother with all this selective, fatuous historical argument? This is where it gets scary and goes well beyond abortion. The court insists that our rights under the 14th Amendment were fixed in 1868. We therefore get a perverse result, as the dissent explains:
Women were denied lots of rights in 1868. Only in the 20th century did some states affirm their right to hold property or take out credit or hold certain professions. Gay people and minor children had no rights to speak of, nor did the physically or mentally disabled. This court declares we are stuck with the precise state of the law pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-modern. And herein rest the absurdity and danger of a Supreme Court unmoored from precedent and unconcerned with the impact of its decisions on today’s America.
Still, perhaps my prediction was off by 100 years. It’s not the 1960s to which the right-wing court wants to take us but the 1860s. That radical, extreme view virtually guarantees outcomes in conflict with diverse, modern America. The notion that liberty and equality are ever expanding is kaput. The moral universe is bending backward.
How radical is this? Well, Justice Clarence Thomas provided the answer by arguing in his concurring opinion that the court should reconsider rights going well beyond abortion. President Biden was right to focus on the import of this: “[Thomas] explicitly called to reconsider the right of marriage equality, the right of couples to make their choices on contraception. This is an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.”
So it’s not right to say “Roe is on the ballot” in November. The 21st century is on the ballot. At risk is the America in which the definition of equality has expanded, in which the state is prohibited from micromanaging our lives, in which one’s right to make personal decisions is not governed by Zip code.
And it’s not just the court that is taking us back to the 19th century. Republicans at all levels of government cheered the decision. Former vice president Mike Pence asserted that a nationwide abortion ban should follow. This is a party of radicalism, of contempt for the modern America in which White males do not get to make all the rules. It’s a view of democracy akin to right-wing authoritarian regimes where elections (sort of) are held but individual liberty and human rights have no guarantee, given few constraints on government power.
Many thought Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was grossly exaggerating when he declared in 1987: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors on midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the door of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.” It turns out he was simply premature — and failed to foresee a five-person majority of Robert Borks.
And it’s going to get worse if the Supreme Court decides in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency that the administrative state (the EPA, but why stop there?) cannot regulate carbon emissions without detailed directions from Congress. And wait until the court considers a North Carolina case that state legislatures can pull off their own coups by reversing the popular vote of the people for president if it does not suit the lawmakers. (Donald Trump’s allies would have been constitutionally empowered to override the vote absent any evidence of fraud.)
Are we doomed to board the Republicans’ time machine back to the 19th century? Certainly not.
First, Congress can act to secure all the rights that Thomas identified for the chopping block. Let Republicans filibuster protection for abortion, for contraception and for interracial and same-sex marriage. And if they do, then voters can send Democrats with sufficient fortitude to modify the filibuster to protect their fundamental rights.
Second, since the Supreme Court is sending the most personal, intimate decisions to state legislatures and governors as well as local district attorneys and judges, those desiring a constitutional regime for the 21st century must fill every one of those offices with people who respect fundamental rights. The 21st century vs. the 19th century becomes the issue in every election.
But inflation! But gas prices! We will have the same rate of inflation (thanks to the Federal Reserve) with Republican majorities as with Democratic ones. The former has no secret plan to reduce prices. What we won’t have with Republicans in power is a country rooted in the 21st century.
For that, you need to vote out the people who apparently thought America was at its best in 1868.
By Jennifer Rubin
It gives me no joy to say that my prediction in April that the Supreme Court was set to launch a war on modern America — on its social and legal progress over decades — was accurate. In a tone more reminiscent of a MAGA rally than a high court, the majority Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning the right to abortion drips with disdain for women’s concerns about personal autonomy and for the principle of stare decisis.
As bad as this particular opinion is, the broader picture is about much more than abortion.
The right-wing court wants to lock 21st-century America into the Founders’ world or, at the latest, the late 19th century, conveniently skipping past the parts of history that disfavor its cramped view of individual rights. Women, minorities, gay people and others once had little political, economic or social power. And so they will again, if the court gets its way.
Look carefully at the court’s language hopscotching through history. “Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right [to abortion] was entirely unknown in American law,” the opinion proclaims. The past 50 years when Roe v. Wade followed a line of previous cases concerning personal autonomy (“privacy”) don’t count, it seems.
The court also leaps past the part of American history when abortion was generally legal up to “quickening.” (Oops, the majority gave it away: “We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after ‘quickening’ — i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy.” After quickening, even in the majority’s telling.)
Why bother with all this selective, fatuous historical argument? This is where it gets scary and goes well beyond abortion. The court insists that our rights under the 14th Amendment were fixed in 1868. We therefore get a perverse result, as the dissent explains:
- Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today.
- Because those laws prevented women from charting the course of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same again.
- Because in 1868, the government could tell a pregnant woman — even in the first days of her pregnancy — that she could do nothing but bear a child, it can once more impose that command.
Women were denied lots of rights in 1868. Only in the 20th century did some states affirm their right to hold property or take out credit or hold certain professions. Gay people and minor children had no rights to speak of, nor did the physically or mentally disabled. This court declares we are stuck with the precise state of the law pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-modern. And herein rest the absurdity and danger of a Supreme Court unmoored from precedent and unconcerned with the impact of its decisions on today’s America.
Still, perhaps my prediction was off by 100 years. It’s not the 1960s to which the right-wing court wants to take us but the 1860s. That radical, extreme view virtually guarantees outcomes in conflict with diverse, modern America. The notion that liberty and equality are ever expanding is kaput. The moral universe is bending backward.
How radical is this? Well, Justice Clarence Thomas provided the answer by arguing in his concurring opinion that the court should reconsider rights going well beyond abortion. President Biden was right to focus on the import of this: “[Thomas] explicitly called to reconsider the right of marriage equality, the right of couples to make their choices on contraception. This is an extreme and dangerous path the court is now taking us on.”
So it’s not right to say “Roe is on the ballot” in November. The 21st century is on the ballot. At risk is the America in which the definition of equality has expanded, in which the state is prohibited from micromanaging our lives, in which one’s right to make personal decisions is not governed by Zip code.
And it’s not just the court that is taking us back to the 19th century. Republicans at all levels of government cheered the decision. Former vice president Mike Pence asserted that a nationwide abortion ban should follow. This is a party of radicalism, of contempt for the modern America in which White males do not get to make all the rules. It’s a view of democracy akin to right-wing authoritarian regimes where elections (sort of) are held but individual liberty and human rights have no guarantee, given few constraints on government power.
Many thought Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was grossly exaggerating when he declared in 1987: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors on midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the door of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.” It turns out he was simply premature — and failed to foresee a five-person majority of Robert Borks.
And it’s going to get worse if the Supreme Court decides in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency that the administrative state (the EPA, but why stop there?) cannot regulate carbon emissions without detailed directions from Congress. And wait until the court considers a North Carolina case that state legislatures can pull off their own coups by reversing the popular vote of the people for president if it does not suit the lawmakers. (Donald Trump’s allies would have been constitutionally empowered to override the vote absent any evidence of fraud.)
Are we doomed to board the Republicans’ time machine back to the 19th century? Certainly not.
First, Congress can act to secure all the rights that Thomas identified for the chopping block. Let Republicans filibuster protection for abortion, for contraception and for interracial and same-sex marriage. And if they do, then voters can send Democrats with sufficient fortitude to modify the filibuster to protect their fundamental rights.
Second, since the Supreme Court is sending the most personal, intimate decisions to state legislatures and governors as well as local district attorneys and judges, those desiring a constitutional regime for the 21st century must fill every one of those offices with people who respect fundamental rights. The 21st century vs. the 19th century becomes the issue in every election.
But inflation! But gas prices! We will have the same rate of inflation (thanks to the Federal Reserve) with Republican majorities as with Democratic ones. The former has no secret plan to reduce prices. What we won’t have with Republicans in power is a country rooted in the 21st century.
For that, you need to vote out the people who apparently thought America was at its best in 1868.
THE SUPREME COURT RULINGS REPRESENT THE TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Everyone knows that the Founders were afraid of the tyranny of the majority. That’s why they built so many checks and balances into the Constitution. What’s less well known is that they were also afraid of the tyranny of the minority. That’s why they scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which required agreement from 9 of 13 states to pass any laws, and enacted a Constitution with much stronger executive authority.
In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware “equal weight in the scale of power” with large states like “Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York” violated the precepts of “justice” and “common-sense.” “The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,” he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”
Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.
These are issues on which public opinion is lopsidedly in favor on what, for want of a better word, we might call the “liberal” side. Following the Uvalde, Tex., shooting, a recent poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want stricter gun controls; only 28 percent are opposed. Public opinion is just as clear on abortion: Fifty-four percent of Americans want to preserve Roe v. Wade and only 28 percent want to overturn it. Fifty-eight percent want abortion to be legal in most or all cases.
Yet the Supreme Court’s hard-right majority just overruled a New York law that made it difficult to get a permit to carry a gun, while upholding a Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks. This represents a dramatic expansion of gun rights and an equally dramatic curtailment of abortion rights.
Now, the Supreme Court has no obligation to follow the popular will. It is charged with safeguarding the Constitution. But it is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing. They are not acting very conservatively in overturning an abortion ruling (Roe v. Wade) that is 49 years old and a New York state gun-control statute that is 109 years old. In both cases, the justices rely on dubious readings of legal history that have been challenged by many scholars to overturn what had been settled law.
Conservatives can plausibly argue that liberal justices invented a constitutional right to abortion, but how is that different from what conservative justices have done in inventing an individual right to carry guns that is also nowhere to be found in the Constitution? The Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms until 2008 — 217 years after the Second Amendment was enacted expressly to protect “well-regulated” state militia. The Second Amendment hasn’t changed over the centuries, but the composition of the court has.
The majority conveniently favors state’s rights on abortion but not on guns. It is obvious that the conservative justices (who are presumably antiabortion rights and pro-gun rights) are simply enacting their personal preferences, just as liberal justices (who are presumably pro-choice and pro-gun control) do.
So, if the Supreme Court is going to be a forum for legislating, shouldn’t it respect the views of two-thirds of the country? But our perverse political system has allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law. As an Economist correspondent points out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.”
The situation is actually even more inequitable: In all likelihood, Roe would not have been overturned if then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not broken with precedent by refusing to grant President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a vote in 2016. McConnell brazenly held the seat open for President Donald Trump to fill. Now Trump’s appointee, Neil M. Gorsuch, is part of the five-justice majority that has overturned Roe. (Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the other five justices to uphold the Mississippi abortion law but not to overrule Roe.)
Public faith in the Supreme Court is down to a historic low of 25 percent, and there’s a good reason why it keeps eroding. We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny. And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that “the sense of the majority should prevail.”
By Max Boot, The Washington Post
Everyone knows that the Founders were afraid of the tyranny of the majority. That’s why they built so many checks and balances into the Constitution. What’s less well known is that they were also afraid of the tyranny of the minority. That’s why they scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which required agreement from 9 of 13 states to pass any laws, and enacted a Constitution with much stronger executive authority.
In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware “equal weight in the scale of power” with large states like “Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York” violated the precepts of “justice” and “common-sense.” “The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,” he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”
Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.
These are issues on which public opinion is lopsidedly in favor on what, for want of a better word, we might call the “liberal” side. Following the Uvalde, Tex., shooting, a recent poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want stricter gun controls; only 28 percent are opposed. Public opinion is just as clear on abortion: Fifty-four percent of Americans want to preserve Roe v. Wade and only 28 percent want to overturn it. Fifty-eight percent want abortion to be legal in most or all cases.
Yet the Supreme Court’s hard-right majority just overruled a New York law that made it difficult to get a permit to carry a gun, while upholding a Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks. This represents a dramatic expansion of gun rights and an equally dramatic curtailment of abortion rights.
Now, the Supreme Court has no obligation to follow the popular will. It is charged with safeguarding the Constitution. But it is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing. They are not acting very conservatively in overturning an abortion ruling (Roe v. Wade) that is 49 years old and a New York state gun-control statute that is 109 years old. In both cases, the justices rely on dubious readings of legal history that have been challenged by many scholars to overturn what had been settled law.
Conservatives can plausibly argue that liberal justices invented a constitutional right to abortion, but how is that different from what conservative justices have done in inventing an individual right to carry guns that is also nowhere to be found in the Constitution? The Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms until 2008 — 217 years after the Second Amendment was enacted expressly to protect “well-regulated” state militia. The Second Amendment hasn’t changed over the centuries, but the composition of the court has.
The majority conveniently favors state’s rights on abortion but not on guns. It is obvious that the conservative justices (who are presumably antiabortion rights and pro-gun rights) are simply enacting their personal preferences, just as liberal justices (who are presumably pro-choice and pro-gun control) do.
So, if the Supreme Court is going to be a forum for legislating, shouldn’t it respect the views of two-thirds of the country? But our perverse political system has allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law. As an Economist correspondent points out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.”
The situation is actually even more inequitable: In all likelihood, Roe would not have been overturned if then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not broken with precedent by refusing to grant President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a vote in 2016. McConnell brazenly held the seat open for President Donald Trump to fill. Now Trump’s appointee, Neil M. Gorsuch, is part of the five-justice majority that has overturned Roe. (Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the other five justices to uphold the Mississippi abortion law but not to overrule Roe.)
Public faith in the Supreme Court is down to a historic low of 25 percent, and there’s a good reason why it keeps eroding. We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny. And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that “the sense of the majority should prevail.”
THE SUPREME COURT EVISCERATES ABORTION RIGHTS AND ITS OWN LEGITIMACY
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
While we knew from the leak of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s majority opinion that Roe v. Wade and nearly 50 years of constitutional precedent were hanging by a thread, and yet when the opinion came down Friday morning — a virtual copy of the leaked draft — many Americans no doubt felt a wave of disbelief, anger, dread and fear.
The court’s decision is so emphatic, and so contemptuous of the principle of stare decisis, that one wonders whether the unvarnished radicalism of the decision will finally rouse millions of Americans to the threat posed by a court untethered to law, precedent or reason.
As the dissent (by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) made clear, the majority opinion is as radical as any in its history: “It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs. An abortion restriction, the majority holds, is permissible whenever rational, the lowest level of scrutiny known to the law. And because, as the Court has often stated, protecting fetal life is rational, States will feel free to enact all manner of restrictions.”
The result could well be enactment of criminal penalties for every abortion, in any circumstance. “Enforcement of all these draconian restrictions will also be left largely to the States’ devices. A State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences,” the three dissenters wrote. “But some States will not stop there. Perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion.” The dissent added, “And as Texas has recently shown, a State can turn neighbor against neighbor, enlisting fellow citizens in the effort to root out anyone who tries to get an abortion, or to assist another in doing so.”
The dissent also underscores the enormous damage to women’s self-determination, autonomy and equal status as persons. And it rightly attacks the garbled history in the majority opinion, noting that the Constitution was ratified before women had the vote. In essence, the court elevates male dominance to a constitutional imperative in the 21st century.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s feckless concurrence claiming the court is simply being neutral on the issue of abortion is preposterous, as the dissent makes clear: “His idea is that neutrality lies in giving the abortion issue to the States, where some can go one way and some another. But would he say that the Court is being ‘scrupulously neutral’ if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want?”
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the court’s right-wing justices lead to the conclusion that they have simply appointed themselves super-legislators free to impose a view of the United States as a White, Christian and male-dominated society despite the values, beliefs and choices of a majority of 330 million modern Americans.
To understand how radical the court’s decision is, one need only consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence, where he says the quiet part out loud: He’d sweep away 14th Amendment substantive due process — birth control, gay marriage, all of it. And that is where we are heading, for in a sense Thomas is right. There is no bright line between destroying the expansive view of liberty in the 14th Amendment, when abortion is at issue, and destroying it for all other intimate decisions. The right-wing majority’s willingness to countenance an all-powerful state that interferes with every aspect of our lives is breathtaking.
The dissent says it plainly: The majority “makes radical change too easy and too fast, based on nothing more than the new views of new judges. The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
And now what? States will race to criminalize abortion. Women’s lives and personhood will be put at risk. But that is not the end. Ultimately, the people — even in the court’s telling — still have control. They can vote out those who would drastically criminalize women unwilling to be forced to give birth. They can elect senators to do away with the filibuster in order to protect reproductive rights and reformulate the court, including the removal of lifetime tenure. The response frankly must be as bold and decisive as the court’s affront.
The court’s decision may result in women’s deaths. But it has certainly killed off what is left of the court’s credibility. And for that, there is no solution in sight.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
While we knew from the leak of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s majority opinion that Roe v. Wade and nearly 50 years of constitutional precedent were hanging by a thread, and yet when the opinion came down Friday morning — a virtual copy of the leaked draft — many Americans no doubt felt a wave of disbelief, anger, dread and fear.
The court’s decision is so emphatic, and so contemptuous of the principle of stare decisis, that one wonders whether the unvarnished radicalism of the decision will finally rouse millions of Americans to the threat posed by a court untethered to law, precedent or reason.
As the dissent (by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) made clear, the majority opinion is as radical as any in its history: “It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs. An abortion restriction, the majority holds, is permissible whenever rational, the lowest level of scrutiny known to the law. And because, as the Court has often stated, protecting fetal life is rational, States will feel free to enact all manner of restrictions.”
The result could well be enactment of criminal penalties for every abortion, in any circumstance. “Enforcement of all these draconian restrictions will also be left largely to the States’ devices. A State can of course impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences,” the three dissenters wrote. “But some States will not stop there. Perhaps, in the wake of today’s decision, a state law will criminalize the woman’s conduct too, incarcerating or fining her for daring to seek or obtain an abortion.” The dissent added, “And as Texas has recently shown, a State can turn neighbor against neighbor, enlisting fellow citizens in the effort to root out anyone who tries to get an abortion, or to assist another in doing so.”
The dissent also underscores the enormous damage to women’s self-determination, autonomy and equal status as persons. And it rightly attacks the garbled history in the majority opinion, noting that the Constitution was ratified before women had the vote. In essence, the court elevates male dominance to a constitutional imperative in the 21st century.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s feckless concurrence claiming the court is simply being neutral on the issue of abortion is preposterous, as the dissent makes clear: “His idea is that neutrality lies in giving the abortion issue to the States, where some can go one way and some another. But would he say that the Court is being ‘scrupulously neutral’ if it allowed New York and California to ban all the guns they want?”
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the court’s right-wing justices lead to the conclusion that they have simply appointed themselves super-legislators free to impose a view of the United States as a White, Christian and male-dominated society despite the values, beliefs and choices of a majority of 330 million modern Americans.
To understand how radical the court’s decision is, one need only consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence, where he says the quiet part out loud: He’d sweep away 14th Amendment substantive due process — birth control, gay marriage, all of it. And that is where we are heading, for in a sense Thomas is right. There is no bright line between destroying the expansive view of liberty in the 14th Amendment, when abortion is at issue, and destroying it for all other intimate decisions. The right-wing majority’s willingness to countenance an all-powerful state that interferes with every aspect of our lives is breathtaking.
The dissent says it plainly: The majority “makes radical change too easy and too fast, based on nothing more than the new views of new judges. The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
And now what? States will race to criminalize abortion. Women’s lives and personhood will be put at risk. But that is not the end. Ultimately, the people — even in the court’s telling — still have control. They can vote out those who would drastically criminalize women unwilling to be forced to give birth. They can elect senators to do away with the filibuster in order to protect reproductive rights and reformulate the court, including the removal of lifetime tenure. The response frankly must be as bold and decisive as the court’s affront.
The court’s decision may result in women’s deaths. But it has certainly killed off what is left of the court’s credibility. And for that, there is no solution in sight.
THE RULING OVERTURNING ROE IS AN INSULT TO WOMEN AND THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Even if we knew it was coming, the shock reverberates.
For the first time in history, the Supreme Court has eliminated an established constitutional right involving the most fundamental of human concerns: the dignity and autonomy to decide what happens to your body. As of June 24, 2022, about 64 million American women of childbearing age have less power to decide what happens in their own bodies than they did the day before, less power than their mothers and even some of their grandmothers did. That is the first and most important consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday morning to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The right-wing majority in Friday’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which involved a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks, well before the line of viability established in Roe and Casey — stated, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
The implications of this reversal will be devastating, throwing America into a new era of struggle over abortion laws — an era that will be marked by chaos, confusion and human suffering. About half the states in the United States are expected to enact laws that restrict or make abortion illegal in all or most cases. Many women may be forced by law to carry pregnancies to term, even, in some cases, those caused by rape or incest. Some will likely die, especially those with pregnancy complications that must be treated with abortion or those who resort to unsafe means of abortion because they can’t afford to travel to states where the procedure remains legal. Even those who are able to travel to other states could face the risk of criminal prosecution. Some could go to prison, as could the doctors who care for them. Miscarriages could be investigated as murders, which has already happened in several states, and may become only more common. Without full control over their bodies, women will lose their ability to function as equal members of American society.
The insult of Friday’s ruling is not only in its blithe dismissal of women’s dignity and equality. It lies, as well, in the overt rejection of a well-established legal standard that had managed for decades to balance and reflect Americans’ views on a fraught topic. A majority of the American public believes that women, not state or federal lawmakers, should have the legal right to decide whether to end a pregnancy in all or most cases. At the same time, Americans are weary of the decades-long fight over abortion, a fight that may feel far removed from their complex and deeply personal views about this issue.
The court’s ruling in Dobbs invites years of even more fractious and protracted legal conflict. By giving state legislatures the power to impose virtually whatever abortion restrictions they please, some will now enact outright bans on abortion. Dozens of cases challenging those laws could soon start making their way through the courts and, almost certainly, to the Supreme Court.
The justices in the majority claim to be playing an impartial role in this decision. “Because the Constitution is neutral on the issue of abortion, this court also must be scrupulously neutral,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. And yet, as the three dissenting justices pointed out, “when it comes to rights, the court does not act ‘neutrally’ when it leaves everything up to the states. Rather, the court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers.”
Friday’s ruling was written by Justice Samuel Alito. It was joined by all the other Republican-appointed justices, although Chief Justice John Roberts tried to have it both ways, joining with the majority to uphold the Mississippi law in Dobbs even as he wrote separately to say he would not have overturned Roe and Casey altogether out of a respect for precedent.
The dissent, signed jointly by the three justices appointed by Democrats, took apart the majority’s attempts to justify its rejection of established precedent and even questioned the Republican-appointed justices’ claims to neutrality. The right to abortion, the dissenters noted, was established by one ruling a half century ago, reaffirmed by another 30 years ago, and “no recent developments, in either law or fact, have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents. Nothing, in short, has changed.”
Nothing, that is, other than the makeup of the court. This is the sole reason for Friday’s ruling. As the dissenters rightly put it, “Today, the proclivities of individuals rule.”
The presence of these individuals on the court is the culmination of a decades-long effort by anti-abortion and other right-wing forces to remake the court into a regressive bulwark. This has never been a secret; and with the help of the Senate under Mitch McConnell, former president Donald Trump and allies in the conservative legal movement, they have succeeded.
The central logic of the Dobbs ruling is superficially straightforward, and the opinion is substantially the same as the draft Justice Alito distributed to the other justices in February, which was leaked to the press last month. Roe and Casey must be overruled, the ruling says, because “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” including the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. While that provision has been held to guarantee certain rights that are not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, any such right must be “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.”
By the majority’s reasoning, the right to terminate a pregnancy is not “deeply rooted” in the history and tradition of the United States — a country whose Constitution was written by a small band of wealthy white men, many of whom owned slaves and most, if not all, of whom considered women to be second-class citizens without any say in politics.
The three dissenters in the Dobbs case — Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — called out the majority’s dishonesty, noting that its exceedingly narrow definition of “deeply rooted” rights poses a threat to far more than reproductive freedom. The majority’s denial of this is impossible to believe, the dissenters wrote, saying: “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure.”
In other words, the court is not going to stop at abortion. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs, in which he called for the court to reconsider other constitutional rights that Americans have enjoyed, in some cases, for decades — including the right to use birth control, the right to marry the person of their choosing and the right of consenting adults to do as they please in the privacy of their bedrooms without being arrested and charged with crimes. These rights share a similar constitutional grounding to the now-former right to abortion, and Justice Thomas rejects that grounding, calling on the court to “eliminate it … at the earliest opportunity.”
This position may not command a majority of justices today, but six years ago, few people thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Brett Kavanaugh, during his confirmation hearing in 2018, said Roe v. Wade “is important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times.” He added: “Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it. That makes Casey a precedent on precedent.”
Yet he voted to overturn two rulings that have led to more equality, more dignity and more freedom for millions of Americans. To dismantle these and other advances, the majority on this Supreme Court has demonstrated its disregard for precedent, public opinion and the court’s own legitimacy in the eyes of the American people. We will be paying the price for decades to come.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Even if we knew it was coming, the shock reverberates.
For the first time in history, the Supreme Court has eliminated an established constitutional right involving the most fundamental of human concerns: the dignity and autonomy to decide what happens to your body. As of June 24, 2022, about 64 million American women of childbearing age have less power to decide what happens in their own bodies than they did the day before, less power than their mothers and even some of their grandmothers did. That is the first and most important consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday morning to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The right-wing majority in Friday’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which involved a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks, well before the line of viability established in Roe and Casey — stated, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
The implications of this reversal will be devastating, throwing America into a new era of struggle over abortion laws — an era that will be marked by chaos, confusion and human suffering. About half the states in the United States are expected to enact laws that restrict or make abortion illegal in all or most cases. Many women may be forced by law to carry pregnancies to term, even, in some cases, those caused by rape or incest. Some will likely die, especially those with pregnancy complications that must be treated with abortion or those who resort to unsafe means of abortion because they can’t afford to travel to states where the procedure remains legal. Even those who are able to travel to other states could face the risk of criminal prosecution. Some could go to prison, as could the doctors who care for them. Miscarriages could be investigated as murders, which has already happened in several states, and may become only more common. Without full control over their bodies, women will lose their ability to function as equal members of American society.
The insult of Friday’s ruling is not only in its blithe dismissal of women’s dignity and equality. It lies, as well, in the overt rejection of a well-established legal standard that had managed for decades to balance and reflect Americans’ views on a fraught topic. A majority of the American public believes that women, not state or federal lawmakers, should have the legal right to decide whether to end a pregnancy in all or most cases. At the same time, Americans are weary of the decades-long fight over abortion, a fight that may feel far removed from their complex and deeply personal views about this issue.
The court’s ruling in Dobbs invites years of even more fractious and protracted legal conflict. By giving state legislatures the power to impose virtually whatever abortion restrictions they please, some will now enact outright bans on abortion. Dozens of cases challenging those laws could soon start making their way through the courts and, almost certainly, to the Supreme Court.
The justices in the majority claim to be playing an impartial role in this decision. “Because the Constitution is neutral on the issue of abortion, this court also must be scrupulously neutral,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. And yet, as the three dissenting justices pointed out, “when it comes to rights, the court does not act ‘neutrally’ when it leaves everything up to the states. Rather, the court acts neutrally when it protects the right against all comers.”
Friday’s ruling was written by Justice Samuel Alito. It was joined by all the other Republican-appointed justices, although Chief Justice John Roberts tried to have it both ways, joining with the majority to uphold the Mississippi law in Dobbs even as he wrote separately to say he would not have overturned Roe and Casey altogether out of a respect for precedent.
The dissent, signed jointly by the three justices appointed by Democrats, took apart the majority’s attempts to justify its rejection of established precedent and even questioned the Republican-appointed justices’ claims to neutrality. The right to abortion, the dissenters noted, was established by one ruling a half century ago, reaffirmed by another 30 years ago, and “no recent developments, in either law or fact, have eroded or cast doubt on those precedents. Nothing, in short, has changed.”
Nothing, that is, other than the makeup of the court. This is the sole reason for Friday’s ruling. As the dissenters rightly put it, “Today, the proclivities of individuals rule.”
The presence of these individuals on the court is the culmination of a decades-long effort by anti-abortion and other right-wing forces to remake the court into a regressive bulwark. This has never been a secret; and with the help of the Senate under Mitch McConnell, former president Donald Trump and allies in the conservative legal movement, they have succeeded.
The central logic of the Dobbs ruling is superficially straightforward, and the opinion is substantially the same as the draft Justice Alito distributed to the other justices in February, which was leaked to the press last month. Roe and Casey must be overruled, the ruling says, because “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” including the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. While that provision has been held to guarantee certain rights that are not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, any such right must be “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.”
By the majority’s reasoning, the right to terminate a pregnancy is not “deeply rooted” in the history and tradition of the United States — a country whose Constitution was written by a small band of wealthy white men, many of whom owned slaves and most, if not all, of whom considered women to be second-class citizens without any say in politics.
The three dissenters in the Dobbs case — Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — called out the majority’s dishonesty, noting that its exceedingly narrow definition of “deeply rooted” rights poses a threat to far more than reproductive freedom. The majority’s denial of this is impossible to believe, the dissenters wrote, saying: “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure.”
In other words, the court is not going to stop at abortion. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs, in which he called for the court to reconsider other constitutional rights that Americans have enjoyed, in some cases, for decades — including the right to use birth control, the right to marry the person of their choosing and the right of consenting adults to do as they please in the privacy of their bedrooms without being arrested and charged with crimes. These rights share a similar constitutional grounding to the now-former right to abortion, and Justice Thomas rejects that grounding, calling on the court to “eliminate it … at the earliest opportunity.”
This position may not command a majority of justices today, but six years ago, few people thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Brett Kavanaugh, during his confirmation hearing in 2018, said Roe v. Wade “is important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times.” He added: “Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it. That makes Casey a precedent on precedent.”
Yet he voted to overturn two rulings that have led to more equality, more dignity and more freedom for millions of Americans. To dismantle these and other advances, the majority on this Supreme Court has demonstrated its disregard for precedent, public opinion and the court’s own legitimacy in the eyes of the American people. We will be paying the price for decades to come.
5 BIG TRUTHS ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT’S GUTTING OF ROE
By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
Like it or not, here’s the reality: The Supreme Court has become the site of a new political Forever War.
That court has now done what liberals insisted it would and what conservatives alternately prayed for and denied was their intention all along: Overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Now abortion can be outlawed, first in Republican-run states and perhaps eventually in the nation as a whole.
The best summary of what just happened comes from the dissent by the liberal justices: “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them.”
Here are five takeaways from this political and legal earthquake.
1-The court’s decision is both straightforward and incredibly sweeping.
The decision written by Justice Samuel Alito flatly declares that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” It rules that because a right to abortion is neither explicitly laid out in the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” it deserves no protection as a fundamental right.
Therefore, states will be free to enact whatever restrictions on that right they choose. The decision also drips with contempt both for the court’s prior abortion jurisprudence and for abortion rights itself.
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes, which means it therefore does not exist. The ruling dismisses the effect on women’s liberty by saying: “Women are not without electoral or political power,” and therefore they might try to protect their rights with their votes.
Crucially, Alito also sent a clear message to states that they may restrict abortion in absolutely any way they like. He specifies that going forward, abortion restrictions will be judged on rational-basis review, the lowest standard courts apply to judging new laws. If the state can show that it has any rational basis at all for a new restriction, the court will uphold it.
The court could have opted for a less radical decision. It could have upheld the 15-week Mississippi abortion ban at issue in this case while further eroding abortion rights by ending the fetal viability standard, without overturning the fundamental right itself. Instead it opted for a much more sweeping decision.
2-The court is only getting started.
In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas gives away the game, saying explicitly that the court should go on to overturn the cases that established the right to use contraception, overturned sodomy bans and established the right to same-sex marriage.
“After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions,” Thomas goes on, the court should expand its view outward to keep overruling more and more decisions.
Thomas bases that agenda on a rejection of “substantive due process.” He rejects the idea that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty incorporates a number of rights, such as the right to privacy, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the text.
Yet as Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s dissent notes, the men who wrote the Constitution and the 14th Amendment granted almost no rights at all to women. Breyer unloads on the majority as follows:
When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.
Those men also didn’t believe that Black and White people have the right to marry one another; only later did the court rule that they do. Presumably this court would not extend the logic of this decision to taking away that right as well.
But as the court’s conservatives have already shown, the historical and textual approach they are now using is infinitely flexible, allowing them to arrive at any decision they want.
In the future that’s likely to mean a further erosion of the separation of church and state, fewer rights for workers, increasingly restricted voting rights, a further entrenchment of minority rule, and ever greater limits on government’s ability to solve problems.
That likely includes dramatically hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to combat climate change at a time when the future human habitability of our only planetary home in the known universe is in grave doubt.
3-Democrats need a fundamental rethink to meet this moment.
With the court escalating the radical legal revolution it is imposing on the country, Democrats need to shift their approach at the most fundamental level.
This entails both accepting and embracing this crowning fact: The court is going to be a zone of full-blown partisan combat for many years to come. Republicans have known this for decades. Democrats have to meet them on the battlefield that Republicans created.
“The court was always politicized,” Yale law professor Samuel Moyn tells us. “The question is, who’s going to get the upper hand in controlling it?”
Communicating this fact with the public — that the court cannot be a purely neutral legal zone and will inevitably be politicized going forward — is job one. This entails explaining clearly that when Republicans swiped Merrick Garland’s seat based on an invented principle about appointments in election years, then ditched that principle to appoint another justice, they fundamentally tainted the court in a way that demands hardball Democratic tactics in response.
It also means leveling with voters by telling them that the court is an instrument of minority rule — with five judges appointed by Republican presidents who ascended to office without winning the popular vote — and that the court is inevitably shaped by electoral politics.
This doesn’t mean all judicial rulings are purely politically motivated. It means the party in power picks judges in keeping with its political and policy agenda. Democrats must put all this squarely before the public.
“In a way there’s an opportunity in this decision to reorient,” Moyn told us, by hammering home to the public that our judicial order is shaped by “who’s elected and who gets power.”
And it means Democrats must stand for serious structural reform of the court, as a corrective to the irredeemable Republican tainting of it. This might entail term limits for justices, or expanding the court, or constraining its power with legislative reforms like limiting its jurisdiction, requiring supermajorities to overturn legislation and enabling legislative overrides of rulings.
But whatever the specifics, the core principle has to be that the court simply cannot continue to exist in its current form if we are to call ourselves a liberal democracy. The basic posture, Moyn says, should be shaped around the idea that we face “an epic confrontation, like in the 1930s.”
4-Democrats must make very clear promises about what’s next.
In keeping with the above shift, Democrats have to be ultra-clear about this fall’s elections. They need to tell voters: If you let us keep the House and deliver us two more Senate seats, we will end the filibuster, pass a bill nationally codifying abortion rights, and undertake far-reaching Supreme Court reform.
Of course, the court could strike down such a national abortion bill. But as Moyn notes, Democrats can tell voters that they would reform the court to prevent this, vowing: “We will declare war on the Supreme Court to keep that law viable.”
5-Democrats must make this stick — hard — politically.
Republicans are already celebrating the decision by calling for a national legislative ban on abortion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alluded to this on Friday by flatly declaring that Republicans are “plotting a national abortion ban.”
Every Republican candidate for the House and Senate should be pressed relentlessly on whether they would vote for such a national ban in Congress. Given broad public support for abortion rights, that won’t be an easy position to hold in swing states and swing districts.
And if the media doesn’t compel Republican candidates to answer this question, Democrats must do it instead. Whether Democrats like it or not, this is becoming a Forever War, and they must meet the moment.
By Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, The Washington Post
Like it or not, here’s the reality: The Supreme Court has become the site of a new political Forever War.
That court has now done what liberals insisted it would and what conservatives alternately prayed for and denied was their intention all along: Overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Now abortion can be outlawed, first in Republican-run states and perhaps eventually in the nation as a whole.
The best summary of what just happened comes from the dissent by the liberal justices: “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them.”
Here are five takeaways from this political and legal earthquake.
1-The court’s decision is both straightforward and incredibly sweeping.
The decision written by Justice Samuel Alito flatly declares that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” It rules that because a right to abortion is neither explicitly laid out in the Constitution nor “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” it deserves no protection as a fundamental right.
Therefore, states will be free to enact whatever restrictions on that right they choose. The decision also drips with contempt both for the court’s prior abortion jurisprudence and for abortion rights itself.
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes, which means it therefore does not exist. The ruling dismisses the effect on women’s liberty by saying: “Women are not without electoral or political power,” and therefore they might try to protect their rights with their votes.
Crucially, Alito also sent a clear message to states that they may restrict abortion in absolutely any way they like. He specifies that going forward, abortion restrictions will be judged on rational-basis review, the lowest standard courts apply to judging new laws. If the state can show that it has any rational basis at all for a new restriction, the court will uphold it.
The court could have opted for a less radical decision. It could have upheld the 15-week Mississippi abortion ban at issue in this case while further eroding abortion rights by ending the fetal viability standard, without overturning the fundamental right itself. Instead it opted for a much more sweeping decision.
2-The court is only getting started.
In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas gives away the game, saying explicitly that the court should go on to overturn the cases that established the right to use contraception, overturned sodomy bans and established the right to same-sex marriage.
“After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions,” Thomas goes on, the court should expand its view outward to keep overruling more and more decisions.
Thomas bases that agenda on a rejection of “substantive due process.” He rejects the idea that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty incorporates a number of rights, such as the right to privacy, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in the text.
Yet as Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s dissent notes, the men who wrote the Constitution and the 14th Amendment granted almost no rights at all to women. Breyer unloads on the majority as follows:
When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.
Those men also didn’t believe that Black and White people have the right to marry one another; only later did the court rule that they do. Presumably this court would not extend the logic of this decision to taking away that right as well.
But as the court’s conservatives have already shown, the historical and textual approach they are now using is infinitely flexible, allowing them to arrive at any decision they want.
In the future that’s likely to mean a further erosion of the separation of church and state, fewer rights for workers, increasingly restricted voting rights, a further entrenchment of minority rule, and ever greater limits on government’s ability to solve problems.
That likely includes dramatically hobbling the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to combat climate change at a time when the future human habitability of our only planetary home in the known universe is in grave doubt.
3-Democrats need a fundamental rethink to meet this moment.
With the court escalating the radical legal revolution it is imposing on the country, Democrats need to shift their approach at the most fundamental level.
This entails both accepting and embracing this crowning fact: The court is going to be a zone of full-blown partisan combat for many years to come. Republicans have known this for decades. Democrats have to meet them on the battlefield that Republicans created.
“The court was always politicized,” Yale law professor Samuel Moyn tells us. “The question is, who’s going to get the upper hand in controlling it?”
Communicating this fact with the public — that the court cannot be a purely neutral legal zone and will inevitably be politicized going forward — is job one. This entails explaining clearly that when Republicans swiped Merrick Garland’s seat based on an invented principle about appointments in election years, then ditched that principle to appoint another justice, they fundamentally tainted the court in a way that demands hardball Democratic tactics in response.
It also means leveling with voters by telling them that the court is an instrument of minority rule — with five judges appointed by Republican presidents who ascended to office without winning the popular vote — and that the court is inevitably shaped by electoral politics.
This doesn’t mean all judicial rulings are purely politically motivated. It means the party in power picks judges in keeping with its political and policy agenda. Democrats must put all this squarely before the public.
“In a way there’s an opportunity in this decision to reorient,” Moyn told us, by hammering home to the public that our judicial order is shaped by “who’s elected and who gets power.”
And it means Democrats must stand for serious structural reform of the court, as a corrective to the irredeemable Republican tainting of it. This might entail term limits for justices, or expanding the court, or constraining its power with legislative reforms like limiting its jurisdiction, requiring supermajorities to overturn legislation and enabling legislative overrides of rulings.
But whatever the specifics, the core principle has to be that the court simply cannot continue to exist in its current form if we are to call ourselves a liberal democracy. The basic posture, Moyn says, should be shaped around the idea that we face “an epic confrontation, like in the 1930s.”
4-Democrats must make very clear promises about what’s next.
In keeping with the above shift, Democrats have to be ultra-clear about this fall’s elections. They need to tell voters: If you let us keep the House and deliver us two more Senate seats, we will end the filibuster, pass a bill nationally codifying abortion rights, and undertake far-reaching Supreme Court reform.
Of course, the court could strike down such a national abortion bill. But as Moyn notes, Democrats can tell voters that they would reform the court to prevent this, vowing: “We will declare war on the Supreme Court to keep that law viable.”
5-Democrats must make this stick — hard — politically.
Republicans are already celebrating the decision by calling for a national legislative ban on abortion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alluded to this on Friday by flatly declaring that Republicans are “plotting a national abortion ban.”
Every Republican candidate for the House and Senate should be pressed relentlessly on whether they would vote for such a national ban in Congress. Given broad public support for abortion rights, that won’t be an easy position to hold in swing states and swing districts.
And if the media doesn’t compel Republican candidates to answer this question, Democrats must do it instead. Whether Democrats like it or not, this is becoming a Forever War, and they must meet the moment.
REQUIEM FOR THE SUPREME COURT
By Linda Greenhouse, winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.
They did it because they could.
It was as simple as that.
With the stroke of a pen, Justice Samuel Alito and four other justices, all chosen by Republican presidents running on successive party platforms committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, erased the constitutional right to reproductive autonomy that the Supreme Court recognized more than 49 years ago. As the dissenting opinion — written by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — observed, never before had the court rescinded an individual right and left it up to the states whether to respect what had once been anchored in the Constitution.
The practical consequences of the decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, are enormous and severe. Abortion, now one of the most common medical procedures, will be banned or sharply limited in about half the country. Excluding miscarriages, nearly one in five pregnancies ends in abortion in the United States, and one American woman in four will terminate a pregnancy during her lifetime. Two generations of women in this country have come of age secure in the knowledge that an unintended pregnancy need not knock their lives off course. “After today,” as the dissent pointed out, “young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had.”
What the court delivered on Friday is a requiem for the right to abortion. As Chief Justice John Roberts, who declined to join Justice Alito’s opinion, may well suspect, it is also a requiem for the Supreme Court.
Consider the implication of Justice Alito’s declaration that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong” from the start. Five of the seven justices in the Roe majority — all except William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall — were appointed by Republican presidents. The votes necessary to preserve the right to abortion 19 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Roe follow-up decision that the court also overturned on Friday, came from five Republican-appointed justices.
In asserting that these justices led the court into grave error from which it must now be rescued, Justice Alito and his majority are necessarily saying that these predecessors, joining the court over a period of four decades, didn’t know enough, or care enough, to use the right methodology and reach the right decision. The arrogance and unapologetic nature of the opinion are breathtaking. (Of the justices who decided Casey in 1992, the only member of the court still serving is Justice Clarence Thomas, a dissenter then, who wrote in a concurring opinion on Friday that now that the court has overturned the right to abortion, it should also reconsider its precedents on contraception, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and same-sex marriage.)
The dissenting justices wrote on Friday, “The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.” They observed, “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
Those sentences are as terrifying as they are obviously correct. Where do they leave the court, now having voluntarily shed the protection offered by its usual stance that it is simply the passive recipient of the disputes that the public brings to its door?
For several years, members of the new majority have been openly inviting opportunities to revisit Roe and Casey, just as the same justices, principally Justices Thomas and Alito, spent years inviting the gun lobby to bring cases affording an opportunity to expand on the Second Amendment analysis of the 2008 Heller decision; that campaign culminated on Thursday with the decision in the New York State gun-licensing case. That case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, of course, did not overturn an old right but expanded on a new one.
The court engaged in no such outreach at the time of Roe. To the contrary, the case reached the Supreme Court under a jurisdictional statute, since repealed, that required it to rule on the merits whenever a federal court had invoked federal constitutional grounds to invalidate a state law. A special three-judge Federal District Court, convened under that statute, had declared unconstitutional the Texas law that made abortion a crime except to save a pregnant woman’s life.
For the court to decide to take on Roe v. Wade, in other words, was the opposite of judicial activism. Friday’s ruling, meanwhile, was judicial activism’s epitome: A federal appeals court had blocked a Mississippi law on the ground that the law’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy was obviously inconsistent with Roe and Casey. (Those decisions protected the right to abortion up until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks.) The state originally asked the justices to decide whether a ban on abortion before viability was always unconstitutional. Over Chief Justice Roberts’s objection, the majority opinion went further, eliminating the right to abortion in its entirety.
In a concurrence, the chief justice underscored just how aggressive the majority opinion was, writing: “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine of stare decisis.” He added that “its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.”
But Justice Alito declined that call for restraint. The chief justice’s “quest for a middle way would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide,” Justice Alito wrote. “The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better — for this court and the country — to face up to the real issue without further delay.”
There will be turmoil now, for sure, as the country’s highways fill with women desperate to regain control over their lives and running out of time, perhaps followed by vigilantes across state lines. But the only turmoil that was caused by Roe and Casey was due to the refusal of activists, politicians and Republican-appointed judges to accept the validity of the precedents. Justice Alito’s reference to “turmoil” reminded me of nothing so much as Donald Trump’s invocation of “carnage” in his inaugural address. There was no carnage then, but there was carnage to come.
Forty-nine years is a long time, but professional lives, including mine, are long as well. I was a freshly minted journalist at The Times in 1969 when I received an assignment to write about the growing controversy over abortion. I immersed myself in the issue, interviewing and learning from lawyers on both sides of the debate. On Jan. 25, 1970, The New York Times Magazine published my article under the headline “Constitutional Question: Is There a Right to Abortion?” It was, I believe, the first article in a general-interest publication to survey the nascent constitutional arguments, and it has been quite widely reprinted. When I finished reading Friday’s decision in preparation for writing this essay, I realized that I will have chronicled this profound issue across its entire arc, a perspective I never could have anticipated.
Except, of course, that the story isn’t over. Although Justice Brett Kavanaugh proclaimed with evident relief in his concurring opinion that the court was now bowing out of the picture and “will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy,” that is not likely to be the case. Those pesky women will keep coming up with problems: What about pregnancy-related medical issues short of imminent death? Rape? Incest? Fetuses doomed to die in the womb or shortly after birth? Will young teens be forced to bear children? Will women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of a serious fetal anomaly be forced to bring a child into the world whom they can’t care for adequately and in whom the state has little postnatal interest? What happens when states start prosecuting not only doctors but women?
Justice Alito has an answer to these questions: “rational basis.” A law regulating abortion, he writes, “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests.” And what might be such an interest? The list of “legitimate interests” is frightening:
Respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development … the protection of maternal health and safety; the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures; the preservation of the integrity of the medical profession; the mitigation of fetal pain; and the prevention of discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disability.
With the exception of the first and second interests — the Casey decision itself recognized the state’s interest in unborn life throughout pregnancy — these are anti-abortion dog whistles. The “particularly gruesome” procedures include a common method of second-trimester abortion that some states have tried to outlaw. The “integrity” of the medical profession is a slam on doctors whom Friday’s majority refers to as “abortionists.” The “fetal pain” issue is a canard, as fetuses lack the neural development to experience pain until late in pregnancy. And the discrimination issue refers, at least in part, to current state laws that would criminalize the abortion of fetuses with a Down syndrome diagnosis; currently, most such pregnancies are terminated.
And the dissenting opinion asks, “What about the morning-after pill? IUDs? In vitro fertilization?” Or medical management of miscarriage, often by the same methods used for abortion?
No, justices, your work isn’t done. What you have finished off is the legitimacy of the court on which you are privileged to spend the rest of your lives.
By Linda Greenhouse, winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.
They did it because they could.
It was as simple as that.
With the stroke of a pen, Justice Samuel Alito and four other justices, all chosen by Republican presidents running on successive party platforms committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, erased the constitutional right to reproductive autonomy that the Supreme Court recognized more than 49 years ago. As the dissenting opinion — written by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — observed, never before had the court rescinded an individual right and left it up to the states whether to respect what had once been anchored in the Constitution.
The practical consequences of the decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, are enormous and severe. Abortion, now one of the most common medical procedures, will be banned or sharply limited in about half the country. Excluding miscarriages, nearly one in five pregnancies ends in abortion in the United States, and one American woman in four will terminate a pregnancy during her lifetime. Two generations of women in this country have come of age secure in the knowledge that an unintended pregnancy need not knock their lives off course. “After today,” as the dissent pointed out, “young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had.”
What the court delivered on Friday is a requiem for the right to abortion. As Chief Justice John Roberts, who declined to join Justice Alito’s opinion, may well suspect, it is also a requiem for the Supreme Court.
Consider the implication of Justice Alito’s declaration that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong” from the start. Five of the seven justices in the Roe majority — all except William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall — were appointed by Republican presidents. The votes necessary to preserve the right to abortion 19 years later in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Roe follow-up decision that the court also overturned on Friday, came from five Republican-appointed justices.
In asserting that these justices led the court into grave error from which it must now be rescued, Justice Alito and his majority are necessarily saying that these predecessors, joining the court over a period of four decades, didn’t know enough, or care enough, to use the right methodology and reach the right decision. The arrogance and unapologetic nature of the opinion are breathtaking. (Of the justices who decided Casey in 1992, the only member of the court still serving is Justice Clarence Thomas, a dissenter then, who wrote in a concurring opinion on Friday that now that the court has overturned the right to abortion, it should also reconsider its precedents on contraception, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and same-sex marriage.)
The dissenting justices wrote on Friday, “The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.” They observed, “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”
Those sentences are as terrifying as they are obviously correct. Where do they leave the court, now having voluntarily shed the protection offered by its usual stance that it is simply the passive recipient of the disputes that the public brings to its door?
For several years, members of the new majority have been openly inviting opportunities to revisit Roe and Casey, just as the same justices, principally Justices Thomas and Alito, spent years inviting the gun lobby to bring cases affording an opportunity to expand on the Second Amendment analysis of the 2008 Heller decision; that campaign culminated on Thursday with the decision in the New York State gun-licensing case. That case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, of course, did not overturn an old right but expanded on a new one.
The court engaged in no such outreach at the time of Roe. To the contrary, the case reached the Supreme Court under a jurisdictional statute, since repealed, that required it to rule on the merits whenever a federal court had invoked federal constitutional grounds to invalidate a state law. A special three-judge Federal District Court, convened under that statute, had declared unconstitutional the Texas law that made abortion a crime except to save a pregnant woman’s life.
For the court to decide to take on Roe v. Wade, in other words, was the opposite of judicial activism. Friday’s ruling, meanwhile, was judicial activism’s epitome: A federal appeals court had blocked a Mississippi law on the ground that the law’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy was obviously inconsistent with Roe and Casey. (Those decisions protected the right to abortion up until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks.) The state originally asked the justices to decide whether a ban on abortion before viability was always unconstitutional. Over Chief Justice Roberts’s objection, the majority opinion went further, eliminating the right to abortion in its entirety.
In a concurrence, the chief justice underscored just how aggressive the majority opinion was, writing: “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine of stare decisis.” He added that “its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.”
But Justice Alito declined that call for restraint. The chief justice’s “quest for a middle way would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide,” Justice Alito wrote. “The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better — for this court and the country — to face up to the real issue without further delay.”
There will be turmoil now, for sure, as the country’s highways fill with women desperate to regain control over their lives and running out of time, perhaps followed by vigilantes across state lines. But the only turmoil that was caused by Roe and Casey was due to the refusal of activists, politicians and Republican-appointed judges to accept the validity of the precedents. Justice Alito’s reference to “turmoil” reminded me of nothing so much as Donald Trump’s invocation of “carnage” in his inaugural address. There was no carnage then, but there was carnage to come.
Forty-nine years is a long time, but professional lives, including mine, are long as well. I was a freshly minted journalist at The Times in 1969 when I received an assignment to write about the growing controversy over abortion. I immersed myself in the issue, interviewing and learning from lawyers on both sides of the debate. On Jan. 25, 1970, The New York Times Magazine published my article under the headline “Constitutional Question: Is There a Right to Abortion?” It was, I believe, the first article in a general-interest publication to survey the nascent constitutional arguments, and it has been quite widely reprinted. When I finished reading Friday’s decision in preparation for writing this essay, I realized that I will have chronicled this profound issue across its entire arc, a perspective I never could have anticipated.
Except, of course, that the story isn’t over. Although Justice Brett Kavanaugh proclaimed with evident relief in his concurring opinion that the court was now bowing out of the picture and “will no longer decide how to evaluate the interests of the pregnant woman and the interests in protecting fetal life throughout pregnancy,” that is not likely to be the case. Those pesky women will keep coming up with problems: What about pregnancy-related medical issues short of imminent death? Rape? Incest? Fetuses doomed to die in the womb or shortly after birth? Will young teens be forced to bear children? Will women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of a serious fetal anomaly be forced to bring a child into the world whom they can’t care for adequately and in whom the state has little postnatal interest? What happens when states start prosecuting not only doctors but women?
Justice Alito has an answer to these questions: “rational basis.” A law regulating abortion, he writes, “must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought that it would serve legitimate state interests.” And what might be such an interest? The list of “legitimate interests” is frightening:
Respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development … the protection of maternal health and safety; the elimination of particularly gruesome or barbaric medical procedures; the preservation of the integrity of the medical profession; the mitigation of fetal pain; and the prevention of discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disability.
With the exception of the first and second interests — the Casey decision itself recognized the state’s interest in unborn life throughout pregnancy — these are anti-abortion dog whistles. The “particularly gruesome” procedures include a common method of second-trimester abortion that some states have tried to outlaw. The “integrity” of the medical profession is a slam on doctors whom Friday’s majority refers to as “abortionists.” The “fetal pain” issue is a canard, as fetuses lack the neural development to experience pain until late in pregnancy. And the discrimination issue refers, at least in part, to current state laws that would criminalize the abortion of fetuses with a Down syndrome diagnosis; currently, most such pregnancies are terminated.
And the dissenting opinion asks, “What about the morning-after pill? IUDs? In vitro fertilization?” Or medical management of miscarriage, often by the same methods used for abortion?
No, justices, your work isn’t done. What you have finished off is the legitimacy of the court on which you are privileged to spend the rest of your lives.
MOST AMERICANS DON’T ACCEPT THE MASS SLAUGHTER OF CHILDREN. WHY DOES THE GOP?
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans often throw out platitudes on their refusal to tackle the gun epidemic: We all care about kids, they say. Sometimes their tone becomes defensive: Don’t question our sincerity!
The polls show a different story. While 60 percent of Americans favor tougher gun laws, only 29 percent of Republicans do, according to the latest CBS News-YouGov poll. A significant majority (62 percent) favor banning semiautomatic weapons such as AR-15s, but only 31 percent of Republicans say the same. Support for red-flag laws among Republicans is 20 points lower than among the general public.
It gets wackier from there. Only 3 percent of Republicans say America would be safer if guns were banned; only 13 percent say it would be safer with fewer guns. A plurality of Republicans are convinced the number of guns has no effect on gun violence.
The kicker is that while only 28 percent of the general population thinks we have to accept mass gun murder as part of living in a free society, 44 percent of Republicans do. It’s an open question as to whether Republicans truly believe that claim or simply deny that there are solutions to maintain their belief in unlimited access to guns. But their willingness to accept tens of thousands of deaths each year from gun-related injuries, including small children, should stun and depress the rational Americans who do not think mass murders of schoolchildren are just a part of life.
The callousness about loss of human life naturally comes up in the abortion debate. Many Republicans, who believe a fetus should be protected from the moment of conception, insist that antiabortion laws would stop abortions. History shows this is utterly false. Rich women would continue to procure abortions; poor women would go to shady operators or try to give an abortion to themselves. The result would be an increased risk of poorer women dying, especially in states where the maternal death rate is high. To follow the cockeyed logic of the pro-gun, pro-forced-birth crowd, these deaths would simply be the “cost” of living in a free society. Not so free for the women involved.
Republicans have demonstrated this same reckless indifference to human life during the covid pandemic. Millions refused to vaccinate or wear masks. The governors and other elected leaders who spread disinformation and encouraged life-threatening behavior were uniformly Republican. Vaccination rates were lower in red states; the death rates there were subsequently higher.
These Republicans, in other words, refused to give up their “freedom” to be carriers of a disease. That freedom from vaccines and masks might have contributed to more deaths (even their own), but — heck — that’s the cost of doing business in a free society.
The GOP has no business affixing the pro-life tag to its party when time and again Republicans insist their right to be free of inconveniences and regulation takes precedence over human life. Democrats should reclaim the pro-life label. They are the party that is willing to “suffer” the mild inconvenience of masks and vaccination and “sacrifice” weapons of war to protect others. They are therefore far more deserving of the “pro-life” mantle.
By Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Republicans often throw out platitudes on their refusal to tackle the gun epidemic: We all care about kids, they say. Sometimes their tone becomes defensive: Don’t question our sincerity!
The polls show a different story. While 60 percent of Americans favor tougher gun laws, only 29 percent of Republicans do, according to the latest CBS News-YouGov poll. A significant majority (62 percent) favor banning semiautomatic weapons such as AR-15s, but only 31 percent of Republicans say the same. Support for red-flag laws among Republicans is 20 points lower than among the general public.
It gets wackier from there. Only 3 percent of Republicans say America would be safer if guns were banned; only 13 percent say it would be safer with fewer guns. A plurality of Republicans are convinced the number of guns has no effect on gun violence.
The kicker is that while only 28 percent of the general population thinks we have to accept mass gun murder as part of living in a free society, 44 percent of Republicans do. It’s an open question as to whether Republicans truly believe that claim or simply deny that there are solutions to maintain their belief in unlimited access to guns. But their willingness to accept tens of thousands of deaths each year from gun-related injuries, including small children, should stun and depress the rational Americans who do not think mass murders of schoolchildren are just a part of life.
The callousness about loss of human life naturally comes up in the abortion debate. Many Republicans, who believe a fetus should be protected from the moment of conception, insist that antiabortion laws would stop abortions. History shows this is utterly false. Rich women would continue to procure abortions; poor women would go to shady operators or try to give an abortion to themselves. The result would be an increased risk of poorer women dying, especially in states where the maternal death rate is high. To follow the cockeyed logic of the pro-gun, pro-forced-birth crowd, these deaths would simply be the “cost” of living in a free society. Not so free for the women involved.
Republicans have demonstrated this same reckless indifference to human life during the covid pandemic. Millions refused to vaccinate or wear masks. The governors and other elected leaders who spread disinformation and encouraged life-threatening behavior were uniformly Republican. Vaccination rates were lower in red states; the death rates there were subsequently higher.
These Republicans, in other words, refused to give up their “freedom” to be carriers of a disease. That freedom from vaccines and masks might have contributed to more deaths (even their own), but — heck — that’s the cost of doing business in a free society.
The GOP has no business affixing the pro-life tag to its party when time and again Republicans insist their right to be free of inconveniences and regulation takes precedence over human life. Democrats should reclaim the pro-life label. They are the party that is willing to “suffer” the mild inconvenience of masks and vaccination and “sacrifice” weapons of war to protect others. They are therefore far more deserving of the “pro-life” mantle.
AMERICA’S HUMAN SACRIFICES
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Once, when I thought of child sacrifice, I thought of ancient shibboleths.
In Aeschylus, Agamemnon lures his daughter, Iphigenia, to a spot she thinks is for her wedding, as the chorus urges: “Hoist her over the altar like a yearling, give it all your strength … gag her hard.” Agamemnon agonized but felt he had to sacrifice his daughter to appease a goddess and be granted favorable winds to sail against Troy. Small sacrifice to get your fleet moving.
In Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus kills his daughter, Lavinia, at the dinner table, after she has been raped and maimed by attackers. “Die, die, Lavinia!” he cries. “And thy shame with thee.” Small sacrifice to save your honor.
Now, however, I think of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this country. We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those who watch and those who fear the future.
Children having their tomorrows taken away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns. Why not let every deranged loner buy an assault weapon?
America is not a mythical kingdom ruled by fickle gods or black magic. Our fate is not in the stars. It is in ourselves. It is within our power to stop schools from becoming killing fields.
We have simply decided not to do it.
The shooter in Uvalde slipped into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School, ominously announced, “Look what we have here” and fired more than 100 rounds.
The local police did nothing to stop the human sacrifice. Nineteen officers loitered in the hall for as long as 78 minutes as children died. How can you justify keeping assault weapons on the open market when police officers don’t engage with them, even with kids’ lives on the line?
As the officers waited, not bothering to break down a barricaded door, the 19 lambs went to slaughter, trapped in a blood-soaked classroom with an 18-year-old madman. In a haunting tableau, one little girl smeared herself with her dead friend’s blood to appear dead. Meanwhile, desperate parents tried to climb over a chain-link fence to save their children. The police, doing nothing more useful, kept busy by handcuffing at least one parent trying to get into the school.
A slain teacher’s husband died of a heart attack after he took flowers to her memorial at the school. They had four kids. Who will take care of them?
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas coldly said of the massacre, the sixth mass shooting in his seven years in office, “could have been worse.” Donald Trump, who once told me if he were elected president, he would get in his limo and drive down to the National Rifle Association and bargain with it until he could get agreement to some common-sense solutions, spoke to the N.R.A. convention in Houston Friday evening and spouted gun lobby talking points — small price for the tens of millions it spent to get him elected. What a sociopathic jellyfish. It was sacrilege for him to make it seem as though the N.R.A. cared by reading the names of the dead children and teachers, with a bell gonging after each name.
What is wrong with this country? Republicans think they’re showing their toughness by preventing curbs on guns. But it’s a huge American weakness.
When a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government passed such common-sense gun laws six months later that there has been only one mass shooting since. More than a million firearms were destroyed.
When an anti-Islamic extremist in Christchurch killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019, the New Zealand government banned most semiautomatic weapons 26 days later. There have been no mass shootings since.
As the inspiring New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said at the time, she could not have faced the surviving victims and told them “our system and our laws allow these guns to be available and that is OK.”
The political debates here are empty and soulless, with Democrats dodging the issue and Republicans hardening even on mild proposals like universal background checks, which has overwhelming public approval.
“Most Republicans in the Senate represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the country,” Carl Hulse wrote in The Times.
Republicans throw up a fog of nonsensical suggestions. Before speaking to the N.R.A. Friday, Ted Cruz said schools should have only one entry point, with an armed guard. Guns don’t kill people. Doors do. During his speech at the N.R.A., Trump suggested turning schools into virtual jails and letting teachers pack pistols in class.
“Meaningful policy discussions over guns or voting or public health have left the room,” said my colleague Elizabeth Williamson, author of the new book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.” “Spewing conspiracy theories and bench-clearing nonsense around mass shootings, elections and coronavirus is becoming a tribal signifier for some on the right.”
The Republicans are doing everything they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.
America is stuck in a loop on guns — and it’s a fatal one. This country always cherished its frontier image, Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” shooting it out with the bad guys. But now when the bad guys start shooting, lawmakers just shrug.
We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Once, when I thought of child sacrifice, I thought of ancient shibboleths.
In Aeschylus, Agamemnon lures his daughter, Iphigenia, to a spot she thinks is for her wedding, as the chorus urges: “Hoist her over the altar like a yearling, give it all your strength … gag her hard.” Agamemnon agonized but felt he had to sacrifice his daughter to appease a goddess and be granted favorable winds to sail against Troy. Small sacrifice to get your fleet moving.
In Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus kills his daughter, Lavinia, at the dinner table, after she has been raped and maimed by attackers. “Die, die, Lavinia!” he cries. “And thy shame with thee.” Small sacrifice to save your honor.
Now, however, I think of child sacrifice as a modern phenomenon, a barbaric one that defines this country. We are sacrificing children, not only the ones who die, but also those who watch and those who fear the future.
Children having their tomorrows taken away. Small sacrifice if we can keep our guns. Why not let every deranged loner buy an assault weapon?
America is not a mythical kingdom ruled by fickle gods or black magic. Our fate is not in the stars. It is in ourselves. It is within our power to stop schools from becoming killing fields.
We have simply decided not to do it.
The shooter in Uvalde slipped into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School, ominously announced, “Look what we have here” and fired more than 100 rounds.
The local police did nothing to stop the human sacrifice. Nineteen officers loitered in the hall for as long as 78 minutes as children died. How can you justify keeping assault weapons on the open market when police officers don’t engage with them, even with kids’ lives on the line?
As the officers waited, not bothering to break down a barricaded door, the 19 lambs went to slaughter, trapped in a blood-soaked classroom with an 18-year-old madman. In a haunting tableau, one little girl smeared herself with her dead friend’s blood to appear dead. Meanwhile, desperate parents tried to climb over a chain-link fence to save their children. The police, doing nothing more useful, kept busy by handcuffing at least one parent trying to get into the school.
A slain teacher’s husband died of a heart attack after he took flowers to her memorial at the school. They had four kids. Who will take care of them?
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas coldly said of the massacre, the sixth mass shooting in his seven years in office, “could have been worse.” Donald Trump, who once told me if he were elected president, he would get in his limo and drive down to the National Rifle Association and bargain with it until he could get agreement to some common-sense solutions, spoke to the N.R.A. convention in Houston Friday evening and spouted gun lobby talking points — small price for the tens of millions it spent to get him elected. What a sociopathic jellyfish. It was sacrilege for him to make it seem as though the N.R.A. cared by reading the names of the dead children and teachers, with a bell gonging after each name.
What is wrong with this country? Republicans think they’re showing their toughness by preventing curbs on guns. But it’s a huge American weakness.
When a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government passed such common-sense gun laws six months later that there has been only one mass shooting since. More than a million firearms were destroyed.
When an anti-Islamic extremist in Christchurch killed 51 people in two mosques in 2019, the New Zealand government banned most semiautomatic weapons 26 days later. There have been no mass shootings since.
As the inspiring New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said at the time, she could not have faced the surviving victims and told them “our system and our laws allow these guns to be available and that is OK.”
The political debates here are empty and soulless, with Democrats dodging the issue and Republicans hardening even on mild proposals like universal background checks, which has overwhelming public approval.
“Most Republicans in the Senate represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the country,” Carl Hulse wrote in The Times.
Republicans throw up a fog of nonsensical suggestions. Before speaking to the N.R.A. Friday, Ted Cruz said schools should have only one entry point, with an armed guard. Guns don’t kill people. Doors do. During his speech at the N.R.A., Trump suggested turning schools into virtual jails and letting teachers pack pistols in class.
“Meaningful policy discussions over guns or voting or public health have left the room,” said my colleague Elizabeth Williamson, author of the new book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.” “Spewing conspiracy theories and bench-clearing nonsense around mass shootings, elections and coronavirus is becoming a tribal signifier for some on the right.”
The Republicans are doing everything they can to stop women from having control over their own bodies and doing nothing to stop the carnage against kids; they may as well change the party symbol from an elephant to an AR-15.
America is stuck in a loop on guns — and it’s a fatal one. This country always cherished its frontier image, Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” shooting it out with the bad guys. But now when the bad guys start shooting, lawmakers just shrug.
We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.
HE AMERICAN KILLING FIELDS
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.
Republicans have allowed guns to proliferate while weakening barriers to ownership, lowering the age at which one can purchase a weapon and eliminating laws governing how, when and where guns can be carried.
They have done this in part with help from conservatives on the Supreme Court who have upheld a corrupt and bastardized interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But Republicans have also done so by promoting fear and paranoia. They tell people that criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you.
The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.
If you buy into this line of thinking, owning a gun is not only logical but prudent. It’s like living in a flood plain and buying flood insurance. Of course you should do it.
The propaganda has been incredibly, insidiously persuasive. As Vox pointed out last year, “Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms,” according to 2018 data.
But once you accept the dogma that a personal arsenal is your last line of defense against an advancing threat, no amount of tragedy can persuade you to relinquish that idea, not even the slaughter of children and their teachers in their classrooms.
Even if you think that shootings like the one in Texas are horrendous, you see yourself and your interests as detached from them. You didn’t do the killing. Your guns are kept safe and secure, possibly even under lock and key. You are a responsible gun owner. The person who did the killing is a lunatic.
Republicans carry this logic in Congress. They offer thoughts and prayers but resist reforms. They offer the same asinine advice: To counter bad guys with guns, we need more good guys with guns. They seem to envision an old-school western in which gunmen square off and the ranger always kills the desperado.
They want to arm teachers, even though most don’t want to be armed. Personally, I can’t imagine any of my elementary-school teachers with a gun in the classroom trying to fend off a gunman. That’s not what they signed up for.
And so Republicans keep the country trapped in a state of intransigence, ricocheting from one tragedy to another. This is not normal, nor is it necessary and inevitable.
No other country has the level of American carnage, but no other country has American Republicans.
The mass shootings are only the tip of the iceberg.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 45,000 people died from gun-related episodes in 2020, the most recorded in this country and a 15 percent increase from the year before. Slightly more than half, 54 percent, were the result of suicide, and 43 percent were the result of homicide.
And still, we do nothing to restrict gun access, or more precisely, Republicans agree to no new restrictions. This is not a both-sides-equally issue. The lion’s share of the resistance to passing federal gun safety laws falls squarely on Republican shoulders. We have to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.
Beginning to pass gun safety wouldn’t immediately end all gun violence in this country, but it could begin to lower the body count, to lessen the amount of blood flowing in the streets.
Republicans have no intention of helping in that regard. Too often, they seem to see the carnage as collateral — as if they could use the constancy and repetition of these killings to scuttle efforts to stop future killings. Some Republicans may even count on Americans getting used to inaction, getting inured to the killing of children, getting numb to the relentless taking of life and no taking of action.
So we go through the cycle yet again — the wailing of loved ones, the sadness of a country. We call the victims’ names and learn a little about their lives before they were cut down. Maybe this one liked ice cream or that one liked to dress up like a princess. We ask: If not now, when? If not for this, then for what? We listen to Democrats condemn and Republicans deflect.
And before we can fully mourn one massacre, another one happens. It was just over a week ago that a white supremacist terrorist gunned down 13 people in a Buffalo grocery store. In fact, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 611 mass shootings in the United States in 2020. That’s not only more than one a day; it’s approaching two a day. (The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.)
There is no great mystery about why we are where we are in this country when it comes to gun violence. We shouldn’t — and must not — pretend that this issue is complicated. It’s not.
We are not addressing our insane gun culture and the havoc it is wreaking because the Republican Party refuses to cooperate. There is death all around us, but for too many Republicans, it is a sad inconvenience rather than impetus for action.
By Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.
Republicans have allowed guns to proliferate while weakening barriers to ownership, lowering the age at which one can purchase a weapon and eliminating laws governing how, when and where guns can be carried.
They have done this in part with help from conservatives on the Supreme Court who have upheld a corrupt and bastardized interpretation of the Second Amendment.
But Republicans have also done so by promoting fear and paranoia. They tell people that criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you.
The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.
If you buy into this line of thinking, owning a gun is not only logical but prudent. It’s like living in a flood plain and buying flood insurance. Of course you should do it.
The propaganda has been incredibly, insidiously persuasive. As Vox pointed out last year, “Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms,” according to 2018 data.
But once you accept the dogma that a personal arsenal is your last line of defense against an advancing threat, no amount of tragedy can persuade you to relinquish that idea, not even the slaughter of children and their teachers in their classrooms.
Even if you think that shootings like the one in Texas are horrendous, you see yourself and your interests as detached from them. You didn’t do the killing. Your guns are kept safe and secure, possibly even under lock and key. You are a responsible gun owner. The person who did the killing is a lunatic.
Republicans carry this logic in Congress. They offer thoughts and prayers but resist reforms. They offer the same asinine advice: To counter bad guys with guns, we need more good guys with guns. They seem to envision an old-school western in which gunmen square off and the ranger always kills the desperado.
They want to arm teachers, even though most don’t want to be armed. Personally, I can’t imagine any of my elementary-school teachers with a gun in the classroom trying to fend off a gunman. That’s not what they signed up for.
And so Republicans keep the country trapped in a state of intransigence, ricocheting from one tragedy to another. This is not normal, nor is it necessary and inevitable.
No other country has the level of American carnage, but no other country has American Republicans.
The mass shootings are only the tip of the iceberg.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 45,000 people died from gun-related episodes in 2020, the most recorded in this country and a 15 percent increase from the year before. Slightly more than half, 54 percent, were the result of suicide, and 43 percent were the result of homicide.
And still, we do nothing to restrict gun access, or more precisely, Republicans agree to no new restrictions. This is not a both-sides-equally issue. The lion’s share of the resistance to passing federal gun safety laws falls squarely on Republican shoulders. We have to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough.
Beginning to pass gun safety wouldn’t immediately end all gun violence in this country, but it could begin to lower the body count, to lessen the amount of blood flowing in the streets.
Republicans have no intention of helping in that regard. Too often, they seem to see the carnage as collateral — as if they could use the constancy and repetition of these killings to scuttle efforts to stop future killings. Some Republicans may even count on Americans getting used to inaction, getting inured to the killing of children, getting numb to the relentless taking of life and no taking of action.
So we go through the cycle yet again — the wailing of loved ones, the sadness of a country. We call the victims’ names and learn a little about their lives before they were cut down. Maybe this one liked ice cream or that one liked to dress up like a princess. We ask: If not now, when? If not for this, then for what? We listen to Democrats condemn and Republicans deflect.
And before we can fully mourn one massacre, another one happens. It was just over a week ago that a white supremacist terrorist gunned down 13 people in a Buffalo grocery store. In fact, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 611 mass shootings in the United States in 2020. That’s not only more than one a day; it’s approaching two a day. (The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.)
There is no great mystery about why we are where we are in this country when it comes to gun violence. We shouldn’t — and must not — pretend that this issue is complicated. It’s not.
We are not addressing our insane gun culture and the havoc it is wreaking because the Republican Party refuses to cooperate. There is death all around us, but for too many Republicans, it is a sad inconvenience rather than impetus for action.
JUSTICE ALITO’S ROSY VIEW OF PREGNANCY IN AMERICA IS FANTASY
Leaky legal protections and economic penalties riddle the health-care and workplace landscapes
Perspective by Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project.
Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant. Alito lists a string of what he calls “modern developments” that lessen the financial toll exacted by pregnancy. “Federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy,” he writes. “Leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases,” and “costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” The implication is that Roe has outlived any role it once played in improving women’s economic security.
But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant Americans must navigate a patchwork of leaky protections, a labyrinth of financial costs and penalties, and a health-care landscape that threatens the lives of the most vulnerable.
Let’s start with Alito’s claim that pregnant workers have nothing to fear because federal and state laws ban pregnancy discrimination. His claim that workplace protections insulate pregnant employees from harm is particularly rich given the origins of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, a rebuke to a 1976 Supreme Court decision, General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, which wrongly concluded that workers could be penalized for being pregnant.
Fortunately, Congress stepped in to right that wrong, but there remains a persistent gap between the letter of the law and the lived experience of pregnant workers. That’s certainly been our experience at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where we routinely represent women fired or forced into unpaid leave for being pregnant. These women aren’t anomalies. In the nearly half-century since 1978, pregnant workers have been continually denied reasonable accommodations they need to keep working safely or are outright fired for being pregnant, leading to more than 50,000 charges of pregnancy discrimination in the last decade alone. Because most incidents of discrimination aren’t reported, that number represents a fraction of the problem. These trends persist even though women now make up a majority of the workforce, and 85 percent of female workers will become pregnant at some point, with most continuing to work through their pregnancies — and beyond.
That brings us to Alito’s next assertion. He writes that “leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases.” The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of leave, but that leave is unpaid. Going three months without pay is a luxury few new parents can afford. And even that minimal guarantee covers only those who work for large employers and have at least a full year on the job, meaning roughly half the workforce is left out. Paid leave is hard to come by; just 1 in 4 workers has access to paid family leave in the United States.
Sotomayor saw she couldn’t sway her colleagues. So she talked to us instead.
Alito’s draft opinion also peddles the notion that “the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” Most of the states likely to ban abortion, should Roe be overturned, are the same states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage. And even those families lucky enough to have employer-based health coverage can end up facing thousands in medical bills for childbirth: For a birth free of complications, a worker with employer-based insurance can expect to pay $4,500 on average in out-of-pocket costs.
That’s assuming, of course, that they make it out of pregnancy alive. The United States has the dubious distinction of having the worst maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries. And appalling racial disparities in resources and health care make pregnancy more life-threatening for some than for others. In Mississippi — the state whose abortion ban is currently before the Supreme Court in a case that the Alito draft addresses — the maternal mortality rate for Black women is nearly three times higher than that for White women. And in Washington, where the Supreme Court sits, Black people make up just 45 percent of the population but 90 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.
Despite the fact that he has two children of his own, Alito displays astonishing ignorance about what many pregnant people and their families face in the wealthiest nation in the world, a nation that spends just $500 per child on early-childhood care — less than 2 percent of what Norway does. The consequences of that ignorance will be the difference between life and death, or profound suffering and unnecessary hardship, for so many.
I, for one, would love to live in the country that the draft opinion describes, where pregnancy is physically and economically safe, valued and supported. Unfortunately, we live in this one — where even a wanted pregnancy and birth can be among the most economically disruptive experiences most people can expect to face. In this America, reproductive autonomy remains a pillar of women’s equality and livelihoods. Until Alito has lived in our house, he has no business knocking down its walls.
Leaky legal protections and economic penalties riddle the health-care and workplace landscapes
Perspective by Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project.
Among the many shocking elements of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, this one jumped out at me: the rosy picture of pregnancy painted by Justice Samuel Alito, who has never been pregnant. Alito lists a string of what he calls “modern developments” that lessen the financial toll exacted by pregnancy. “Federal and state laws ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy,” he writes. “Leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases,” and “costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” The implication is that Roe has outlived any role it once played in improving women’s economic security.
But anyone who has been pregnant — or cares to understand — knows that the reality in the United States is not rosy at all. At best, pregnant Americans must navigate a patchwork of leaky protections, a labyrinth of financial costs and penalties, and a health-care landscape that threatens the lives of the most vulnerable.
Let’s start with Alito’s claim that pregnant workers have nothing to fear because federal and state laws ban pregnancy discrimination. His claim that workplace protections insulate pregnant employees from harm is particularly rich given the origins of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, a rebuke to a 1976 Supreme Court decision, General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, which wrongly concluded that workers could be penalized for being pregnant.
Fortunately, Congress stepped in to right that wrong, but there remains a persistent gap between the letter of the law and the lived experience of pregnant workers. That’s certainly been our experience at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where we routinely represent women fired or forced into unpaid leave for being pregnant. These women aren’t anomalies. In the nearly half-century since 1978, pregnant workers have been continually denied reasonable accommodations they need to keep working safely or are outright fired for being pregnant, leading to more than 50,000 charges of pregnancy discrimination in the last decade alone. Because most incidents of discrimination aren’t reported, that number represents a fraction of the problem. These trends persist even though women now make up a majority of the workforce, and 85 percent of female workers will become pregnant at some point, with most continuing to work through their pregnancies — and beyond.
That brings us to Alito’s next assertion. He writes that “leave for pregnancy and childbirth are now guaranteed by law in many cases.” The Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees 12 weeks of leave, but that leave is unpaid. Going three months without pay is a luxury few new parents can afford. And even that minimal guarantee covers only those who work for large employers and have at least a full year on the job, meaning roughly half the workforce is left out. Paid leave is hard to come by; just 1 in 4 workers has access to paid family leave in the United States.
Sotomayor saw she couldn’t sway her colleagues. So she talked to us instead.
Alito’s draft opinion also peddles the notion that “the costs of medical care associated with pregnancy are covered by insurance or government assistance.” Most of the states likely to ban abortion, should Roe be overturned, are the same states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage. And even those families lucky enough to have employer-based health coverage can end up facing thousands in medical bills for childbirth: For a birth free of complications, a worker with employer-based insurance can expect to pay $4,500 on average in out-of-pocket costs.
That’s assuming, of course, that they make it out of pregnancy alive. The United States has the dubious distinction of having the worst maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries. And appalling racial disparities in resources and health care make pregnancy more life-threatening for some than for others. In Mississippi — the state whose abortion ban is currently before the Supreme Court in a case that the Alito draft addresses — the maternal mortality rate for Black women is nearly three times higher than that for White women. And in Washington, where the Supreme Court sits, Black people make up just 45 percent of the population but 90 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.
Despite the fact that he has two children of his own, Alito displays astonishing ignorance about what many pregnant people and their families face in the wealthiest nation in the world, a nation that spends just $500 per child on early-childhood care — less than 2 percent of what Norway does. The consequences of that ignorance will be the difference between life and death, or profound suffering and unnecessary hardship, for so many.
I, for one, would love to live in the country that the draft opinion describes, where pregnancy is physically and economically safe, valued and supported. Unfortunately, we live in this one — where even a wanted pregnancy and birth can be among the most economically disruptive experiences most people can expect to face. In this America, reproductive autonomy remains a pillar of women’s equality and livelihoods. Until Alito has lived in our house, he has no business knocking down its walls.
THE GOP ROARS ABOUT ABORTION. THEN THEY ABANDON THE CHILDREN.
By Michele L. Norris, The Washington Post
What about the children?
For decades, the abortion debate has been about politics and precedent, about religion and reproductive rights, about riling up voters and rewriting laws. Rarely is it about what happens to children once they roam this earth if their mothers are forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy. Where is the commitment by antiabortion warriors to take up the fight for the babies who will be born under duress?
Short answer? It hardly exists. This is the false piety hidden in the Republican Party’s zeal to roll back a woman’s right to choose. The sanctity of human life is all-important right up to the point when that flesh-and-bone child enters a world where programs designed to support women, the poor or households teetering toward economic ruin are being scaled back by a party that claims to be about family values. Family, for the radicalized GOP, is too often an inelastic framework built around powerful men, subordinate women, and children who will learn how to hurl themselves forward in life, even if there’s no money, few educational opportunities, no job prospects in their future, no proverbial boots with magical straps to lift their fortunes toward the sun.
The pro-life warriors — including legislators who have been rolling back abortion rights at the state level — are silent when it comes to fighting for even the simple principle of enhanced child support enforcement so the men who father these children can provide for the life they create. Let’s not forget that women who seek abortions are disproportionately poor or economically insecure. A 2014 study found that 3 in 4 women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income and almost 50 percent of those women live below the poverty level. Fifty-five percent are unmarried or do not live with the father.
Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, knows what a world without abortion looks like. She spent 10 years tracking thousands of women and reports that women who were denied abortions because of rules around gestation limits were more likely to be single, without steady work, without a partner and without family support five years later. Those women also reported feeling trapped and less emotionally bonded to their new babies compared with women who had abortions and then had subsequent children later in life.
“It is by no means a given that a woman who did not want to have a baby cannot forge a loving and healthy relationship with that child, even if it doesn’t happen right away,” Greene Foster writes in her book “The Turnaway Study.” “But the finding does underscore the adverse circumstances for the child when a woman continues a pregnancy against her will.”
A further irony is that many of the states that have enacted the most restrictive bans on abortion also spend the least money to provide health and economic benefits for expecting mothers and children once they’re born.
The numbers don’t lie when you look at state rankings on maternal morbidity, infant mortality, premature birth, child poverty, birth weight, access to health care, day care, food stamps and housing. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is about a case that comes from Mississippi — a state that ranks dead last in preterm births, neonatal mortality and overall child well-being.
Some religious institutions do focus on the outcome of unplanned pregnancies. The Gabriel Project, sponsored by Catholic Charities, is a crisis pregnancy center that aims to offer compassionate and confidential ministry to those pregnant and in distress. Clearly, its aim is to reduce the number of abortions, but at least a program such as this centers women and the children they might bear. That rarely happens in political or legal debates about abortion.
The women who contemplate ending their pregnancies never really take center stage in this drama. Their dilemma is framed as simply a choice. Their anguish is subject to moral policing. Their reasons (poverty, abusive partner, age, insufficient life skills) are brushed away by majority White and male lawmakers who have
no problem policing women’s bodies but have been howling for months about something as simple as mask mandates. Even women who become pregnant under the most horrible of circumstances — rape or incest — are criminalized under a growing number of state laws if the mother decides not to carry the fetus to term, regardless of the physical or emotional trauma.
The prospect of a United States where abortion is unattainable is no longer an abstraction. Those who have long fought to outlaw the procedure often argue that the child whose life is ended by abortion might be the very person who could discover the cure for cancer — as if the government needs to control women’s bodies to protect the future of the human race.
That argument is wickedly hollow when it comes from lawmakers who are unwilling to invest in helping expectant mothers or providing a stronger safety net for the children they will be forced to bear.
By Michele L. Norris, The Washington Post
What about the children?
For decades, the abortion debate has been about politics and precedent, about religion and reproductive rights, about riling up voters and rewriting laws. Rarely is it about what happens to children once they roam this earth if their mothers are forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy. Where is the commitment by antiabortion warriors to take up the fight for the babies who will be born under duress?
Short answer? It hardly exists. This is the false piety hidden in the Republican Party’s zeal to roll back a woman’s right to choose. The sanctity of human life is all-important right up to the point when that flesh-and-bone child enters a world where programs designed to support women, the poor or households teetering toward economic ruin are being scaled back by a party that claims to be about family values. Family, for the radicalized GOP, is too often an inelastic framework built around powerful men, subordinate women, and children who will learn how to hurl themselves forward in life, even if there’s no money, few educational opportunities, no job prospects in their future, no proverbial boots with magical straps to lift their fortunes toward the sun.
The pro-life warriors — including legislators who have been rolling back abortion rights at the state level — are silent when it comes to fighting for even the simple principle of enhanced child support enforcement so the men who father these children can provide for the life they create. Let’s not forget that women who seek abortions are disproportionately poor or economically insecure. A 2014 study found that 3 in 4 women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income and almost 50 percent of those women live below the poverty level. Fifty-five percent are unmarried or do not live with the father.
Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, knows what a world without abortion looks like. She spent 10 years tracking thousands of women and reports that women who were denied abortions because of rules around gestation limits were more likely to be single, without steady work, without a partner and without family support five years later. Those women also reported feeling trapped and less emotionally bonded to their new babies compared with women who had abortions and then had subsequent children later in life.
“It is by no means a given that a woman who did not want to have a baby cannot forge a loving and healthy relationship with that child, even if it doesn’t happen right away,” Greene Foster writes in her book “The Turnaway Study.” “But the finding does underscore the adverse circumstances for the child when a woman continues a pregnancy against her will.”
A further irony is that many of the states that have enacted the most restrictive bans on abortion also spend the least money to provide health and economic benefits for expecting mothers and children once they’re born.
The numbers don’t lie when you look at state rankings on maternal morbidity, infant mortality, premature birth, child poverty, birth weight, access to health care, day care, food stamps and housing. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is about a case that comes from Mississippi — a state that ranks dead last in preterm births, neonatal mortality and overall child well-being.
Some religious institutions do focus on the outcome of unplanned pregnancies. The Gabriel Project, sponsored by Catholic Charities, is a crisis pregnancy center that aims to offer compassionate and confidential ministry to those pregnant and in distress. Clearly, its aim is to reduce the number of abortions, but at least a program such as this centers women and the children they might bear. That rarely happens in political or legal debates about abortion.
The women who contemplate ending their pregnancies never really take center stage in this drama. Their dilemma is framed as simply a choice. Their anguish is subject to moral policing. Their reasons (poverty, abusive partner, age, insufficient life skills) are brushed away by majority White and male lawmakers who have
no problem policing women’s bodies but have been howling for months about something as simple as mask mandates. Even women who become pregnant under the most horrible of circumstances — rape or incest — are criminalized under a growing number of state laws if the mother decides not to carry the fetus to term, regardless of the physical or emotional trauma.
The prospect of a United States where abortion is unattainable is no longer an abstraction. Those who have long fought to outlaw the procedure often argue that the child whose life is ended by abortion might be the very person who could discover the cure for cancer — as if the government needs to control women’s bodies to protect the future of the human race.
That argument is wickedly hollow when it comes from lawmakers who are unwilling to invest in helping expectant mothers or providing a stronger safety net for the children they will be forced to bear.
HOW PAID EXPERTS HELP EXONERATE POLICE AFTER DEATHS IN CUSTODY
Inside the self-reinforcing ecosystem of people who advise, train and defend officers. Many accuse them of slanting science and perpetuating aggressive tactics.
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Mike McIntire, Rebecca R. Ruiz, Julie Tate and Michael H. Keller, The New York Times
An officer fired a Taser at Kevin Piskura’s chest for 11 seconds. He went into cardiac arrest and later died. A consultant working for Taser wrote:
Nov. 1, 2011 ... there is no support for speculations that the minimal amount of current and charge delivered into a human body by an X26 ECD discharge ... is likely, or even medically or scientifically possible, to directly cause clinically significant adverse effects ...
The family sued, and the case settled out of court.
Officers in Phoenix held Miguel Ruiz in a neck hold. Asked in court about the possible dangers of this type of restraint, a doctor testifying as an expert witness for the city said:
May 30, 2017 There are no short-term or long-term effects. It doesn't cause brain damage or brain injury.
A jury found in favor of the officers.
In 2019, deputies shocked Kevin Niedzialek twice with a stun gun and pushed him facedown into the ground. After he died, a doctor hired by the county wrote:
Jan. 18, 2021 ... we have found no scientific evidence ... that a restraint position in a prone, chest-down, or prone hobbled position causes or contributes to asphyxiation or associated death.
The family sued, and the case is ongoing.
When lawyers were preparing to defend against a lawsuit over a death in police custody in Fresno, Calif., they knew whom to call.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Gary Vilke has established himself as a leading expert witness by repeatedly asserting that police techniques such as facedown restraints, stun gun shocks and some neck holds did not kill people.
Officers in Fresno had handcuffed 41-year-old Joseph Perez and, holding him facedown on the ground, put a spinal board from an ambulance on his back as he cried out for help. One officer sat on the board as they strapped him to it. The county medical examiner ruled his death, in May 2017, a homicide by asphyxiation.
Dr. Vilke, who was hired by the ambulance provider, charged $500 an hour and provided a different determination. He wrote in a report filed with the court this past July that Mr. Perez had died from methamphetamine use, heart disease and the exertion of his struggle against the restraints.
Dr. Vilke, an emergency medicine doctor in San Diego, is an integral part of a small but influential cadre of scientists, lawyers, physicians and other police experts whose research and testimony is almost always used to absolve officers of blame for deaths, according to a review of hundreds of research papers and more than 25,000 pages of court documents, as well as interviews with nearly three dozen people with knowledge of the deaths or the research.
Their views infuriate many prosecutors, plaintiff lawyers, medical experts and relatives of the dead, who accuse them of slanting science, ignoring inconvenient facts and dangerously emboldening police officers to act aggressively. One of the researchers has suggested that police officers involved in the deaths are often unfairly blamed — like parents of babies who die of sudden infant death syndrome.
The experts also intersect with law-enforcement-friendly companies that train police officers, write police policies and lend authority to studies rebutting concerns about police use of force.
Together they form what often amounts to a cottage industry of exoneration. The dozen or so individuals and companies have collected millions of dollars over the past decade, much of it in fees that are largely underwritten by taxpayers, who cover the costs of police training and policies and the legal bills of accused officers.
Many of the experts also have ties to Axon, maker of the Taser: A lawyer for the company, for example, was an early sponsor of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a commercial undertaking that is among the police-friendly entities, and some of the experts have worked as consultants for Axon; another has served on Axon’s corporate board.
The New York Times identified more than 100 instances of in-custody deaths or life-threatening injuries from the past 15 years in which experts in the network were hired to defend the police. The cases were nearly all civil lawsuits, as the officers involved were rarely charged with crimes. About two-thirds of the cases were settled out of court; of the 28 decided by judges or juries, 16 had outcomes favoring the police. (A handful of cases are pending.)
Beyond the courtroom, the individuals and businesses have offered instruction to thousands of police officers and medical examiners, whose cause-of-death rulings often help determine legal culpability. Lexipol, a Texas-based business whose webinars and publications have included experts from the network, boasts that it helped write policy manuals for 6,300 police departments, sometimes suggesting standards for officers’ conduct that reduce legal liability. A company spokeswoman said it did not rely on the researchers in making its policies.
The self-reinforcing ecosystem underscores the difficulty of obtaining an impartial accounting of deaths in police custody, particularly in cases involving a struggle, where the cause of death is not immediately clear. The Times reported earlier this year that outside criminal investigations of such cases can be plagued with shortcuts and biases that favor the police, and that medical examiners sometimes tie the deaths to a biological trait that would rarely be deemed fatal in other circumstances.
Some researchers and doctors in this ecosystem who responded to questions from The Times said they did not assist law enforcement but provided unbiased results of scientific research and opinions based on the facts of each case. Several pointed to research demonstrating that police struggles overall have an exceedingly low risk of death. They also highlighted health issues that could cause deaths in such circumstances, including drug use, obesity, psychological disturbances and genetic mutations that may predispose people to heart problems.
Some also criticized research and medical opinions that found that police techniques might cause or contribute to deaths, suggesting these were flawed. They also pointed out that other academic papers have been written by people who testify against law enforcement in such cases.
Lawyers for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was ultimately convicted in last year’s murder of George Floyd, also drew upon the same network of researchers and experts. In particular, they turned to the defense of prone restraint, a technique in which officers subdue subjects facedown, as happened to Mr. Floyd. The work of Dr. Kroll, who has a Ph.D in electrical engineering but no medical degree, was cited by the Chauvin defense as proof that putting body weight on someone facedown does not cause asphyxia.
Shaping the Science
The physicians, scientists and researchers who come to the defense of law enforcement officers often cite experiments conducted on volunteers. They shock them with Tasers, douse them with pepper spray or restrain them facedown on the ground.
Their published findings are usually the same: that there is no evidence that the actions have enough of an effect to cause death.
A Times analysis of more than 230 scientific papers in the National Library of Medicine database published since the 1980s showed those conclusions to be significantly different from those published by others, including studies about restraints, body position and excited delirium.
Nearly three-quarters of the studies that included at least one author in the network supported the idea that restraint techniques were safe or that the deaths of people who had been restrained were caused by health problems. Only about a quarter of the studies that did not involve anyone from the network backed that conclusion. More commonly, the other studies said some restraint techniques increased the risk of death, if only by a small amount.
The few studies by the group that found problems with police techniques focused on deaths in which Tasers ignited gas fumes or caused people to fall and hit their heads.
Papers by researchers outside the network were more frequently balanced — finding, for example, that some restraint positions are generally safe while others can cause statistically significant changes in breathing. Another recent paper used new computer imaging technology to measure lung function and found that it was affected during restraint.
One-Sided Track Record
The Times found that, with rare exceptions, when members of this network weigh in on a case in court, they side with the police.
In court documents and testimony, some of them have acknowledged their one-sided track record.
“That’s like trying to retain Columbus to testify that the Earth is flat,” Dr. Tom Neuman, a retired emergency medicine physician in San Diego, said in 2018 when asked if relatives of people who had died in police custody would ever hire him as an expert.
Assessing the effectiveness of the opinions exonerating the police is difficult because most cases settle or are decided without explanation.
But several cases reviewed by The Times suggest that the research has had far-reaching effects — influencing investigator decisions in death inquests and giving officers assurance that their methods are safe. Some of the experts’ legal statements and educational materials they have prepared for police called safety warnings by Taser and other law enforcement groups outdated or needlessly conservative.
In a deposition in April, the sheriff in Riverside County, Calif., cited studies backed by the law-enforcement-leaning experts to explain why his deputies held people facedown after handcuffing them. The sheriff, Chad Bianco, described the position as “the absolute safest place for any subject.”
Two years ago, deputies working for Sheriff Bianco found Kevin Niedzialek, 34, bleeding from a head wound and behaving strangely after taking methamphetamines. They shocked him twice with a Taser, and held him facedown.
When they rolled him onto his back, Mr. Niedzialek was unresponsive. He died the next day.
Inside the self-reinforcing ecosystem of people who advise, train and defend officers. Many accuse them of slanting science and perpetuating aggressive tactics.
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Mike McIntire, Rebecca R. Ruiz, Julie Tate and Michael H. Keller, The New York Times
An officer fired a Taser at Kevin Piskura’s chest for 11 seconds. He went into cardiac arrest and later died. A consultant working for Taser wrote:
Nov. 1, 2011 ... there is no support for speculations that the minimal amount of current and charge delivered into a human body by an X26 ECD discharge ... is likely, or even medically or scientifically possible, to directly cause clinically significant adverse effects ...
The family sued, and the case settled out of court.
Officers in Phoenix held Miguel Ruiz in a neck hold. Asked in court about the possible dangers of this type of restraint, a doctor testifying as an expert witness for the city said:
May 30, 2017 There are no short-term or long-term effects. It doesn't cause brain damage or brain injury.
A jury found in favor of the officers.
In 2019, deputies shocked Kevin Niedzialek twice with a stun gun and pushed him facedown into the ground. After he died, a doctor hired by the county wrote:
Jan. 18, 2021 ... we have found no scientific evidence ... that a restraint position in a prone, chest-down, or prone hobbled position causes or contributes to asphyxiation or associated death.
The family sued, and the case is ongoing.
When lawyers were preparing to defend against a lawsuit over a death in police custody in Fresno, Calif., they knew whom to call.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Gary Vilke has established himself as a leading expert witness by repeatedly asserting that police techniques such as facedown restraints, stun gun shocks and some neck holds did not kill people.
Officers in Fresno had handcuffed 41-year-old Joseph Perez and, holding him facedown on the ground, put a spinal board from an ambulance on his back as he cried out for help. One officer sat on the board as they strapped him to it. The county medical examiner ruled his death, in May 2017, a homicide by asphyxiation.
Dr. Vilke, who was hired by the ambulance provider, charged $500 an hour and provided a different determination. He wrote in a report filed with the court this past July that Mr. Perez had died from methamphetamine use, heart disease and the exertion of his struggle against the restraints.
Dr. Vilke, an emergency medicine doctor in San Diego, is an integral part of a small but influential cadre of scientists, lawyers, physicians and other police experts whose research and testimony is almost always used to absolve officers of blame for deaths, according to a review of hundreds of research papers and more than 25,000 pages of court documents, as well as interviews with nearly three dozen people with knowledge of the deaths or the research.
Their views infuriate many prosecutors, plaintiff lawyers, medical experts and relatives of the dead, who accuse them of slanting science, ignoring inconvenient facts and dangerously emboldening police officers to act aggressively. One of the researchers has suggested that police officers involved in the deaths are often unfairly blamed — like parents of babies who die of sudden infant death syndrome.
The experts also intersect with law-enforcement-friendly companies that train police officers, write police policies and lend authority to studies rebutting concerns about police use of force.
Together they form what often amounts to a cottage industry of exoneration. The dozen or so individuals and companies have collected millions of dollars over the past decade, much of it in fees that are largely underwritten by taxpayers, who cover the costs of police training and policies and the legal bills of accused officers.
Many of the experts also have ties to Axon, maker of the Taser: A lawyer for the company, for example, was an early sponsor of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a commercial undertaking that is among the police-friendly entities, and some of the experts have worked as consultants for Axon; another has served on Axon’s corporate board.
The New York Times identified more than 100 instances of in-custody deaths or life-threatening injuries from the past 15 years in which experts in the network were hired to defend the police. The cases were nearly all civil lawsuits, as the officers involved were rarely charged with crimes. About two-thirds of the cases were settled out of court; of the 28 decided by judges or juries, 16 had outcomes favoring the police. (A handful of cases are pending.)
Beyond the courtroom, the individuals and businesses have offered instruction to thousands of police officers and medical examiners, whose cause-of-death rulings often help determine legal culpability. Lexipol, a Texas-based business whose webinars and publications have included experts from the network, boasts that it helped write policy manuals for 6,300 police departments, sometimes suggesting standards for officers’ conduct that reduce legal liability. A company spokeswoman said it did not rely on the researchers in making its policies.
The self-reinforcing ecosystem underscores the difficulty of obtaining an impartial accounting of deaths in police custody, particularly in cases involving a struggle, where the cause of death is not immediately clear. The Times reported earlier this year that outside criminal investigations of such cases can be plagued with shortcuts and biases that favor the police, and that medical examiners sometimes tie the deaths to a biological trait that would rarely be deemed fatal in other circumstances.
Some researchers and doctors in this ecosystem who responded to questions from The Times said they did not assist law enforcement but provided unbiased results of scientific research and opinions based on the facts of each case. Several pointed to research demonstrating that police struggles overall have an exceedingly low risk of death. They also highlighted health issues that could cause deaths in such circumstances, including drug use, obesity, psychological disturbances and genetic mutations that may predispose people to heart problems.
Some also criticized research and medical opinions that found that police techniques might cause or contribute to deaths, suggesting these were flawed. They also pointed out that other academic papers have been written by people who testify against law enforcement in such cases.
Lawyers for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was ultimately convicted in last year’s murder of George Floyd, also drew upon the same network of researchers and experts. In particular, they turned to the defense of prone restraint, a technique in which officers subdue subjects facedown, as happened to Mr. Floyd. The work of Dr. Kroll, who has a Ph.D in electrical engineering but no medical degree, was cited by the Chauvin defense as proof that putting body weight on someone facedown does not cause asphyxia.
Shaping the Science
The physicians, scientists and researchers who come to the defense of law enforcement officers often cite experiments conducted on volunteers. They shock them with Tasers, douse them with pepper spray or restrain them facedown on the ground.
Their published findings are usually the same: that there is no evidence that the actions have enough of an effect to cause death.
A Times analysis of more than 230 scientific papers in the National Library of Medicine database published since the 1980s showed those conclusions to be significantly different from those published by others, including studies about restraints, body position and excited delirium.
Nearly three-quarters of the studies that included at least one author in the network supported the idea that restraint techniques were safe or that the deaths of people who had been restrained were caused by health problems. Only about a quarter of the studies that did not involve anyone from the network backed that conclusion. More commonly, the other studies said some restraint techniques increased the risk of death, if only by a small amount.
The few studies by the group that found problems with police techniques focused on deaths in which Tasers ignited gas fumes or caused people to fall and hit their heads.
Papers by researchers outside the network were more frequently balanced — finding, for example, that some restraint positions are generally safe while others can cause statistically significant changes in breathing. Another recent paper used new computer imaging technology to measure lung function and found that it was affected during restraint.
One-Sided Track Record
The Times found that, with rare exceptions, when members of this network weigh in on a case in court, they side with the police.
In court documents and testimony, some of them have acknowledged their one-sided track record.
“That’s like trying to retain Columbus to testify that the Earth is flat,” Dr. Tom Neuman, a retired emergency medicine physician in San Diego, said in 2018 when asked if relatives of people who had died in police custody would ever hire him as an expert.
Assessing the effectiveness of the opinions exonerating the police is difficult because most cases settle or are decided without explanation.
But several cases reviewed by The Times suggest that the research has had far-reaching effects — influencing investigator decisions in death inquests and giving officers assurance that their methods are safe. Some of the experts’ legal statements and educational materials they have prepared for police called safety warnings by Taser and other law enforcement groups outdated or needlessly conservative.
In a deposition in April, the sheriff in Riverside County, Calif., cited studies backed by the law-enforcement-leaning experts to explain why his deputies held people facedown after handcuffing them. The sheriff, Chad Bianco, described the position as “the absolute safest place for any subject.”
Two years ago, deputies working for Sheriff Bianco found Kevin Niedzialek, 34, bleeding from a head wound and behaving strangely after taking methamphetamines. They shocked him twice with a Taser, and held him facedown.
When they rolled him onto his back, Mr. Niedzialek was unresponsive. He died the next day.
FIGHTING INFLATION MEANS TAKING ON CORPORATIONS
By Meg Jacobs
Dr. Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton and is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.”
Since the Carter administration, monetary policy has been the chief tool presidents use to curb inflation, which has been on the rise: The Consumer Price Index rose by 6.8 percent in the year through November — the fastest pace since 1982. The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, has pivoted to a tighter monetary policy, announcing plans to taper the central bank’s bond purchases and raise interest rates next year.
Yet inflation doesn’t rise and ebb just because of monetary policy. It’s largely the result of choices businesses make. And history shows presidents have the power to stem inflation by taking on corporate power — if they choose.
While Franklin Roosevelt is best known for the New Deal expansion of the social safety net, he also protected Americans against wartime inflation. During World War II, his Office of Price Administration imposed price ceilings on three million businesses and more than eight million goods. The office also put caps on rents in 14 million dwellings occupied by 45 million residents and issued ration stamps for goods like meat to manage supply. According to Gallup polls, more than three-quarters of the public favored extending controls after the war.
When Harry Truman lost a bitter fight in Congress to do just that, there were consequences. When peace came, Americans eager to spend their stored-up savings ran headlong into a supply shortage: Manufacturers had yet to convert back from wartime production.
In the summer of 1946, without controls, the cost of living jumped. In July, meat prices doubled to 70 cents a pound. In the midterm elections that November, Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time since 1932.
In 1948, with inflation running at 7.7 percent, Truman condemned the “do-nothing” Republicans who placed blame for rising prices on newfound union power. In his re-election campaign that year, he promised to expand the New Deal and ran hard against corporate power. “The Republicans don’t want any price control for one simple reason: the higher prices go up, the bigger the profits for the corporations,” he said that year.
At a campaign stop in Kentucky on October 1948, he lashed out at the National Association of Manufacturers, a business lobbying group that opposed price controls, for engaging in a “conspiracy against the American consumer.” He called Congress into a special summer session to restore price controls, but that effort failed.
Democrats returned to the polls; automobile workers gave Truman 89 percent of their vote, helping him secure re-election in a close contest. One key to his success: doubling down on tough talk against inflation and support for liberal programs to raise living standards for ordinary Americans.
From the presidencies of Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stuck to the program. Like Truman, who went so far as to order a takeover of the nation’s steel mills when they announced a price hike, John F. Kennedy and Johnson also publicly reprimanded steel executives for price increases.
They all spoke out against efforts by William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman, to raise interest rates. Martin famously asserted his independence and raised rates anyway; as he saw it, the job of the Federal Reserve was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting good.” Truman called him a “traitor.”
Sign up for the Peter Coy newsletter, for Times subscribers only. A veteran business and economics columnist unpacks the biggest headlines. Get it in your inbox.
When inflation struck in the 1970s, Richard Nixon understood the expectations created by Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration. As a World War II-era inspector for the agency, Nixon had been horrified at the thought of bureaucrats checking up on the pricing decisions of private business, and he quit. Yet once in the White House, he didn’t hesitate to slap on price controls in response to the soaring cost of beef and gas.
Milton Friedman, the free-market economist, and other conservatives denounced Nixon’s response as heavy-handed — a message that his successor Gerald Ford absorbed. Instead of price controls, Ford distributed “Whip Inflation Now” buttons and called for budgetary austerity.
As American economic thinking fell under Friedman’s influence, the Roosevelt-Truman tools lost favor. With inflation reaching double digits in 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve to use monetary policy to fight inflation. When Ronald Reagan came into office, he endorsed Mr. Volcker’s muscular move to raise interest rates and drive the economy into recession to fight inflation. Subsequent presidents have largely stuck to this approach of controlling inflation.
Amid a pandemic, Mr. Biden has shown a willingness to lean hard on corporate America and embrace New Deal-style tools to lighten inflationary pressures. Through his supply chain task force, he is working to reverse offshoring and outsourcing, expand domestic production and help the ports in Los Angeles stay open round the clock to ease the cargo pileup. His infrastructure bill will allocate billions to construct and operate coastal ports and inland waterways, further easing prices.
Mr. Biden has also warned the big four meat processors against anticompetitive practices that probably contributed to spiking prices, including squeezing out competitors. His administration has pledged to take more aggressive action on illegal price fixing and antitrust, while working to bring more transparency to cattle markets. Higher meat prices are “not just the natural consequences of supply and demand in a free market — they are also the result of corporate decisions to take advantage of their market power in an uncompetitive market, to the detriment of consumers, farmers and ranchers, and our economy,” his economic advisers Brian Deese, Sameera Fazili and Bharat Ramamurti recently wrote.
Through the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Biden has called for an investigation into the prices set by large oil and gas companies and authorized the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dampen OPEC’s ability to raise prices. He also met with the chief executives of Walmart, Mattel, Food Lion, Kroger and other companies to discuss their plans to overcome supply-chain problems and keep prices in check for the holidays.
In the coming weeks, Mr. Biden should use his bully pulpit to make clear to Americans that corporations are padding their profits while working families are struggling through the pandemic. Almost two-thirds of publicly traded companies had substantially larger profit margins this year compared to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. In 2021, close to 100 of them saw their profit margins go up at least 50 percent relative to 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Showing working Americans that he gets it will help Mr. Biden demonstrate that he cares, as the Democratic pollster Joel Benenson told me. “We’re not having an inflation problem,” he said. “We’re having a corporate greed problem. And the president should put the blame where it belongs.”
As Mr. Biden leans on big businesses to temper rising prices, he also needs to push hard for policies that have a much greater impact than fluctuations in gas or meat prices: His stalled Build Back Better legislation would go a long way to ease the burden of major expenses. Mr. Biden promised the bill would lower out-of-pocket costs for child care, care for the elderly, housing, college, health care and prescription drugs — some of the biggest costs that most families face.
Like his Democratic predecessors, Mr. Biden needs to get tough.
By Meg Jacobs
Dr. Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton and is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.”
Since the Carter administration, monetary policy has been the chief tool presidents use to curb inflation, which has been on the rise: The Consumer Price Index rose by 6.8 percent in the year through November — the fastest pace since 1982. The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, has pivoted to a tighter monetary policy, announcing plans to taper the central bank’s bond purchases and raise interest rates next year.
Yet inflation doesn’t rise and ebb just because of monetary policy. It’s largely the result of choices businesses make. And history shows presidents have the power to stem inflation by taking on corporate power — if they choose.
While Franklin Roosevelt is best known for the New Deal expansion of the social safety net, he also protected Americans against wartime inflation. During World War II, his Office of Price Administration imposed price ceilings on three million businesses and more than eight million goods. The office also put caps on rents in 14 million dwellings occupied by 45 million residents and issued ration stamps for goods like meat to manage supply. According to Gallup polls, more than three-quarters of the public favored extending controls after the war.
When Harry Truman lost a bitter fight in Congress to do just that, there were consequences. When peace came, Americans eager to spend their stored-up savings ran headlong into a supply shortage: Manufacturers had yet to convert back from wartime production.
In the summer of 1946, without controls, the cost of living jumped. In July, meat prices doubled to 70 cents a pound. In the midterm elections that November, Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time since 1932.
In 1948, with inflation running at 7.7 percent, Truman condemned the “do-nothing” Republicans who placed blame for rising prices on newfound union power. In his re-election campaign that year, he promised to expand the New Deal and ran hard against corporate power. “The Republicans don’t want any price control for one simple reason: the higher prices go up, the bigger the profits for the corporations,” he said that year.
At a campaign stop in Kentucky on October 1948, he lashed out at the National Association of Manufacturers, a business lobbying group that opposed price controls, for engaging in a “conspiracy against the American consumer.” He called Congress into a special summer session to restore price controls, but that effort failed.
Democrats returned to the polls; automobile workers gave Truman 89 percent of their vote, helping him secure re-election in a close contest. One key to his success: doubling down on tough talk against inflation and support for liberal programs to raise living standards for ordinary Americans.
From the presidencies of Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stuck to the program. Like Truman, who went so far as to order a takeover of the nation’s steel mills when they announced a price hike, John F. Kennedy and Johnson also publicly reprimanded steel executives for price increases.
They all spoke out against efforts by William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman, to raise interest rates. Martin famously asserted his independence and raised rates anyway; as he saw it, the job of the Federal Reserve was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting good.” Truman called him a “traitor.”
Sign up for the Peter Coy newsletter, for Times subscribers only. A veteran business and economics columnist unpacks the biggest headlines. Get it in your inbox.
When inflation struck in the 1970s, Richard Nixon understood the expectations created by Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration. As a World War II-era inspector for the agency, Nixon had been horrified at the thought of bureaucrats checking up on the pricing decisions of private business, and he quit. Yet once in the White House, he didn’t hesitate to slap on price controls in response to the soaring cost of beef and gas.
Milton Friedman, the free-market economist, and other conservatives denounced Nixon’s response as heavy-handed — a message that his successor Gerald Ford absorbed. Instead of price controls, Ford distributed “Whip Inflation Now” buttons and called for budgetary austerity.
As American economic thinking fell under Friedman’s influence, the Roosevelt-Truman tools lost favor. With inflation reaching double digits in 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve to use monetary policy to fight inflation. When Ronald Reagan came into office, he endorsed Mr. Volcker’s muscular move to raise interest rates and drive the economy into recession to fight inflation. Subsequent presidents have largely stuck to this approach of controlling inflation.
Amid a pandemic, Mr. Biden has shown a willingness to lean hard on corporate America and embrace New Deal-style tools to lighten inflationary pressures. Through his supply chain task force, he is working to reverse offshoring and outsourcing, expand domestic production and help the ports in Los Angeles stay open round the clock to ease the cargo pileup. His infrastructure bill will allocate billions to construct and operate coastal ports and inland waterways, further easing prices.
Mr. Biden has also warned the big four meat processors against anticompetitive practices that probably contributed to spiking prices, including squeezing out competitors. His administration has pledged to take more aggressive action on illegal price fixing and antitrust, while working to bring more transparency to cattle markets. Higher meat prices are “not just the natural consequences of supply and demand in a free market — they are also the result of corporate decisions to take advantage of their market power in an uncompetitive market, to the detriment of consumers, farmers and ranchers, and our economy,” his economic advisers Brian Deese, Sameera Fazili and Bharat Ramamurti recently wrote.
Through the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Biden has called for an investigation into the prices set by large oil and gas companies and authorized the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dampen OPEC’s ability to raise prices. He also met with the chief executives of Walmart, Mattel, Food Lion, Kroger and other companies to discuss their plans to overcome supply-chain problems and keep prices in check for the holidays.
In the coming weeks, Mr. Biden should use his bully pulpit to make clear to Americans that corporations are padding their profits while working families are struggling through the pandemic. Almost two-thirds of publicly traded companies had substantially larger profit margins this year compared to the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. In 2021, close to 100 of them saw their profit margins go up at least 50 percent relative to 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Showing working Americans that he gets it will help Mr. Biden demonstrate that he cares, as the Democratic pollster Joel Benenson told me. “We’re not having an inflation problem,” he said. “We’re having a corporate greed problem. And the president should put the blame where it belongs.”
As Mr. Biden leans on big businesses to temper rising prices, he also needs to push hard for policies that have a much greater impact than fluctuations in gas or meat prices: His stalled Build Back Better legislation would go a long way to ease the burden of major expenses. Mr. Biden promised the bill would lower out-of-pocket costs for child care, care for the elderly, housing, college, health care and prescription drugs — some of the biggest costs that most families face.
Like his Democratic predecessors, Mr. Biden needs to get tough.
‘HER HEART WAS BEATING TOO’: THE WOMEN WHO DIED AFTER ABORTION BANS
By Sarah Wildman, The New York Times
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old married dentist, appeared at Ireland’s University Hospital Galway in pain. She was 17 weeks pregnant and miscarrying. According to Dr. Halappanavar’s husband, hospital staff said that there was no saving the pregnancy, but they refused to intercede because her fetus still had a heartbeat. She was told her only option was to wait.
Dr. Halappanavar became feverish. By the time the fetal heartbeat faded away, she was in organ failure. Two and a half days later she was dead.
Nearly three decades earlier, Ireland’s leaders created one of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws with an amendment to their nation’s Constitution, cementing Ireland’s near-total ban on abortions. After that, women who were able left the country for the procedure, while those who couldn’t lived with the consequences of the law. The amendment remained in place despite many stories of related brutality during that period, including a suicidal 14-year-old girl who was impregnated through rape. Her family had to plea to the highest court in the nation for her to even travel for a termination. She lost her case at first, but mass protest prompted the court to reconvene, and she was ultimately allowed to travel to Britain for an abortion.
Dr. Halappanavar’s story had an even greater impact. When she died, her husband stepped forward immediately and said Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws were to blame in her death. Her death created a surge of grief and anger that became a focal point of the abortion and women’s rights movement in Ireland, and contributed to the drive to overturn the country’s constitutional amendment.
“People would say, ‘This is for Savita,’ and she came to symbolize all women who had to struggle and suffer because of that ban,” an Irish abortion rights activist, Ailbhe Smyth, told me. In 2018 Irish voters finally overturned the amendment.
In the United States, with Roe v. Wade likely to be largely dismantled, if not overturned, next year, it is time to look again at the women whose lives — and deaths — changed how the public understands what’s at stake when we talk about banning abortion.
“The thing I worry about in the United States is that the rallying cry won’t happen until women die, and that’s so unnecessary and unfortunate,” said Kathryn Kolbert, who in 1992 argued the major abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the Supreme Court.
It should not take a high-profile death to expose just how much is at risk when medicine is hamstrung by politics, religion or culture. And yet, interviewed for The New York Times, women across Ireland described how learning about Savita Halappanavar’s story had woken them up to the reality that their very lives were on the line — not only if they found themselves facing an unwanted pregnancy, but also if a wanted pregnancy went wrong.
When you look at which stories have fueled abortion rights activism in other countries, Ms. Kolbert’s worry seems well founded. In September a 30-year-old mother identified in the press only as Izabela arrived at a Polish county hospital. According to a lawyer for her family, she was 22 weeks pregnant and the prognosis was poor: There was little or no amniotic fluid, and sonograms showed the fetus bore abnormalities. Still, a heartbeat remained.
Last year the Polish high court struck down a provision in the country’s already draconian abortion law that allowed for abortion in cases of fetal abnormality.
Izabela knew that her situation was grim. She sent a text message to her mother from the hospital: “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, because of the abortion law, I have to lie down. They can’t do anything. They are going to wait until he dies or something else happens. Oh and also, I could die of septic shock.”
In time, the fetus died. Then Izabela died, too.
(“Doctors and midwives did everything in their power, they fought a difficult battle for the patient and her child,” the hospital said in a statement.)
Eventually, Izabela’s mother made her texts public. Days later, in early November, Polish protesters marched with signs that said, “Her heart was beating too” and “Not one more.” In apparent response to the protesters, Poland’s health ministry “clarified” the nation’s abortion law, insisting that the procedure remains available to save the life of the pregnant woman.
Storytelling, Ms. Kolbert pointed out, has always been a tool in the arsenal of the political movement to safeguard abortion rights, or to win them in the first place. In recent years, the focus among activists in the United States has shifted away from telling stories of dangerous back-alley abortions and become one of empowerment, focused on sharing stories that help remove the stigma and shame that still clings to the procedure.
But in the years before Roe, clergy, legislators, media and feminist activists hoped that telling women’s stories of victimization, humiliation and death could humanize the need for universal abortion access and bring about legalization. One such story began with a 1964 police photo of a woman’s bloodied, lifeless body, facedown on a motel carpet. The woman was Geraldine Santoro, known as Gerri, 28 and a mother of two. Ms. Santoro had been fearful of what her estranged and violent husband would do to her if he discovered she was pregnant with a lover’s child. Her boyfriend attempted to perform an abortion on Ms. Santoro, accidentally killing her in the process. (He fled and was later convicted of manslaughter.)
That photo of Ms. Santoro was published in Ms. magazine in 1973, under the words “Never Again.” The image was blown up on placards carried at abortion rights rallies, a visceral illustration of the risks of illegal abortion.
In recent years, the state of abortion rights in America has deteriorated, especially for poor women and women of color. But it may be harder to motivate protesters now, in an era where women of reproductive age have spent their entire lives with the protections of the Roe era. The back-alley abortions that motivated the movement in the past are largely someone else’s memory.
There are other fears now. Today, a person could be charged with a crime after miscarrying or could face legal consequences for ingesting abortion pills ordered on the internet. In states where abortion access has been whittled down, legal provisions promising to safeguard the life of the pregnant woman are left to interpretation by medical personnel. But this is a space without clear answers, and hospital staffs will inevitably factor their own legal and professional risk into what would otherwise be a decision about the patient’s best interest.
Texas’ law banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy has been in effect since September, and already, The Lily has reported, a woman in the state who experienced an ectopic pregnancy said she was turned away for care. Ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, require immediate termination because they endanger the patient’s fertility or, worse, her life. In theory, terminating an ectopic pregnancy is not banned under the Texas law. But in this case, according to the National Abortion Federation’s hotline director, who spoke with The Lily, doctors were afraid to intercede, and the woman ended up driving at least 12 hours to New Mexico for the procedure.
The Texas woman with the ectopic pregnancy survived her ordeal. But as more states consider passing laws like Texas’, the next woman might not. What will happen then? Will we know her name? Will she become a rallying cry? Or will she and other women with tragic stories fade into obscurity, their families fearful of coming forward? No one wants to see this happen, but what are we doing to prevent it?
I called up Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (who happens to be my cousin by marriage), and asked her: Why does tremendous outcry over restrictive abortion laws come after a woman dies, rather than before? Ms. Paltrow was biting in her response. “The primary impact of the anti-abortion movement has not been to stop abortions, it is to dehumanize,” she said. “It is martyrdom and the visible suffering and death of a visible woman that reminds people of their humanity and their right to life.”
In Texas and elsewhere, Americans shouldn’t wait for another woman’s heart to stop beating before they demand change.
By Sarah Wildman, The New York Times
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old married dentist, appeared at Ireland’s University Hospital Galway in pain. She was 17 weeks pregnant and miscarrying. According to Dr. Halappanavar’s husband, hospital staff said that there was no saving the pregnancy, but they refused to intercede because her fetus still had a heartbeat. She was told her only option was to wait.
Dr. Halappanavar became feverish. By the time the fetal heartbeat faded away, she was in organ failure. Two and a half days later she was dead.
Nearly three decades earlier, Ireland’s leaders created one of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws with an amendment to their nation’s Constitution, cementing Ireland’s near-total ban on abortions. After that, women who were able left the country for the procedure, while those who couldn’t lived with the consequences of the law. The amendment remained in place despite many stories of related brutality during that period, including a suicidal 14-year-old girl who was impregnated through rape. Her family had to plea to the highest court in the nation for her to even travel for a termination. She lost her case at first, but mass protest prompted the court to reconvene, and she was ultimately allowed to travel to Britain for an abortion.
Dr. Halappanavar’s story had an even greater impact. When she died, her husband stepped forward immediately and said Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws were to blame in her death. Her death created a surge of grief and anger that became a focal point of the abortion and women’s rights movement in Ireland, and contributed to the drive to overturn the country’s constitutional amendment.
“People would say, ‘This is for Savita,’ and she came to symbolize all women who had to struggle and suffer because of that ban,” an Irish abortion rights activist, Ailbhe Smyth, told me. In 2018 Irish voters finally overturned the amendment.
In the United States, with Roe v. Wade likely to be largely dismantled, if not overturned, next year, it is time to look again at the women whose lives — and deaths — changed how the public understands what’s at stake when we talk about banning abortion.
“The thing I worry about in the United States is that the rallying cry won’t happen until women die, and that’s so unnecessary and unfortunate,” said Kathryn Kolbert, who in 1992 argued the major abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey before the Supreme Court.
It should not take a high-profile death to expose just how much is at risk when medicine is hamstrung by politics, religion or culture. And yet, interviewed for The New York Times, women across Ireland described how learning about Savita Halappanavar’s story had woken them up to the reality that their very lives were on the line — not only if they found themselves facing an unwanted pregnancy, but also if a wanted pregnancy went wrong.
When you look at which stories have fueled abortion rights activism in other countries, Ms. Kolbert’s worry seems well founded. In September a 30-year-old mother identified in the press only as Izabela arrived at a Polish county hospital. According to a lawyer for her family, she was 22 weeks pregnant and the prognosis was poor: There was little or no amniotic fluid, and sonograms showed the fetus bore abnormalities. Still, a heartbeat remained.
Last year the Polish high court struck down a provision in the country’s already draconian abortion law that allowed for abortion in cases of fetal abnormality.
Izabela knew that her situation was grim. She sent a text message to her mother from the hospital: “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, because of the abortion law, I have to lie down. They can’t do anything. They are going to wait until he dies or something else happens. Oh and also, I could die of septic shock.”
In time, the fetus died. Then Izabela died, too.
(“Doctors and midwives did everything in their power, they fought a difficult battle for the patient and her child,” the hospital said in a statement.)
Eventually, Izabela’s mother made her texts public. Days later, in early November, Polish protesters marched with signs that said, “Her heart was beating too” and “Not one more.” In apparent response to the protesters, Poland’s health ministry “clarified” the nation’s abortion law, insisting that the procedure remains available to save the life of the pregnant woman.
Storytelling, Ms. Kolbert pointed out, has always been a tool in the arsenal of the political movement to safeguard abortion rights, or to win them in the first place. In recent years, the focus among activists in the United States has shifted away from telling stories of dangerous back-alley abortions and become one of empowerment, focused on sharing stories that help remove the stigma and shame that still clings to the procedure.
But in the years before Roe, clergy, legislators, media and feminist activists hoped that telling women’s stories of victimization, humiliation and death could humanize the need for universal abortion access and bring about legalization. One such story began with a 1964 police photo of a woman’s bloodied, lifeless body, facedown on a motel carpet. The woman was Geraldine Santoro, known as Gerri, 28 and a mother of two. Ms. Santoro had been fearful of what her estranged and violent husband would do to her if he discovered she was pregnant with a lover’s child. Her boyfriend attempted to perform an abortion on Ms. Santoro, accidentally killing her in the process. (He fled and was later convicted of manslaughter.)
That photo of Ms. Santoro was published in Ms. magazine in 1973, under the words “Never Again.” The image was blown up on placards carried at abortion rights rallies, a visceral illustration of the risks of illegal abortion.
In recent years, the state of abortion rights in America has deteriorated, especially for poor women and women of color. But it may be harder to motivate protesters now, in an era where women of reproductive age have spent their entire lives with the protections of the Roe era. The back-alley abortions that motivated the movement in the past are largely someone else’s memory.
There are other fears now. Today, a person could be charged with a crime after miscarrying or could face legal consequences for ingesting abortion pills ordered on the internet. In states where abortion access has been whittled down, legal provisions promising to safeguard the life of the pregnant woman are left to interpretation by medical personnel. But this is a space without clear answers, and hospital staffs will inevitably factor their own legal and professional risk into what would otherwise be a decision about the patient’s best interest.
Texas’ law banning abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy has been in effect since September, and already, The Lily has reported, a woman in the state who experienced an ectopic pregnancy said she was turned away for care. Ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, require immediate termination because they endanger the patient’s fertility or, worse, her life. In theory, terminating an ectopic pregnancy is not banned under the Texas law. But in this case, according to the National Abortion Federation’s hotline director, who spoke with The Lily, doctors were afraid to intercede, and the woman ended up driving at least 12 hours to New Mexico for the procedure.
The Texas woman with the ectopic pregnancy survived her ordeal. But as more states consider passing laws like Texas’, the next woman might not. What will happen then? Will we know her name? Will she become a rallying cry? Or will she and other women with tragic stories fade into obscurity, their families fearful of coming forward? No one wants to see this happen, but what are we doing to prevent it?
I called up Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (who happens to be my cousin by marriage), and asked her: Why does tremendous outcry over restrictive abortion laws come after a woman dies, rather than before? Ms. Paltrow was biting in her response. “The primary impact of the anti-abortion movement has not been to stop abortions, it is to dehumanize,” she said. “It is martyrdom and the visible suffering and death of a visible woman that reminds people of their humanity and their right to life.”
In Texas and elsewhere, Americans shouldn’t wait for another woman’s heart to stop beating before they demand change.
PARENTS CLAIM THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO SHAPE THEIR KIDS’ SCHOOL CURRICULUM. THEY DON’T.
By Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, The Washington Post
In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of “parents’ rights.” In Indiana, Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita recently introduced a Parents Bill of Rights, which asserts that “education policy and curriculum should accurately reflect the values of Indiana families.” In Florida, the legislature passed an even more comprehensive bill, assuring that the state and its public schools cannot infringe on the “fundamental rights” of parents. A growing number of states are allowing parents to sue districts that teach banned concepts. And in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin has made parents’ rights a centerpiece of his campaign for governor, staging “parents matter” rallies and declaring, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere. Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents. In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, “This effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself is what children do.”
When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent’s desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain. To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently. As the political scientist Rob Reich has argued, “Minimal autonomy requires, especially for its civic importance, that a child be able to examine his or her own political values and beliefs, and those of others, with a critical eye.” If we value that end, “the structure of schooling cannot simply replicate in every particularity the values and beliefs of a child’s home.”
The law has long reflected this. Consider home schooling. Although it is legal across the country, states still regulate its practice. Such regulations often aren’t enforced, but they are certainly on the books. Home-schooling parents can be required to establish minimal academic qualifications, to submit examples of student work to school district administrators or even to adopt a state-approved curriculum. As the Supreme Court noted in Wisconsin v. Yoder, a case that granted Amish parents the widest possible exemption from state control, “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.” And, as the court made clear in an earlier case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the state concerns itself not just with the well-being of the child but also with what the justices broadly called “the public welfare.”
The sudden push for parental rights, then, isn’t a response to substantive changes in education or the law. It’s a political tactic.
Writing in the 1960s, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that conservatives felt that the country had been “taken away from them and their kind” and that timeworn American virtues had been “eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals.” In response, they took up what he called the “paranoid style” — an approach to politics characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Published more than half a century ago, his essay could have been penned yesterday.
The “paranoid style” of politics is particularly useful as a mechanism for organizing opposition. And the Republicans employing it right now have two particular targets in mind. The first is the public education system, which hard-liners have long sought to undermine. At an annual cost of nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, tuition-free, open-enrollment education represents one of the nation’s most substantial commitments to the public good. But well before Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to introduce vouchers in the 1980s, conservatives were making the case for a privatized system — one in which families, not taxpayers, would bear the cost of education, and governance would happen through the free market rather than democratic politics. In recent years, this vision has come roaring back. Conservative legislatures across the United States have introduced bills creating education savings accounts, private-school tuition tax credits and other forms of neo-vouchers that package old ideological wine in new bottles.
But this play is much bigger than education. For years, the Republican Party has understood that the demographic tide is against it. Knowing that every vote matters, the GOP has increasingly relied on a strategy of voter suppression. Simultaneously, Republicans have worked to ensure that their base turns out in force by stoking White racial grievance. The recent firestorm over critical race theory is a perfect case in point. Never mind that this concept from legal scholarship isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools or that it isn’t what most protesters believe it to be. Republicans gain an electoral advantage by convincing their base that White children are being taught to hate themselves, their families and their country. Whether this supposed attack on the American way of life is being coordinated by Black Lives Matter activists, Marxist educators or antifa operatives, the point, as Hofstadter observed, is to generate an enemy “thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable.”
Courts have found that parents have great authority when it comes to deciding how to raise and educate their children. This right, however, does not mean that public schools must cater to parents’ individual ideas about education. Parents can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools. But even there, parental rights remain subject to state regulation and override.
In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight. That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor. But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of “rights” only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
By Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, The Washington Post
In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of “parents’ rights.” In Indiana, Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita recently introduced a Parents Bill of Rights, which asserts that “education policy and curriculum should accurately reflect the values of Indiana families.” In Florida, the legislature passed an even more comprehensive bill, assuring that the state and its public schools cannot infringe on the “fundamental rights” of parents. A growing number of states are allowing parents to sue districts that teach banned concepts. And in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin has made parents’ rights a centerpiece of his campaign for governor, staging “parents matter” rallies and declaring, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere. Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents. In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, “This effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself is what children do.”
When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent’s desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain. To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently. As the political scientist Rob Reich has argued, “Minimal autonomy requires, especially for its civic importance, that a child be able to examine his or her own political values and beliefs, and those of others, with a critical eye.” If we value that end, “the structure of schooling cannot simply replicate in every particularity the values and beliefs of a child’s home.”
The law has long reflected this. Consider home schooling. Although it is legal across the country, states still regulate its practice. Such regulations often aren’t enforced, but they are certainly on the books. Home-schooling parents can be required to establish minimal academic qualifications, to submit examples of student work to school district administrators or even to adopt a state-approved curriculum. As the Supreme Court noted in Wisconsin v. Yoder, a case that granted Amish parents the widest possible exemption from state control, “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.” And, as the court made clear in an earlier case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the state concerns itself not just with the well-being of the child but also with what the justices broadly called “the public welfare.”
The sudden push for parental rights, then, isn’t a response to substantive changes in education or the law. It’s a political tactic.
Writing in the 1960s, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that conservatives felt that the country had been “taken away from them and their kind” and that timeworn American virtues had been “eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals.” In response, they took up what he called the “paranoid style” — an approach to politics characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Published more than half a century ago, his essay could have been penned yesterday.
The “paranoid style” of politics is particularly useful as a mechanism for organizing opposition. And the Republicans employing it right now have two particular targets in mind. The first is the public education system, which hard-liners have long sought to undermine. At an annual cost of nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, tuition-free, open-enrollment education represents one of the nation’s most substantial commitments to the public good. But well before Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to introduce vouchers in the 1980s, conservatives were making the case for a privatized system — one in which families, not taxpayers, would bear the cost of education, and governance would happen through the free market rather than democratic politics. In recent years, this vision has come roaring back. Conservative legislatures across the United States have introduced bills creating education savings accounts, private-school tuition tax credits and other forms of neo-vouchers that package old ideological wine in new bottles.
But this play is much bigger than education. For years, the Republican Party has understood that the demographic tide is against it. Knowing that every vote matters, the GOP has increasingly relied on a strategy of voter suppression. Simultaneously, Republicans have worked to ensure that their base turns out in force by stoking White racial grievance. The recent firestorm over critical race theory is a perfect case in point. Never mind that this concept from legal scholarship isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools or that it isn’t what most protesters believe it to be. Republicans gain an electoral advantage by convincing their base that White children are being taught to hate themselves, their families and their country. Whether this supposed attack on the American way of life is being coordinated by Black Lives Matter activists, Marxist educators or antifa operatives, the point, as Hofstadter observed, is to generate an enemy “thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable.”
Courts have found that parents have great authority when it comes to deciding how to raise and educate their children. This right, however, does not mean that public schools must cater to parents’ individual ideas about education. Parents can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools. But even there, parental rights remain subject to state regulation and override.
In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight. That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor. But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of “rights” only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
THE GOP REBRANDS ITSELF AS THE PARTY OF TAX CHEATS
Opinion by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Once upon a time, Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of small government and family values. Recently, though, GOP leaders have been cobbling together a new coalition, welcoming insurrectionists, white-nationalist tiki-torchers and people who think Bill Gates is trying to microchip them.
The latest recruit to the Big Tent? Tax cheats.
Here’s the backstory. Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data.
These unpaid taxes — often called the “tax gap” — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year.
To be clear, rank-and-file wage-earners are not necessarily more honest or patriotic. It’s just much harder for them to shortchange Uncle Sam.
Workplace grunts have taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. And, critically, most labor-related income — as well as income from dividends, interest and other sources — gets reported to the Internal Revenue Service through W-2s, 1099s and other common tax documents.
So it’s difficult to sneak unpaid liabilities past the IRS.
There are some types of income, however, for which little or no third-party reporting exists. These income categories — including partnership, proprietorship and rental income — accrue disproportionately to high earners. The government has much less ability to tell when these filers are misreporting; as a result, they can more easily get away with cheating.
And some of them do.
This is evident from IRS data on “voluntary compliance,” or how accurately people report their income and tax liabilities without the government having to come after them. When it comes to ordinary wage and salary income, taxpayers are remarkably forthcoming, with noncompliance averaging only 1 percent; for those more “opaque” income sources, noncompliance is an estimated 55 percent.
Tax cheating is not a victimless crime. When (disproportionately high-income) people don’t pay their bills, everyone else must pay more to fill the shortfall.
One solution is to have the IRS conduct more audits. Audit rates for big corporations and high-income individuals should be higher, given that tax enforcement has plummeted as the IRS has been starved of resources.
But indiscriminately increasing audit rates alone is unlikely to solve the problem, and might irritate a lot of honest taxpayers in the process.
Not all high-income people (or people with rental or partnership or other “opaque” income) are cheating, of course. A more effective response would involve more of that third-party reporting so the IRS has greater visibility into who’s likely fudging their numbers. Then the agency could better target its audit decisions.
More reporting would also deter would-be tax cheats from fudging in the first place, because they’d know they’re more likely to get caught.
This solution is exactly what Democrats have proposed as part of their big budget bill.
Financial institutions already report certain information to the IRS about their clients’ accounts, such as interest income accrued over the year. Under Democrats’ latest proposal, banks would — once a year — also report the sums of all deposits and withdrawals for certain accounts. Not every transaction; just the year-end totals. Only accounts with flows of more than $10,000 not tied to wage income or exempted benefits would be affected — the idea being that the IRS already knows about the wage income anyway.
The reporting proposal is estimated to bring in $200 billion to $250 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Treasury.
This is revenue that would be collected without having to raise a single tax rate, which you’d think Republicans would applaud. Instead, the GOP, backed by the bank lobby, has fought every version of the reporting policy tooth and nail.
Just as they did with Obamacare “death panels,” Republicans have megaphoned misinformation. They allege that Democrats would create a Marxist “surveillance program designed to target low- and middle-income earners” (false) in which the government would “monitor every single transaction you make” (false) with “no limits” (definitely false).
“Democrats want to track every penny you earn so they can then tax you and your family at the maximum possible amount,” fearmongered House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). This is an interesting euphemism for “rich people are going to pay the minimum amount of taxes the law already requires.”
The GOP seeks to exploit the confusion of honest, rank-and-file taxpayers. Their income is already quite well reported to the IRS: Three billion 1099 forms alone will be issued this year, and Americans haven’t considered this a “dragnet” or “infringement on personal privacy.” But suddenly it is — when similar reporting is proposed to ensure high-income people’s tax compliance, too.
Republicans also presumably have another shameful aim: communicating to tax cheats that, now and in the future, the GOP has their backs.
Opinion by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
Once upon a time, Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of small government and family values. Recently, though, GOP leaders have been cobbling together a new coalition, welcoming insurrectionists, white-nationalist tiki-torchers and people who think Bill Gates is trying to microchip them.
The latest recruit to the Big Tent? Tax cheats.
Here’s the backstory. Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data.
These unpaid taxes — often called the “tax gap” — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year.
To be clear, rank-and-file wage-earners are not necessarily more honest or patriotic. It’s just much harder for them to shortchange Uncle Sam.
Workplace grunts have taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. And, critically, most labor-related income — as well as income from dividends, interest and other sources — gets reported to the Internal Revenue Service through W-2s, 1099s and other common tax documents.
So it’s difficult to sneak unpaid liabilities past the IRS.
There are some types of income, however, for which little or no third-party reporting exists. These income categories — including partnership, proprietorship and rental income — accrue disproportionately to high earners. The government has much less ability to tell when these filers are misreporting; as a result, they can more easily get away with cheating.
And some of them do.
This is evident from IRS data on “voluntary compliance,” or how accurately people report their income and tax liabilities without the government having to come after them. When it comes to ordinary wage and salary income, taxpayers are remarkably forthcoming, with noncompliance averaging only 1 percent; for those more “opaque” income sources, noncompliance is an estimated 55 percent.
Tax cheating is not a victimless crime. When (disproportionately high-income) people don’t pay their bills, everyone else must pay more to fill the shortfall.
One solution is to have the IRS conduct more audits. Audit rates for big corporations and high-income individuals should be higher, given that tax enforcement has plummeted as the IRS has been starved of resources.
But indiscriminately increasing audit rates alone is unlikely to solve the problem, and might irritate a lot of honest taxpayers in the process.
Not all high-income people (or people with rental or partnership or other “opaque” income) are cheating, of course. A more effective response would involve more of that third-party reporting so the IRS has greater visibility into who’s likely fudging their numbers. Then the agency could better target its audit decisions.
More reporting would also deter would-be tax cheats from fudging in the first place, because they’d know they’re more likely to get caught.
This solution is exactly what Democrats have proposed as part of their big budget bill.
Financial institutions already report certain information to the IRS about their clients’ accounts, such as interest income accrued over the year. Under Democrats’ latest proposal, banks would — once a year — also report the sums of all deposits and withdrawals for certain accounts. Not every transaction; just the year-end totals. Only accounts with flows of more than $10,000 not tied to wage income or exempted benefits would be affected — the idea being that the IRS already knows about the wage income anyway.
The reporting proposal is estimated to bring in $200 billion to $250 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Treasury.
This is revenue that would be collected without having to raise a single tax rate, which you’d think Republicans would applaud. Instead, the GOP, backed by the bank lobby, has fought every version of the reporting policy tooth and nail.
Just as they did with Obamacare “death panels,” Republicans have megaphoned misinformation. They allege that Democrats would create a Marxist “surveillance program designed to target low- and middle-income earners” (false) in which the government would “monitor every single transaction you make” (false) with “no limits” (definitely false).
“Democrats want to track every penny you earn so they can then tax you and your family at the maximum possible amount,” fearmongered House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). This is an interesting euphemism for “rich people are going to pay the minimum amount of taxes the law already requires.”
The GOP seeks to exploit the confusion of honest, rank-and-file taxpayers. Their income is already quite well reported to the IRS: Three billion 1099 forms alone will be issued this year, and Americans haven’t considered this a “dragnet” or “infringement on personal privacy.” But suddenly it is — when similar reporting is proposed to ensure high-income people’s tax compliance, too.
Republicans also presumably have another shameful aim: communicating to tax cheats that, now and in the future, the GOP has their backs.
NO FEDERAL TAXES FOR DOZENS OF BIG, PROFITABLE COMPANIES
FedEx and Nike are among those found to have avoided U.S. tax liability for three straight years.
By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
Just as the Biden administration is pushing to raise taxes on corporations, a new study finds that at least 55 of America’s largest paid no taxes last year on billions of dollars in profits.
The sweeping tax bill passed in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. But dozens of Fortune 500 companies were able to further shrink their tax bill — sometimes to zero — thanks to a range of legal deductions and exemptions that have become staples of the tax code, according to the analysis.
Salesforce, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Consolidated Edison were among those named in the report, which was done by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning research group in Washington.
Twenty-six of the companies listed, including FedEx, Duke Energy and Nike, were able to avoid paying any federal income tax for the last three years even though they reported a combined income of $77 billion. Many also received millions of dollars in tax rebates.
Escaping 3 Years of Taxes
These are Fortune 500 companies with enough public information to show that they were profitable in 2018, 2019 and 2020 and had a total effective federal tax rate of zero or less over those three years, according to data compiled by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Company 3-year income (in billions) Effective 3-year tax rate
Duke Energy $7.9 −15.5%
FedEx $6.9 −12.8%
Dish Network $6.6 −0.2%
American Electric Power $5.9 −3.0%
Kinder Morgan $4.9 −0.9%
Xcel Energy $4.4 −1.4%
Nike $4.1 −18.0%
Salesforce.com $4.1 −0.1%
DTE Energy $4.1 −11.0%
FirstEnergy $3.7 −1.2%
Williams $3.2 −4.8%
PPL $2.9 −1.3%
CMS Energy $2.5 −5.3%
Archer-Daniels-Midland $2.1 −0.1%
Evergy $2.1 −6.4%
Cabot Oil & Gas $1.8 −8.6%
Westlake Chemical $1.7 −1.7%
Advanced Micro Devices $1.7 −0.1%
Textron $1.5 −3.1%
Penske Automotive Group $1.3 −5.1%
UGI $1.1 −3.2%
Telephone & Data Systems $0.7 −22.8%
Mohawk Industries $0.6 −3.3%
Ball $0.6 −1.8%
Howmet Aerospace $0.4 −0.5%
Sanmina-SCI $0.3 −0.1%
Companies’ tax returns are private, but publicly traded corporations are required to file financial reports that include federal income tax expense. The institute used that data along with other information supplied by each company on its pretax income.
Catherine Butler, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, responded in an email that the company “fully complies with federal and state tax laws as part of our efforts to make investments that will benefit our customers and communities.”
She pointed out that the bonus depreciation, intended to encourage investment in areas like renewable energy, “caused Duke’s cash tax obligations to be deferred to future periods, but it did not eliminate them.” According to a filing at the end of 2020, Duke has a deferred federal tax balance of $9 billion that will be paid in the future.
DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utility that was also found to have paid no federal taxes for three years, said major investments in modernizing aging infrastructure and new solar and wind technologies were the primary reasons last year. “For utilities, the benefit of these federal tax savings are passed on to utility customers in the form of lower utility bills,” it said in a statement.
A provision in the 2017 tax bill allowed businesses to immediately write off the cost of any new equipment and machinery.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed last year to help businesses and families survive the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus, also contained a provision that temporarily allowed businesses to use losses in 2020 to offset profits earned in previous years, according to the institute.
DTE used that provision to get an accelerated refund of credits representing $220 million of previously paid alternative minimum taxes, the company said.
FedEx, too, took advantage of provisions in the CARES Act, using losses in 2020 to reduce tax bills from previous years when the tax rate was higher.
The report is the latest fodder in a debate over whether and how to revise the tax code. Policymakers, business leaders and tax experts argue that many deductions and credits are there for good reason — to encourage research and development, to promote expansion and to smooth the ups and downs of the business cycle, taking a longer view of profit and loss than can be calculated in a single year.
“The fact that a lot of companies aren’t paying taxes says there are a lot of provisions and preferences out there,” said Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “It doesn’t tell you whether they’re good or bad or indifferent. At most it’s a starting point, certainly not an ending point.”
He pointed out that the Biden administration itself supported tax credits for green energy investments.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has been issuing a form of its report on corporate taxes for decades. During the 2020 presidential campaign, its findings grabbed center stage, with Democratic candidates citing it to argue the tax code was deeply flawed.
Tax avoidance strategies include a mix of old standards and new innovations. Companies, for example, saved billions by allowing top executives to buy discounted stock options in the future and then deducting their value as a loss.
The Biden administration announced this week that it planned to increase the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, and establish a kind of minimum tax that would limit the number of zero-payers. The White House estimated that the revisions would raise $2 trillion over 15 years, which will be used to fund the president’s ambitious infrastructure plan.
Supporters say that in addition to yielding revenue, the rewrite would help make the tax code more equitable, requiring individuals and companies at the top of the income ladder to pay more. But Republicans have signaled that the tax increases in the Biden proposal — which Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, called “massive” — will preclude bipartisan support.
Referring to the proposed revisions, Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the taxation institute, said, “If I were going to make a list of the things I would want the corporate tax reform to do, this outline tackles all these issues.”
Deductions and exemptions wouldn’t disappear, but other changes like the minimum tax would reduce their value, he said.
FedEx and Nike are among those found to have avoided U.S. tax liability for three straight years.
By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
Just as the Biden administration is pushing to raise taxes on corporations, a new study finds that at least 55 of America’s largest paid no taxes last year on billions of dollars in profits.
The sweeping tax bill passed in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. But dozens of Fortune 500 companies were able to further shrink their tax bill — sometimes to zero — thanks to a range of legal deductions and exemptions that have become staples of the tax code, according to the analysis.
Salesforce, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Consolidated Edison were among those named in the report, which was done by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning research group in Washington.
Twenty-six of the companies listed, including FedEx, Duke Energy and Nike, were able to avoid paying any federal income tax for the last three years even though they reported a combined income of $77 billion. Many also received millions of dollars in tax rebates.
Escaping 3 Years of Taxes
These are Fortune 500 companies with enough public information to show that they were profitable in 2018, 2019 and 2020 and had a total effective federal tax rate of zero or less over those three years, according to data compiled by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Company 3-year income (in billions) Effective 3-year tax rate
Duke Energy $7.9 −15.5%
FedEx $6.9 −12.8%
Dish Network $6.6 −0.2%
American Electric Power $5.9 −3.0%
Kinder Morgan $4.9 −0.9%
Xcel Energy $4.4 −1.4%
Nike $4.1 −18.0%
Salesforce.com $4.1 −0.1%
DTE Energy $4.1 −11.0%
FirstEnergy $3.7 −1.2%
Williams $3.2 −4.8%
PPL $2.9 −1.3%
CMS Energy $2.5 −5.3%
Archer-Daniels-Midland $2.1 −0.1%
Evergy $2.1 −6.4%
Cabot Oil & Gas $1.8 −8.6%
Westlake Chemical $1.7 −1.7%
Advanced Micro Devices $1.7 −0.1%
Textron $1.5 −3.1%
Penske Automotive Group $1.3 −5.1%
UGI $1.1 −3.2%
Telephone & Data Systems $0.7 −22.8%
Mohawk Industries $0.6 −3.3%
Ball $0.6 −1.8%
Howmet Aerospace $0.4 −0.5%
Sanmina-SCI $0.3 −0.1%
Companies’ tax returns are private, but publicly traded corporations are required to file financial reports that include federal income tax expense. The institute used that data along with other information supplied by each company on its pretax income.
Catherine Butler, a spokeswoman for Duke Energy, responded in an email that the company “fully complies with federal and state tax laws as part of our efforts to make investments that will benefit our customers and communities.”
She pointed out that the bonus depreciation, intended to encourage investment in areas like renewable energy, “caused Duke’s cash tax obligations to be deferred to future periods, but it did not eliminate them.” According to a filing at the end of 2020, Duke has a deferred federal tax balance of $9 billion that will be paid in the future.
DTE Energy, a Detroit-based utility that was also found to have paid no federal taxes for three years, said major investments in modernizing aging infrastructure and new solar and wind technologies were the primary reasons last year. “For utilities, the benefit of these federal tax savings are passed on to utility customers in the form of lower utility bills,” it said in a statement.
A provision in the 2017 tax bill allowed businesses to immediately write off the cost of any new equipment and machinery.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed last year to help businesses and families survive the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus, also contained a provision that temporarily allowed businesses to use losses in 2020 to offset profits earned in previous years, according to the institute.
DTE used that provision to get an accelerated refund of credits representing $220 million of previously paid alternative minimum taxes, the company said.
FedEx, too, took advantage of provisions in the CARES Act, using losses in 2020 to reduce tax bills from previous years when the tax rate was higher.
The report is the latest fodder in a debate over whether and how to revise the tax code. Policymakers, business leaders and tax experts argue that many deductions and credits are there for good reason — to encourage research and development, to promote expansion and to smooth the ups and downs of the business cycle, taking a longer view of profit and loss than can be calculated in a single year.
“The fact that a lot of companies aren’t paying taxes says there are a lot of provisions and preferences out there,” said Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “It doesn’t tell you whether they’re good or bad or indifferent. At most it’s a starting point, certainly not an ending point.”
He pointed out that the Biden administration itself supported tax credits for green energy investments.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has been issuing a form of its report on corporate taxes for decades. During the 2020 presidential campaign, its findings grabbed center stage, with Democratic candidates citing it to argue the tax code was deeply flawed.
Tax avoidance strategies include a mix of old standards and new innovations. Companies, for example, saved billions by allowing top executives to buy discounted stock options in the future and then deducting their value as a loss.
The Biden administration announced this week that it planned to increase the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, and establish a kind of minimum tax that would limit the number of zero-payers. The White House estimated that the revisions would raise $2 trillion over 15 years, which will be used to fund the president’s ambitious infrastructure plan.
Supporters say that in addition to yielding revenue, the rewrite would help make the tax code more equitable, requiring individuals and companies at the top of the income ladder to pay more. But Republicans have signaled that the tax increases in the Biden proposal — which Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, called “massive” — will preclude bipartisan support.
Referring to the proposed revisions, Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the taxation institute, said, “If I were going to make a list of the things I would want the corporate tax reform to do, this outline tackles all these issues.”
Deductions and exemptions wouldn’t disappear, but other changes like the minimum tax would reduce their value, he said.
HOW TO COLLECT $1.4 TRILLION IN UNPAID TAXES
Wealthy Americans are concealing large amounts of income from the I.R.S. There is a straightforward corrective.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
When the federal government started withholding income taxes from workers’ paychecks during World War II, the innovation was presented as a matter of fairness, a way to ensure that everyone paid. Irving Berlin wrote a song for the Treasury Department: “You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them. So did I.”
The withholding system remains the cornerstone of income taxation, effectively preventing Americans from lying about wage income. Employers submit an annual W-2 report on the wages paid to each worker, making it hard to fudge the numbers.
But the burden of taxation is increasingly warped because the government has no comparable system for verifying income from businesses. The result is that most wage earners pay their fair share while many business owners engage in blatant fraud at public expense.
In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2. Billions of dollars in business profits, rent and royalties are hidden from the government each year. By contrast, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.
Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.
The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans’ good-faith participation.
Proposals to close this “tax gap” often focus on reversing the long-term decline in funding for the I.R.S., allowing the agency to hire more workers and to audit more wealthy taxpayers. But Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, makes a compelling argument that such an approach is inadequate. Mr. Rossotti says that Congress needs to change the rules, by creating a third-party verification system for business income, too.
The core of Mr. Rossotti’s clever proposal is to obtain that information from banks. Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.
Individuals would then have the opportunity to reconcile what Mr. Rossotti dubs their “1099New” forms with their reported income on their individual tax returns. One might, for example, assert that a particular deposit was a tax-exempt gift.
Mr. Rossotti has proposed that the I.R.S. require the new forms only for people with taxable income above a generous threshold. A bill including Mr. Rossotti’s plan, introduced by Representative Ro Khanna of California, sets that threshold at $400,000, to minimize the burden on small business. The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard. Small businesses ought to pay their taxes, too.
The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating.
It would have the immediate benefit of scaring people into probity.
Consider what happened after Congress passed legislation in 1986 to require taxpayers to list a Social Security number for each person claimed as a dependent. The government could not easily crosscheck all of those claims then, but the requirement itself caused a sharp drop in fraud. The next year, seven million children abruptly disappeared from tax returns.
To realize the full benefit of the new data, however, Congress does need to make a significant investment in upgrading the I.R.S.’s outdated computer systems, and in hiring enough qualified workers to examine suspicious cases and to hold accountable those who cheat.
In 2008, for example, Congress passed a bill to require credit card processors to report payments processed on behalf of online retailers on an annual form called a 1099-K so the I.R.S. could verify the income reported by those retailers. But in December, the Treasury Department’s inspector general reported that “resource limitations” had prevented the I.R.S. from investigating more than 310,000 cases in which individuals and businesses failed to report more than $330 billion in income documented on 1099-Ks.
Congressional Republicans, unable to muster public support for reductions in federal spending, have pursued that goal indirectly by constraining federal revenue, in part by hacking away at the I.R.S.’s budget. The share of all tax returns subject to an audit declined by 46 percent from 2010 to 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For millionaires, the decline in the audit rate was 61 percent. Today, the government employs fewer people to track down deadbeats than at any time since the 1950s.
The result is a parallel increase in federal debt and in tax fraud.
Mr. Rossotti, together with the Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and the University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin, argued in an analysis published in November that investing $100 billion in the I.R.S. over the next decade, for technology and personnel, in combination with better data on business income, would allow the agency to collect up to $1.4 trillion in lawful tax revenue that otherwise would go uncollected.
The logic of such an investment is overwhelming. The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let’s start by collecting what they already owe.
Wealthy Americans are concealing large amounts of income from the I.R.S. There is a straightforward corrective.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
When the federal government started withholding income taxes from workers’ paychecks during World War II, the innovation was presented as a matter of fairness, a way to ensure that everyone paid. Irving Berlin wrote a song for the Treasury Department: “You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them. So did I.”
The withholding system remains the cornerstone of income taxation, effectively preventing Americans from lying about wage income. Employers submit an annual W-2 report on the wages paid to each worker, making it hard to fudge the numbers.
But the burden of taxation is increasingly warped because the government has no comparable system for verifying income from businesses. The result is that most wage earners pay their fair share while many business owners engage in blatant fraud at public expense.
In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income that is not subject to some form of third-party verification like a W-2. Billions of dollars in business profits, rent and royalties are hidden from the government each year. By contrast, more than 95 percent of wage income is reported.
Unreported income is the single largest reason that unpaid federal income taxes may amount to more than $600 billion this year, and more than $7.5 trillion over the next decade. It is a truly staggering sum — more than half of the projected federal deficit over the same period.
The government has a basic obligation to enforce the law and to crack down on this epidemic of tax fraud. The failure to do so means that the burden of paying for public services falls more heavily on wage earners than on business owners, exacerbating economic inequality. The reality of widespread cheating also undermines the legitimacy of a tax system that still relies to a considerable extent on Americans’ good-faith participation.
Proposals to close this “tax gap” often focus on reversing the long-term decline in funding for the I.R.S., allowing the agency to hire more workers and to audit more wealthy taxpayers. But Charles Rossotti, who led the I.R.S. from 1997 to 2002, makes a compelling argument that such an approach is inadequate. Mr. Rossotti says that Congress needs to change the rules, by creating a third-party verification system for business income, too.
The core of Mr. Rossotti’s clever proposal is to obtain that information from banks. Under his plan, the government would require banks to produce an annual account statement totaling inflows and outflows, like the 1099 tax forms that investment firms must provide to their clients.
Individuals would then have the opportunity to reconcile what Mr. Rossotti dubs their “1099New” forms with their reported income on their individual tax returns. One might, for example, assert that a particular deposit was a tax-exempt gift.
Mr. Rossotti has proposed that the I.R.S. require the new forms only for people with taxable income above a generous threshold. A bill including Mr. Rossotti’s plan, introduced by Representative Ro Khanna of California, sets that threshold at $400,000, to minimize the burden on small business. The money is undoubtedly in chasing wealthy tax cheats, but equity argues that business income, like wage income, should be subject to a uniform reporting standard. Small businesses ought to pay their taxes, too.
The proposal would not increase the amount anyone owes in taxes. It would, instead, increase the amount paid in taxes by those who are currently cheating.
It would have the immediate benefit of scaring people into probity.
Consider what happened after Congress passed legislation in 1986 to require taxpayers to list a Social Security number for each person claimed as a dependent. The government could not easily crosscheck all of those claims then, but the requirement itself caused a sharp drop in fraud. The next year, seven million children abruptly disappeared from tax returns.
To realize the full benefit of the new data, however, Congress does need to make a significant investment in upgrading the I.R.S.’s outdated computer systems, and in hiring enough qualified workers to examine suspicious cases and to hold accountable those who cheat.
In 2008, for example, Congress passed a bill to require credit card processors to report payments processed on behalf of online retailers on an annual form called a 1099-K so the I.R.S. could verify the income reported by those retailers. But in December, the Treasury Department’s inspector general reported that “resource limitations” had prevented the I.R.S. from investigating more than 310,000 cases in which individuals and businesses failed to report more than $330 billion in income documented on 1099-Ks.
Congressional Republicans, unable to muster public support for reductions in federal spending, have pursued that goal indirectly by constraining federal revenue, in part by hacking away at the I.R.S.’s budget. The share of all tax returns subject to an audit declined by 46 percent from 2010 to 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For millionaires, the decline in the audit rate was 61 percent. Today, the government employs fewer people to track down deadbeats than at any time since the 1950s.
The result is a parallel increase in federal debt and in tax fraud.
Mr. Rossotti, together with the Harvard economist Lawrence Summers and the University of Pennsylvania law professor Natasha Sarin, argued in an analysis published in November that investing $100 billion in the I.R.S. over the next decade, for technology and personnel, in combination with better data on business income, would allow the agency to collect up to $1.4 trillion in lawful tax revenue that otherwise would go uncollected.
The logic of such an investment is overwhelming. The government can crack down on crime, improve the equity of taxation — and raise some needed money in the bargain. There are many proposals to raise taxes on the rich. Let’s start by collecting what they already owe.
FOR DEMOCRACY TO STAY, THE FILIBUSTER MUST GO
What happens when the biggest election reform bill in half a century runs into one of the most formidable barriers to American governance?
By The New York Times Editorial Board
It is hard to imagine a more fitting job for Congress than for members to join together to pass a broadly popular law that makes democracy safer, stronger and more accessible to all Americans.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1. The bill, a similar version of which the House passed in 2019, is a comprehensive and desperately needed set of reforms that would strengthen voting rights and election security, ban partisan gerrymandering, reduce big money in politics and establish ethics codes for Supreme Court justices, the president and other executive branch officials.
The legislation has the support of at least 50 senators, plus the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. President Biden is on board and ready to sign it. So what’s the problem? Majority support in the Senate isn’t enough. In the upper chamber, a supermajority of 60 votes is required to pass even the most middling piece of legislation. That requirement is not found in the Constitution; it’s because of the filibuster, a centuries-old parliamentary tool that has been transformed into a weapon for strangling functional government.
This is a singular moment for American democracy, if Democrats are willing to seize it. Whatever grand principles have been used to sustain the filibuster over the years, it is clear as a matter of history, theory and practice that it vindicates none of them. If America is to be governed competently and fairly — if it is to be governed at all — the filibuster must go.
The most compelling reason to keep the filibuster is its proponents’ argument that the rule prevents a tyranny of the majority in the Senate. That’s the rationale of the two Democrats currently standing in the way of ending it, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They have been steadfast in defending the modern filibuster as part of what they assert is a longstanding Senate custom.
“It’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be,” Senator Sinema said. “Debate on bills should be a bipartisan process that takes into account the views of all Americans, not just those of one political party.”
(It’s unlikely that any Republican senator will support getting rid of the filibuster today, even knowing that it would make legislating easier for them in the future, but because the filibuster is a Senate-created rule, that can be accomplished by a simple majority vote.)
Bipartisan cooperation and debate should be at the heart of the legislative process, but there is little evidence that the filibuster facilitates either. The filibuster doesn’t require interparty compromise; it requires 60 votes. It says nothing about the diversity of the coalition required to pass legislation. It just substitutes 60 percent of the Senate for 51 percent as the threshold to pass most legislation. If the Senate was designed to be a place where both parties come together to deliberate and pass laws in the interest of the American people, the filibuster has turned it into the place where good legislation goes to die.
That’s one reason the framers of the Constitution didn’t include a supermajority requirement for the Senate to pass legislation. They had watched how such a requirement under the Articles of Confederation had prevented the government from doing almost anything. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22, “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Supermajority requirements would serve “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
The filibuster arose only decades later. John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina used it as a means to protect the interests of slavers like himself from a majority. From its beginnings through the middle of the 20th century, when segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond, also of South Carolina, used the filibuster to try to kill multiple civil-rights bills, the pattern has been clear: It has been used regularly by those who reject inclusive democracy.
The relevance of the history is that the pattern continues today.
Finally, the filibuster is a redundancy in a system that already includes multiple veto points and countermajoritarian tools, including a bicameral legislature, a Supreme Court and a presidential veto. The Senate itself protects minorities in its very design, which gives small states the same representation as large ones.
Another common defense of the filibuster, as Ms. Sinema said, is that the filibuster is crucial for permitting full debate on a bill. Again, reality shows otherwise. The filibuster doesn’t only fail to ensure extended debate on a bill; today it curtails the opportunity for any debate at all. A single senator can signal he or she intends to filibuster by typing an email and hitting send. No need to stand on the Senate floor to make your impassioned case.
Reformers have suggested many ways to chip away at the filibuster without destroying it completely. One proposal would bar its use for legislation involving voting rights or other democratic expansions. Another would require the old-fashioned “talking” filibuster. A third would entail holding a series of cloture votes spaced three days apart, lowering the number of senators needed to end the filibuster each time. These are clever solutions, and Mr. Manchin has said he is open to at least one of them.
Even if there were a real debate on a bill, however, it should end at some point. That was clear more than a century ago, when the Senate had not yet established a rule to shut down a filibuster. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts senator, wrote, “If the courtesy of unlimited debate is granted it must carry with it the reciprocal courtesy of permitting a vote after due discussion. If this is not the case the system is impossible.”
If the political reforms in H.R. 1 are not undertaken at the federal level, Republican leaders will continue to entrench minority rule. That’s happening already in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Republican-drawn maps give them large legislative majorities despite winning fewer votes statewide than Democrats. It’s happening in dozens of other states that have passed hundreds of voting restrictions and are pushing hundreds more, under the guise of protecting election security.
The Supreme Court should be blocking these measures and protecting the right to vote, but far too often under Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s done the opposite. In 2019 it refused to stop even the worst partisan gerrymanders, and in 2013 it struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a wave of Republican voter-suppression laws that continues to crash. That’s why federal law is the only solution.
There have also already been many revisions to the filibuster. In the 1970s, Congress created a loophole for spending and revenue bills to avoid the filibuster, allowing such legislation to pass with a simple majority — a process known as reconciliation. More recently, in 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for nominations of lower-court federal judges and executive-branch officials. Four years later, Republicans eliminated it for Supreme Court justices, which allowed President Donald Trump to fill one-third of the high court’s bench with his picks.
The perverse result of all this is that it is now easier to block a piece of legislation, which could be repealed in the next Congress, than it is to block a federal judge seeking a lifetime appointment. Any intellectual justification for the filibuster has been gutted by the fact that it doesn’t apply anymore to many important issues before the Senate.
The point of H.R. 1 is not to help Democrats. It is to rebuild and reinforce the crumbling foundations of American self-government and abolish voter restrictions erected for explicitly partisan gain — a federal law that would protect all voters. If the choice is between saving the filibuster and saving democracy, it should be an easy call.
What happens when the biggest election reform bill in half a century runs into one of the most formidable barriers to American governance?
By The New York Times Editorial Board
It is hard to imagine a more fitting job for Congress than for members to join together to pass a broadly popular law that makes democracy safer, stronger and more accessible to all Americans.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1. The bill, a similar version of which the House passed in 2019, is a comprehensive and desperately needed set of reforms that would strengthen voting rights and election security, ban partisan gerrymandering, reduce big money in politics and establish ethics codes for Supreme Court justices, the president and other executive branch officials.
The legislation has the support of at least 50 senators, plus the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. President Biden is on board and ready to sign it. So what’s the problem? Majority support in the Senate isn’t enough. In the upper chamber, a supermajority of 60 votes is required to pass even the most middling piece of legislation. That requirement is not found in the Constitution; it’s because of the filibuster, a centuries-old parliamentary tool that has been transformed into a weapon for strangling functional government.
This is a singular moment for American democracy, if Democrats are willing to seize it. Whatever grand principles have been used to sustain the filibuster over the years, it is clear as a matter of history, theory and practice that it vindicates none of them. If America is to be governed competently and fairly — if it is to be governed at all — the filibuster must go.
The most compelling reason to keep the filibuster is its proponents’ argument that the rule prevents a tyranny of the majority in the Senate. That’s the rationale of the two Democrats currently standing in the way of ending it, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They have been steadfast in defending the modern filibuster as part of what they assert is a longstanding Senate custom.
“It’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be,” Senator Sinema said. “Debate on bills should be a bipartisan process that takes into account the views of all Americans, not just those of one political party.”
(It’s unlikely that any Republican senator will support getting rid of the filibuster today, even knowing that it would make legislating easier for them in the future, but because the filibuster is a Senate-created rule, that can be accomplished by a simple majority vote.)
Bipartisan cooperation and debate should be at the heart of the legislative process, but there is little evidence that the filibuster facilitates either. The filibuster doesn’t require interparty compromise; it requires 60 votes. It says nothing about the diversity of the coalition required to pass legislation. It just substitutes 60 percent of the Senate for 51 percent as the threshold to pass most legislation. If the Senate was designed to be a place where both parties come together to deliberate and pass laws in the interest of the American people, the filibuster has turned it into the place where good legislation goes to die.
That’s one reason the framers of the Constitution didn’t include a supermajority requirement for the Senate to pass legislation. They had watched how such a requirement under the Articles of Confederation had prevented the government from doing almost anything. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 22, “What at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison.” Supermajority requirements would serve “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices” of a minority to the “regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
The filibuster arose only decades later. John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina used it as a means to protect the interests of slavers like himself from a majority. From its beginnings through the middle of the 20th century, when segregationists like Senator Strom Thurmond, also of South Carolina, used the filibuster to try to kill multiple civil-rights bills, the pattern has been clear: It has been used regularly by those who reject inclusive democracy.
The relevance of the history is that the pattern continues today.
Finally, the filibuster is a redundancy in a system that already includes multiple veto points and countermajoritarian tools, including a bicameral legislature, a Supreme Court and a presidential veto. The Senate itself protects minorities in its very design, which gives small states the same representation as large ones.
Another common defense of the filibuster, as Ms. Sinema said, is that the filibuster is crucial for permitting full debate on a bill. Again, reality shows otherwise. The filibuster doesn’t only fail to ensure extended debate on a bill; today it curtails the opportunity for any debate at all. A single senator can signal he or she intends to filibuster by typing an email and hitting send. No need to stand on the Senate floor to make your impassioned case.
Reformers have suggested many ways to chip away at the filibuster without destroying it completely. One proposal would bar its use for legislation involving voting rights or other democratic expansions. Another would require the old-fashioned “talking” filibuster. A third would entail holding a series of cloture votes spaced three days apart, lowering the number of senators needed to end the filibuster each time. These are clever solutions, and Mr. Manchin has said he is open to at least one of them.
Even if there were a real debate on a bill, however, it should end at some point. That was clear more than a century ago, when the Senate had not yet established a rule to shut down a filibuster. As Henry Cabot Lodge, a Massachusetts senator, wrote, “If the courtesy of unlimited debate is granted it must carry with it the reciprocal courtesy of permitting a vote after due discussion. If this is not the case the system is impossible.”
If the political reforms in H.R. 1 are not undertaken at the federal level, Republican leaders will continue to entrench minority rule. That’s happening already in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Republican-drawn maps give them large legislative majorities despite winning fewer votes statewide than Democrats. It’s happening in dozens of other states that have passed hundreds of voting restrictions and are pushing hundreds more, under the guise of protecting election security.
The Supreme Court should be blocking these measures and protecting the right to vote, but far too often under Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s done the opposite. In 2019 it refused to stop even the worst partisan gerrymanders, and in 2013 it struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a wave of Republican voter-suppression laws that continues to crash. That’s why federal law is the only solution.
There have also already been many revisions to the filibuster. In the 1970s, Congress created a loophole for spending and revenue bills to avoid the filibuster, allowing such legislation to pass with a simple majority — a process known as reconciliation. More recently, in 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for nominations of lower-court federal judges and executive-branch officials. Four years later, Republicans eliminated it for Supreme Court justices, which allowed President Donald Trump to fill one-third of the high court’s bench with his picks.
The perverse result of all this is that it is now easier to block a piece of legislation, which could be repealed in the next Congress, than it is to block a federal judge seeking a lifetime appointment. Any intellectual justification for the filibuster has been gutted by the fact that it doesn’t apply anymore to many important issues before the Senate.
The point of H.R. 1 is not to help Democrats. It is to rebuild and reinforce the crumbling foundations of American self-government and abolish voter restrictions erected for explicitly partisan gain — a federal law that would protect all voters. If the choice is between saving the filibuster and saving democracy, it should be an easy call.
LET’S TALK ABOUT HIGHER WAGES
The nation, and the Democratic Party, desperately needs a replacement for the tired story that tax cuts drive economic growth.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
One of the great successes of the Republican Party in recent decades is the relentless propagation of a simple formula for economic growth: tax cuts.
The formula doesn’t work, but that has not affected its popularity. In part, that’s because people like tax cuts. But it’s also because people like economic growth, and while the cult of tax cuts has attracted many critics, it lacks for obvious rivals.
Democratic politicians have tended to campaign on helping people left behind by economic growth, the difficulties caused by economic growth and the problems that cannot be addressed by economic growth. When Democrats do talk about encouraging economic growth, they often sound like Republicans with a few misgivings — the party of kinder, better tax cuts.
This is not just a political problem for Democrats; it is an economic problem for the United States. The nation needs a better story about the drivers of economic growth, to marshal support for better public policies. The painful lessons of recent decades, along with recent economic research, point to a promising candidate: higher wages.
Raising the wages of American workers ought to be the priority of economic policymakers and the measure of economic performance under the Biden administration. We’d all be better off paying less attention to quarterly updates on the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product and focusing instead on the growth of workers’ paychecks.
Set aside, for the moment, the familiar arguments for higher wages: fairness, equality of opportunity, ensuring Americans can provide for their families. The argument here is that higher wages can stoke the sputtering engine of economic growth.
Perhaps the most famous illustration of the benefits is the story of Henry Ford’s decision in 1914 to pay $5 a day to workers on his Model T assembly lines. He did it to increase production — he was paying a premium to maintain a reliable work force. The unexpected benefit was that Ford’s factory workers became Ford customers, too.
The same logic still holds: Consumption drives the American economy, and workers who are paid more can spend more. The rich spend a smaller share of what they earn, and though they lend to the poor, the overall result is still less spending and consumption.
For decades, mainstream economists insisted that it was impossible to order up a sustainable increase in wages because compensation levels reflected the unerring judgment of market forces. “People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” in the apt summary of John Snow, the Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.
The conventional wisdom held that productivity growth was the only route to higher wages. Through that lens, efforts to negotiate or require higher wages were counterproductive. Minimum-wage laws would raise unemployment because there was only so much money in the wage pool, and if some people got more, others would get none. Collective bargaining similarly was derided as a scheme by some workers to take money from others.
It was in the context of this worldview that it became popular to argue that tax cuts would drive prosperity. Rich people would invest, productivity would increase, wages would rise.
In the real world, things are more complicated. Wages are influenced by a tug of war between employers and workers, and employers have been winning. One clear piece of evidence is the yawning divergence between productivity growth and wage growth since roughly 1970. Productivity has more than doubled; wages have lagged far behind.
The point is not that economists were completely wrong. Productivity obviously plays a role in determining wages. McDonald’s cannot pay workers more money than it collects from its customers. But economists were partly and consequentially wrong. Power mattered, too.
The importance of rewriting our stories about the way that the economy works is that they frame our policy debates. Our beliefs about economics determine what seems viable and worthwhile — and whether new ideas can muster support.
Preaching the value of higher wages is a necessary first step toward concrete changes in public policy that can begin to shift economic power. It can help to build support for increasing the federal minimum wage — a policy that already has proved popular at the state level, including in conservative states like Arkansas, Florida and Missouri where voters in recent years have approved higher minimum wages in referendums.
A focus on higher wages is not a sufficient goal for economic policy. There is a genuine need for a stronger safety net to ensure a minimum quality of life. The pursuit of economic growth has to be balanced against other imperatives, notably environmental protection. Wage growth by itself is not a corrective for the accumulated effects of racism or other social ills.
But a focus on wage growth would provide a useful organizing principle for public policy — and an antidote to the attractive simplicity of the belief in the magical power of tax cuts.
The value of such stories extends beyond public policy. The government, too, has limited power to increase wages. The nation also could use some Ford-like executives who can see that the public interest — or at least their own self-interest — is served by raising wages.
That won’t be easy. The affluent live in growing isolation from other Americans, which makes it harder for them to imagine themselves as members of a broader community. Their companies derive a growing share of profits from other countries, which makes it easier to ignore the welfare of American consumers. The nation’s laws, social norms and patterns of daily life all have been revised in recent decades to facilitate the suppression of wage growth.
But we can begin by telling better stories about the way the economy works.
The nation, and the Democratic Party, desperately needs a replacement for the tired story that tax cuts drive economic growth.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
One of the great successes of the Republican Party in recent decades is the relentless propagation of a simple formula for economic growth: tax cuts.
The formula doesn’t work, but that has not affected its popularity. In part, that’s because people like tax cuts. But it’s also because people like economic growth, and while the cult of tax cuts has attracted many critics, it lacks for obvious rivals.
Democratic politicians have tended to campaign on helping people left behind by economic growth, the difficulties caused by economic growth and the problems that cannot be addressed by economic growth. When Democrats do talk about encouraging economic growth, they often sound like Republicans with a few misgivings — the party of kinder, better tax cuts.
This is not just a political problem for Democrats; it is an economic problem for the United States. The nation needs a better story about the drivers of economic growth, to marshal support for better public policies. The painful lessons of recent decades, along with recent economic research, point to a promising candidate: higher wages.
Raising the wages of American workers ought to be the priority of economic policymakers and the measure of economic performance under the Biden administration. We’d all be better off paying less attention to quarterly updates on the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product and focusing instead on the growth of workers’ paychecks.
Set aside, for the moment, the familiar arguments for higher wages: fairness, equality of opportunity, ensuring Americans can provide for their families. The argument here is that higher wages can stoke the sputtering engine of economic growth.
Perhaps the most famous illustration of the benefits is the story of Henry Ford’s decision in 1914 to pay $5 a day to workers on his Model T assembly lines. He did it to increase production — he was paying a premium to maintain a reliable work force. The unexpected benefit was that Ford’s factory workers became Ford customers, too.
The same logic still holds: Consumption drives the American economy, and workers who are paid more can spend more. The rich spend a smaller share of what they earn, and though they lend to the poor, the overall result is still less spending and consumption.
For decades, mainstream economists insisted that it was impossible to order up a sustainable increase in wages because compensation levels reflected the unerring judgment of market forces. “People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” in the apt summary of John Snow, the Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush.
The conventional wisdom held that productivity growth was the only route to higher wages. Through that lens, efforts to negotiate or require higher wages were counterproductive. Minimum-wage laws would raise unemployment because there was only so much money in the wage pool, and if some people got more, others would get none. Collective bargaining similarly was derided as a scheme by some workers to take money from others.
It was in the context of this worldview that it became popular to argue that tax cuts would drive prosperity. Rich people would invest, productivity would increase, wages would rise.
In the real world, things are more complicated. Wages are influenced by a tug of war between employers and workers, and employers have been winning. One clear piece of evidence is the yawning divergence between productivity growth and wage growth since roughly 1970. Productivity has more than doubled; wages have lagged far behind.
The point is not that economists were completely wrong. Productivity obviously plays a role in determining wages. McDonald’s cannot pay workers more money than it collects from its customers. But economists were partly and consequentially wrong. Power mattered, too.
The importance of rewriting our stories about the way that the economy works is that they frame our policy debates. Our beliefs about economics determine what seems viable and worthwhile — and whether new ideas can muster support.
Preaching the value of higher wages is a necessary first step toward concrete changes in public policy that can begin to shift economic power. It can help to build support for increasing the federal minimum wage — a policy that already has proved popular at the state level, including in conservative states like Arkansas, Florida and Missouri where voters in recent years have approved higher minimum wages in referendums.
A focus on higher wages is not a sufficient goal for economic policy. There is a genuine need for a stronger safety net to ensure a minimum quality of life. The pursuit of economic growth has to be balanced against other imperatives, notably environmental protection. Wage growth by itself is not a corrective for the accumulated effects of racism or other social ills.
But a focus on wage growth would provide a useful organizing principle for public policy — and an antidote to the attractive simplicity of the belief in the magical power of tax cuts.
The value of such stories extends beyond public policy. The government, too, has limited power to increase wages. The nation also could use some Ford-like executives who can see that the public interest — or at least their own self-interest — is served by raising wages.
That won’t be easy. The affluent live in growing isolation from other Americans, which makes it harder for them to imagine themselves as members of a broader community. Their companies derive a growing share of profits from other countries, which makes it easier to ignore the welfare of American consumers. The nation’s laws, social norms and patterns of daily life all have been revised in recent decades to facilitate the suppression of wage growth.
But we can begin by telling better stories about the way the economy works.
ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Opinion by The Washington Post Editorial Board
OUR COLUMNIST Marc A. Thiessen noted last week that President Trump had come very close to winning reelection. “A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states [Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia] and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be taking about a ‘red wave,’ ” he wrote.
Mr. Thiessen’s point was that Mr. Trump’s near miss makes him a viable candidate in 2024. We draw a different lesson: It is alarming that a candidate came so close to winning while polling more than 5 million fewer votes than his opponent nationwide. The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.
We write this with full awareness of the challenges of adopting a new system, with respect for many of the people who continue to argue against a switch, and with awareness that any change may have unintended consequences. Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed. All of that would have to change if the president were chosen based on the national vote count. Additionally, electoral college math induces candidates to pay attention to voters in some small states who might otherwise be ignored.
But why should Iowa’s biofuel lobby get more of a hearing than, say, California’s artichoke lobby? Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million. We see no particular reason voters in purple states such as Wisconsin should be valued more than voters in red states such as Mississippi or blue states such as Washington.
There are worries that direct election might encourage regionalism or third parties at the extremes of political discourse. Any switch to a national system would rightly trigger debates over runoffs or ranked-choice voting to ensure majority rule. And we recognize that the constitutional amendment that would be required isn’t about to happen.
But it’s time to get serious about a change. Mr. Trump became president in 2016 despite earning 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Now, he has come close to winning reelection despite losing the popular vote by a far greater margin (though, by the time all the votes aren’t counted, it won’t be quite as close as when Mr. Thiessen wrote; Mr. Trump is now trailing in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania by more than 90,000).
We believe that Mr. Trump’s election was a sad event for the nation; his reelection would have been a calamity; we hope Mr. Thiessen is wrong about 2024. But we would be making this argument no matter which party seemed likely to benefit. If Democratic nominee John F. Kerry hadn’t lost Ohio by just 120,000 votes in 2004, he would have won an electoral college victory despite trailing President George W. Bush by 3 million votes in the national count. That would have been a problem, too.
Americans are not going to be satisfied with leaders who have been rejected by a majority of voters, and they’re right not to be. It’s time to let the majority rule.
Opinion by The Washington Post Editorial Board
OUR COLUMNIST Marc A. Thiessen noted last week that President Trump had come very close to winning reelection. “A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states [Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia] and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be taking about a ‘red wave,’ ” he wrote.
Mr. Thiessen’s point was that Mr. Trump’s near miss makes him a viable candidate in 2024. We draw a different lesson: It is alarming that a candidate came so close to winning while polling more than 5 million fewer votes than his opponent nationwide. The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.
We write this with full awareness of the challenges of adopting a new system, with respect for many of the people who continue to argue against a switch, and with awareness that any change may have unintended consequences. Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed. All of that would have to change if the president were chosen based on the national vote count. Additionally, electoral college math induces candidates to pay attention to voters in some small states who might otherwise be ignored.
But why should Iowa’s biofuel lobby get more of a hearing than, say, California’s artichoke lobby? Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million. We see no particular reason voters in purple states such as Wisconsin should be valued more than voters in red states such as Mississippi or blue states such as Washington.
There are worries that direct election might encourage regionalism or third parties at the extremes of political discourse. Any switch to a national system would rightly trigger debates over runoffs or ranked-choice voting to ensure majority rule. And we recognize that the constitutional amendment that would be required isn’t about to happen.
But it’s time to get serious about a change. Mr. Trump became president in 2016 despite earning 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Now, he has come close to winning reelection despite losing the popular vote by a far greater margin (though, by the time all the votes aren’t counted, it won’t be quite as close as when Mr. Thiessen wrote; Mr. Trump is now trailing in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania by more than 90,000).
We believe that Mr. Trump’s election was a sad event for the nation; his reelection would have been a calamity; we hope Mr. Thiessen is wrong about 2024. But we would be making this argument no matter which party seemed likely to benefit. If Democratic nominee John F. Kerry hadn’t lost Ohio by just 120,000 votes in 2004, he would have won an electoral college victory despite trailing President George W. Bush by 3 million votes in the national count. That would have been a problem, too.
Americans are not going to be satisfied with leaders who have been rejected by a majority of voters, and they’re right not to be. It’s time to let the majority rule.
50 RICHEST AMERICANS HAVE MORE WEALTH THAN POOREST 165 MILLION COMBINED
By Mary Papenfuss
The 50 richest Americans increased their net worth this year to an amount nearly equal to the combined money and assets of the poorest 165 million Americans, which is half of the U.S. population, according to new data from the first half of the year collected by the Federal Reserve.
The rich got richer this year despite the COVID-19 pandemic — while people struggling financially found themselves in even more dire straits. COVID-19, which has killed more than 210,000 Americans, has disproportionally hurt people of color, older people, women and workers in low-paying jobs.
The 50 richest people increased their wealth since the beginning of 2020 by nearly $339 billion to almost $2 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The poorest 50% of Americans — about 165 million people — hold just $2.08 trillion of net worth, or 1.9% of all household wealth, according to Federal Reserve statistics.
More broadly, the top 1% of Americans currently have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. They hold 30.4% of all U.S. household wealth and more than half of the equity in corporations and in mutual fund shares, according to the data.
The wealthy and corporations were already sailing along thanks to a massive tax cut from the administration of President Donald Trump in 2017. As a result, the nation racked up a record deficit, which hit an all-time high of $3 trillion in the first 11 months of the current budget year.
“Combined with the disproportionate effects of COVID on communities of color, and the overwhelming burden of child care during quarantine and distance learning, which has fallen mostly on women, the pandemic is further widening divides in wealth and economic mobility,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech earlier this month at the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics.
It doesn’t look like fortunes for most Americans will improve soon. “A long period of unnecessarily slow progress could continue to exacerbate existing disparities in our economy,” Powell warned.
The nation has been churning toward a historic economic gap for years. The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016.
U.S. income inequality in 2018 hit the highest level in half a century. Powell warned last year that income inequality would be one of the biggest challenges in the nation over the next decade.
Income inequality is higher in the U.S. than in any other country of the G-7 nations.
By Mary Papenfuss
The 50 richest Americans increased their net worth this year to an amount nearly equal to the combined money and assets of the poorest 165 million Americans, which is half of the U.S. population, according to new data from the first half of the year collected by the Federal Reserve.
The rich got richer this year despite the COVID-19 pandemic — while people struggling financially found themselves in even more dire straits. COVID-19, which has killed more than 210,000 Americans, has disproportionally hurt people of color, older people, women and workers in low-paying jobs.
The 50 richest people increased their wealth since the beginning of 2020 by nearly $339 billion to almost $2 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The poorest 50% of Americans — about 165 million people — hold just $2.08 trillion of net worth, or 1.9% of all household wealth, according to Federal Reserve statistics.
More broadly, the top 1% of Americans currently have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. They hold 30.4% of all U.S. household wealth and more than half of the equity in corporations and in mutual fund shares, according to the data.
The wealthy and corporations were already sailing along thanks to a massive tax cut from the administration of President Donald Trump in 2017. As a result, the nation racked up a record deficit, which hit an all-time high of $3 trillion in the first 11 months of the current budget year.
“Combined with the disproportionate effects of COVID on communities of color, and the overwhelming burden of child care during quarantine and distance learning, which has fallen mostly on women, the pandemic is further widening divides in wealth and economic mobility,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech earlier this month at the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics.
It doesn’t look like fortunes for most Americans will improve soon. “A long period of unnecessarily slow progress could continue to exacerbate existing disparities in our economy,” Powell warned.
The nation has been churning toward a historic economic gap for years. The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016.
U.S. income inequality in 2018 hit the highest level in half a century. Powell warned last year that income inequality would be one of the biggest challenges in the nation over the next decade.
Income inequality is higher in the U.S. than in any other country of the G-7 nations.
POLICE ARE USING THE LAW TO DENY THE RELEASE OF RECORDS INVOLVING USE OF FORCE, CRITICS CLAIM
By Hannah Knowles, , Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, The Washington Post
Two months after the family of Daniel Prude tried to obtain police body-camera footage showing Prude naked, handcuffed and hooded on a Rochester, N.Y., street, nationwide protests against police violence were gaining momentum — and officials did not want the video to be made public.
“I’m wondering if we shouldn’t hold back on this for a little while considering what is going on around the country,” a police lieutenant wrote in a June email. Officials suggested citing an “open” investigation. Days later, they raised concerns about the medical privacy of Prude, who died a week after the video was filmed in March.
“Can we deny/delay?” a top city attorney wrote in a flurry of emails between city officials.
The video was ultimately given to Prude’s family after a months-long legal battle and made public, sparking outrage and protests and costing the police chief his job.
The case highlights what some families, victim advocates and lawyers say is a persistent issue amid a nationwide push for police transparency: As viral videos bring unprecedented scrutiny to police officers’ use of force, they allege that authorities are using and sometimes abusing the law to deny and delay the release of police records.
Laws in many states create broad exemptions allowing police and other authorities to keep records secret. Officials often cite “ongoing investigations” as the reason, without explaining why releasing a dashboard-camera video or documents would cause harm. In some cases, including Prude’s, these laws are used by authorities against the wishes of a family that wants records made public.
Police and municipal officials say they are following long-standing rules to guard people’s rights and the integrity of investigations and court cases.
The Rochester video shows officers forcing Prude’s head and neck onto the pavement. He died a week later in what a medical examiner ruled was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” Prude, who was in the throes of a mental health crisis, also had PCP in his system.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren (D) said she was told that Prude died of a drug overdose. In an April email to a city spokesman, former Rochester police chief La’Ron Singletary wrote that Prude’s death was deemed a homicide with three “attributing factors”: “PCP in his system,” “Excited Delirium” and “Resisting Arrest.” Emails and other documents related to the case were made public as part of an inquiry this month by the city’s deputy mayor.
To hide the full picture, “the city was grabbing at any excuse that they could,” said Elliot Shields, an attorney for Prude’s family.
Several city officials and the police department did not return requests for comment. Rochester police have said the department is unable to comment on Prude’s case because of an ongoing investigation.
The information police and other officials release about shootings by officers, deaths in their custody and other uses of force can vary widely from state to state and from agency to agency. But the patchwork of rules governing the United States’ 18,000 police departments tends to favor secrecy, said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
“State law and local law and rules have been designed to shield police from accountability,” Harris said. “The assumption within law enforcement has been: Citizens don’t need to know this, they won’t understand it, and we’re not under any obligation to share it.”
In Minnesota, where George Floyd died in May after a police officer knelt on his neck for about eight minutes, laws shielding records during ongoing investigations — until criminal appeals are exhausted, state police say — meant that body-camera footage of Floyd’s death became public only after it was filed in court. The public knows little about 16 of at least 17 complaints filed against the officer during his two decades on the force, because police personnel records are largely governed by the same privacy laws as other government employees. Details are released only if a complaint led to discipline.
“We have released what we’re able to release out of the personnel files,” said Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder, who said the department only wants to follow the law.
Elsewhere, police have turned to controversial legal interpretations to justify withholding records, prompting accusations that they are misusing laws created for very different purposes.
The Florida Police Benevolent Association in June sued the city of Tallahassee to prevent officials from releasing the identities of two police officers involved in fatal shootings, arguing that the officers “were victims of separate, aggravated assaults.”
The legal fight centers on a 2019 state constitutional amendment billed as a crime victim’s bill of rights. Known as Marsy’s Law, it says victims have the right to be free from intimidation and the ability to keep “information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family” from being released.
The union is arguing that “Marsy’s Law should apply to the police just like it applies to anyone,” said Pamela C. Marsh, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a Florida nonprofit that intervened in the case. “But police aren’t just anyone.”
In July, Florida Circuit Court Judge Charles W. Dodson rejected the union’s argument, saying the law’s language was not intended to cover police officers “acting in their official capacity.” One officer shot someone pointing a gun at him and the other shot someone wielding a knife in a threatening way, Dodson said, but under the union’s argument, “officers could act with virtual anonymity.”
The executive director of the Florida Police Benevolent Association did not respond to an interview request. The organization is appealing Dodson’s ruling.
Departments have cited the privacy of those injured or killed to avoid releasing records. The New York City Police Department sought to withhold 18 minutes of video, most of which was recorded in 2017 immediately after a fatal officer-involved shooting — the first involving NYPD officers outfitted with body cameras.
Police said the footage would be an “unwarranted invasion” of the dead man’s privacy under state law because it showed him receiving medical treatment. But the video at issue did not reveal any private medical condition, a judge wrote last year. The victim’s family said they fully supported releasing the footage.
“It’s outrageous that the police can shoot somebody . . . and then argue against releasing footage that’s going to show what happened, you know, on the basis of protecting the privacy of that person,” said Marinda van Dalen, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which fought to release the video.
Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokeswoman, said: “To ensure due process and the protection of the rights of those depicted in the video, the department follows the law.”
In Rochester, city officials said unredacted video of Prude’s detention would run afoul of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects medical records, citing the medical treatment he received from EMTs. They said they would need a waiver from the family attorney.
The law, known as HIPAA, “has no application” to any incident that occurs in public, said Larry Byrne, who headed the NYPD’s legal bureau from 2014 to 2018. He believes withholding video demanded by the public only fuels simmering tensions and anti-police sentiment, further endangering the lives of the officers on the street.
'Ongoing investigations'
Byrne said there can be a legitimate reason to deny requests for information if a case is part of an ongoing investigation. Witnesses could be threatened if the wrong information gets out — a particular concern in New York, he said, where many incidents are gang-related.
But some lawyers and advocates argue that officials are abusing exemptions for active criminal investigations to avoid scrutiny. Emails released last week as part of a city investigation into Prude’s death in March suggest that police understood within days that their records-request objections about an “open investigation” were unlikely to hold up in court.
“I can tell you that this will probably be appealed and he will win,” a police lieutenant wrote April 6.
New York law states that police may deny access to documents that, if disclosed, interfere with investigations, deprive someone of their right to a fair trial or cause other repercussions. The state Committee on Open Government has repeatedly warned against wholesale denials of records requests based on ongoing investigations.
A Rochester police captain wrote in an email that because the New York attorney general’s office was investigating Prude’s death, the inquiry by local police “can be interpreted technically as remaining ‘open’ . . . in the highly unlikely event they uncover any additional information that could impact our investigative findings.”
An attorney for the city of Rochester said she was told by a lawyer from Attorney General Letitia James’s office that the state prefers that material not be made public because it can interfere with an investigation. James’s office showed the arrest video to Prude’s family and attorneys over the summer and said it never asked the city to withhold information related to Prude’s death.
James announced Sunday that her office will now release body-camera footage as quickly as possible after it is shown to a victim’s family. The decision had been left to local law enforcement.
In Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-Journal is appealing a judge’s ruling that police do not have to share investigative records in the case of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her apartment as police executed a warrant. The suit argues that the internal investigation into the shooting is complete and that the files are public by law.
On Wednesday, a grand jury declined to issue charges in Taylor’s death, determining that two officers were justified in shooting into Taylor’s apartment. A third was charged with recklessly firing into a neighboring apartment.
Michael Abate, an attorney for the newspaper, said Wednesday’s decision should bolster the case for releasing the records.
In a news conference Thursday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer (D) said the city wants to “get as much of this information out as soon as we can.”
Fischer said the city is working with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office and the FBI to understand what the city can release so that it “doesn’t interfere with any of the ongoing investigations.”
Change — and resistance
There is now a push to change laws that allow police to keep many records private.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced in June a requirement that police release body-camera footage within 30 days after most situations in which an officer fires a weapon or causes serious injury or death through other uses of force. New York also repealed a law, referred to as 50-a, that shielded the disciplinary and complaint records of law enforcement officers.
Disciplinary records stemming from allegations that were substantiated — including in incidents that were widely reported in the press and discussed publicly by officials — were considered secret under 50-a. Now, every complaint made against an officer is public information.
Advocates of transparency hailed it as a breakthrough. But police unions are pushing back, claiming that most complaints are frivolous and should not be listed on an officer’s permanent public record. Unions representing police officers, firefighters and corrections officers are challenging the repeal in court.
New York’s plans to make disciplinary complaints available in a public online database, “without any review or analysis, would functionally negate the rights of officers to clear their disciplinary records of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations,” unions argued in a recent court filing.
In Rochester, Shields, the attorney for Prude’s family, said he is struggling to take advantage of the change. He said he is still waiting on personnel files for officers involved in Prude’s arrest, with officials saying they need more time to release them.
In emails provided to The Washington Post, city officials told Shields in July and August, after 50-a was repealed, that they do not need to share unsubstantiated misconduct complaints or those that did not result in discipline. City officials did not respond to questions about the emails.
By Hannah Knowles, , Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, The Washington Post
Two months after the family of Daniel Prude tried to obtain police body-camera footage showing Prude naked, handcuffed and hooded on a Rochester, N.Y., street, nationwide protests against police violence were gaining momentum — and officials did not want the video to be made public.
“I’m wondering if we shouldn’t hold back on this for a little while considering what is going on around the country,” a police lieutenant wrote in a June email. Officials suggested citing an “open” investigation. Days later, they raised concerns about the medical privacy of Prude, who died a week after the video was filmed in March.
“Can we deny/delay?” a top city attorney wrote in a flurry of emails between city officials.
The video was ultimately given to Prude’s family after a months-long legal battle and made public, sparking outrage and protests and costing the police chief his job.
The case highlights what some families, victim advocates and lawyers say is a persistent issue amid a nationwide push for police transparency: As viral videos bring unprecedented scrutiny to police officers’ use of force, they allege that authorities are using and sometimes abusing the law to deny and delay the release of police records.
Laws in many states create broad exemptions allowing police and other authorities to keep records secret. Officials often cite “ongoing investigations” as the reason, without explaining why releasing a dashboard-camera video or documents would cause harm. In some cases, including Prude’s, these laws are used by authorities against the wishes of a family that wants records made public.
Police and municipal officials say they are following long-standing rules to guard people’s rights and the integrity of investigations and court cases.
The Rochester video shows officers forcing Prude’s head and neck onto the pavement. He died a week later in what a medical examiner ruled was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” Prude, who was in the throes of a mental health crisis, also had PCP in his system.
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren (D) said she was told that Prude died of a drug overdose. In an April email to a city spokesman, former Rochester police chief La’Ron Singletary wrote that Prude’s death was deemed a homicide with three “attributing factors”: “PCP in his system,” “Excited Delirium” and “Resisting Arrest.” Emails and other documents related to the case were made public as part of an inquiry this month by the city’s deputy mayor.
To hide the full picture, “the city was grabbing at any excuse that they could,” said Elliot Shields, an attorney for Prude’s family.
Several city officials and the police department did not return requests for comment. Rochester police have said the department is unable to comment on Prude’s case because of an ongoing investigation.
The information police and other officials release about shootings by officers, deaths in their custody and other uses of force can vary widely from state to state and from agency to agency. But the patchwork of rules governing the United States’ 18,000 police departments tends to favor secrecy, said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
“State law and local law and rules have been designed to shield police from accountability,” Harris said. “The assumption within law enforcement has been: Citizens don’t need to know this, they won’t understand it, and we’re not under any obligation to share it.”
In Minnesota, where George Floyd died in May after a police officer knelt on his neck for about eight minutes, laws shielding records during ongoing investigations — until criminal appeals are exhausted, state police say — meant that body-camera footage of Floyd’s death became public only after it was filed in court. The public knows little about 16 of at least 17 complaints filed against the officer during his two decades on the force, because police personnel records are largely governed by the same privacy laws as other government employees. Details are released only if a complaint led to discipline.
“We have released what we’re able to release out of the personnel files,” said Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder, who said the department only wants to follow the law.
Elsewhere, police have turned to controversial legal interpretations to justify withholding records, prompting accusations that they are misusing laws created for very different purposes.
The Florida Police Benevolent Association in June sued the city of Tallahassee to prevent officials from releasing the identities of two police officers involved in fatal shootings, arguing that the officers “were victims of separate, aggravated assaults.”
The legal fight centers on a 2019 state constitutional amendment billed as a crime victim’s bill of rights. Known as Marsy’s Law, it says victims have the right to be free from intimidation and the ability to keep “information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family” from being released.
The union is arguing that “Marsy’s Law should apply to the police just like it applies to anyone,” said Pamela C. Marsh, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a Florida nonprofit that intervened in the case. “But police aren’t just anyone.”
In July, Florida Circuit Court Judge Charles W. Dodson rejected the union’s argument, saying the law’s language was not intended to cover police officers “acting in their official capacity.” One officer shot someone pointing a gun at him and the other shot someone wielding a knife in a threatening way, Dodson said, but under the union’s argument, “officers could act with virtual anonymity.”
The executive director of the Florida Police Benevolent Association did not respond to an interview request. The organization is appealing Dodson’s ruling.
Departments have cited the privacy of those injured or killed to avoid releasing records. The New York City Police Department sought to withhold 18 minutes of video, most of which was recorded in 2017 immediately after a fatal officer-involved shooting — the first involving NYPD officers outfitted with body cameras.
Police said the footage would be an “unwarranted invasion” of the dead man’s privacy under state law because it showed him receiving medical treatment. But the video at issue did not reveal any private medical condition, a judge wrote last year. The victim’s family said they fully supported releasing the footage.
“It’s outrageous that the police can shoot somebody . . . and then argue against releasing footage that’s going to show what happened, you know, on the basis of protecting the privacy of that person,” said Marinda van Dalen, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which fought to release the video.
Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokeswoman, said: “To ensure due process and the protection of the rights of those depicted in the video, the department follows the law.”
In Rochester, city officials said unredacted video of Prude’s detention would run afoul of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects medical records, citing the medical treatment he received from EMTs. They said they would need a waiver from the family attorney.
The law, known as HIPAA, “has no application” to any incident that occurs in public, said Larry Byrne, who headed the NYPD’s legal bureau from 2014 to 2018. He believes withholding video demanded by the public only fuels simmering tensions and anti-police sentiment, further endangering the lives of the officers on the street.
'Ongoing investigations'
Byrne said there can be a legitimate reason to deny requests for information if a case is part of an ongoing investigation. Witnesses could be threatened if the wrong information gets out — a particular concern in New York, he said, where many incidents are gang-related.
But some lawyers and advocates argue that officials are abusing exemptions for active criminal investigations to avoid scrutiny. Emails released last week as part of a city investigation into Prude’s death in March suggest that police understood within days that their records-request objections about an “open investigation” were unlikely to hold up in court.
“I can tell you that this will probably be appealed and he will win,” a police lieutenant wrote April 6.
New York law states that police may deny access to documents that, if disclosed, interfere with investigations, deprive someone of their right to a fair trial or cause other repercussions. The state Committee on Open Government has repeatedly warned against wholesale denials of records requests based on ongoing investigations.
A Rochester police captain wrote in an email that because the New York attorney general’s office was investigating Prude’s death, the inquiry by local police “can be interpreted technically as remaining ‘open’ . . . in the highly unlikely event they uncover any additional information that could impact our investigative findings.”
An attorney for the city of Rochester said she was told by a lawyer from Attorney General Letitia James’s office that the state prefers that material not be made public because it can interfere with an investigation. James’s office showed the arrest video to Prude’s family and attorneys over the summer and said it never asked the city to withhold information related to Prude’s death.
James announced Sunday that her office will now release body-camera footage as quickly as possible after it is shown to a victim’s family. The decision had been left to local law enforcement.
In Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-Journal is appealing a judge’s ruling that police do not have to share investigative records in the case of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her apartment as police executed a warrant. The suit argues that the internal investigation into the shooting is complete and that the files are public by law.
On Wednesday, a grand jury declined to issue charges in Taylor’s death, determining that two officers were justified in shooting into Taylor’s apartment. A third was charged with recklessly firing into a neighboring apartment.
Michael Abate, an attorney for the newspaper, said Wednesday’s decision should bolster the case for releasing the records.
In a news conference Thursday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer (D) said the city wants to “get as much of this information out as soon as we can.”
Fischer said the city is working with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office and the FBI to understand what the city can release so that it “doesn’t interfere with any of the ongoing investigations.”
Change — and resistance
There is now a push to change laws that allow police to keep many records private.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced in June a requirement that police release body-camera footage within 30 days after most situations in which an officer fires a weapon or causes serious injury or death through other uses of force. New York also repealed a law, referred to as 50-a, that shielded the disciplinary and complaint records of law enforcement officers.
Disciplinary records stemming from allegations that were substantiated — including in incidents that were widely reported in the press and discussed publicly by officials — were considered secret under 50-a. Now, every complaint made against an officer is public information.
Advocates of transparency hailed it as a breakthrough. But police unions are pushing back, claiming that most complaints are frivolous and should not be listed on an officer’s permanent public record. Unions representing police officers, firefighters and corrections officers are challenging the repeal in court.
New York’s plans to make disciplinary complaints available in a public online database, “without any review or analysis, would functionally negate the rights of officers to clear their disciplinary records of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations,” unions argued in a recent court filing.
In Rochester, Shields, the attorney for Prude’s family, said he is struggling to take advantage of the change. He said he is still waiting on personnel files for officers involved in Prude’s arrest, with officials saying they need more time to release them.
In emails provided to The Washington Post, city officials told Shields in July and August, after 50-a was repealed, that they do not need to share unsubstantiated misconduct complaints or those that did not result in discipline. City officials did not respond to questions about the emails.
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE WILL DESTROY AMERICA
And no, New York and California would not dominate a popular vote.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
Last week, Nate Silver, the polling analyst, tweeted a chart illustrating the chances that Joe Biden would become president if he wins the most votes in November.
The “if” is probably unnecessary. It’s hard to find anyone who disputes that Mr. Biden will win the most votes. This isn’t a liberal’s fantasy. In a recent panel discussion among four veteran Republican campaign managers, one acknowledged, “We’re going to lose the popular vote.” Another responded, “Oh, that’s a given.” The real question is will Mr. Biden win enough more votes than President Trump to overcome this year’s bias in the Electoral College.
Mr. Silver’s analysis is bracing. If Mr. Biden wins by five percentage points or more — if he beats Donald Trump by more than seven million votes — he’s a virtual shoo-in. If he wins 4.5 million more votes than the president? He’s still got a three-in-four chance to be president.
Anything less, however, and Mr. Biden’s odds drop like a rock. A mere three million-vote Biden victory? A second Trump term suddenly becomes more likely than not. If Mr. Biden’s margin drops to 1.5 million — about the populations of Rhode Island and Wyoming combined — forget about it. The chance of a Biden presidency in that scenario is less than one in 10.
I don’t know about you, but this makes me really angry. Yes, I am aware that the United States has never elected its president by a direct popular vote; I wrote a whole book about it. I still cannot fathom why, in a representative democracy based on the principle that all votes are equal, the person who wins the most votes can — and does, repeatedly — lose the most consequential election in the land.
It happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, who won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump — a margin of more than two percentage points — but lost because of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Two months away from Election Day, the odds of something like this happening again are disconcertingly high. That’s a bad thing. The presidency is the only office whose occupant must represent all Americans equally, no matter where they live. The person who holds that office should have to win the most votes from all Americans, everywhere.
The Electoral College as it functions today is the most glaring reminder of many that our democracy is not fair, not equal and not representative. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. The election, as Mr. Trump would say — though not for the right reasons — is rigged.
The main problem with the Electoral College today is not, as both its supporters and detractors believe, the disproportionate power it gives smaller states. Those states do get a boost from their two Senate-based electoral votes, but that benefit pales in comparison to the real culprit: statewide winner-take-all laws. Under these laws, which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nation’s early years, even though it was never raised by the framers — states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state. The effect is to erase all the voters in that state who didn’t vote for the top candidate.
Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. As a result, most are considered “safe,” that is, comfortably in hand for one party or the other. No amount of campaigning will change that. The only states that matter to either party are the “battleground” states — especially bigger ones like Florida and Pennsylvania, where a swing of a few thousand or even a few hundred votes can shift the entire pot of electors from one candidate to the other.
The corrosiveness of this system isn’t only a modern concern. James Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, was very disturbed by the state winner-take-all rule, which he considered one of the central flaws of the Electoral College as it took shape in the early 19th century.
As Madison wrote in an 1823 letter, states using the winner-take-all rule “are a string of beads” and fail to reflect the true political diversity of their citizens. He disliked the practice so much he called for a constitutional amendment barring it.
It’s not only liberals who understand the problem with winner-take-all. In 1950, a Texas representative named Ed Gossett took to the floor of Congress to vent about the unfairness of a system that gave some voters more influence in the election than others, solely because of where they live. New York was at the time the nation’s largest and most important swing state, and the voters who decided which way it swung were racial and ethnic minorities in large urban areas.
“Now, please understand, I have no objection to the Negro in Harlem voting and to his vote being counted,” Gossett said, “but I do resent the fact that both parties will spend a hundred times as much money to get his vote and that his vote is worth a hundred times as much in the scale of national politics as is the vote of a white man in Texas.”
“Is it fair, is it honest, is it democratic, is it to the best interest of anyone in fact, to place such a premium on a few thousand” votes from racial and ethnic minorities, he went on, “simply because they happen to be located in two or three large, industrial pivotal states?”
Two hundred years after James Madison’s letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. Every four years, tens of millions of Americans’ votes magically disappear before the real election for president happens — about six weeks after Election Day, when 538 electors convene in state capitals across the country to cast their votes for president. “Blue” states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the “red” states.
Given that abolishing the Electoral College is not on the table at the moment, for a number of reasons, the best solution would be to do what Madison tried to do more than two centuries ago: get rid of statewide winner-take-all laws. That can be achieved through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electors to the candidate who wins the most votes in the whole country, not just within their borders. When states representing a majority of electoral votes join, the compact takes effect, making all Americans’ votes relevant, and all of them equal to one another. The popular-vote winner then automatically becomes president.
If you think this is a plot by bitter Democrats who just want to win, consider this: Texas is going to turn blue. Maybe not this year, maybe not even in 2024. But it’s headed in that direction, and when it gets there, Republicans will be in for an unpleasant surprise. In 2016, Donald Trump won about 4.5 million votes in Texas. The moment the Democratic nominee wins more, all those Republican voters suddenly disappear, along with any realistic shot at winning the White House. As Ed Gossett asked, how is that fair?
Every time a new national poll on the presidential election is released, it’s followed by a chorus of responses along the lines of, Who cares? The national popular vote is meaningless. Well, I care. So do tens of millions of other Americans.
And so does Donald Trump. “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy,” he tweeted on election night 2012. Why? Because he believed Mitt Romney would win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College. Not only has he never taken that tweet down, but he continues to claim that he won the popular vote in 2016. Why does he care so much about making that case unless he believed in his heart, like the rest of us do, that the person who gets the most votes should win?
And no, New York and California would not dominate a popular vote.
By Jesse Wegman, The New York Times
Last week, Nate Silver, the polling analyst, tweeted a chart illustrating the chances that Joe Biden would become president if he wins the most votes in November.
The “if” is probably unnecessary. It’s hard to find anyone who disputes that Mr. Biden will win the most votes. This isn’t a liberal’s fantasy. In a recent panel discussion among four veteran Republican campaign managers, one acknowledged, “We’re going to lose the popular vote.” Another responded, “Oh, that’s a given.” The real question is will Mr. Biden win enough more votes than President Trump to overcome this year’s bias in the Electoral College.
Mr. Silver’s analysis is bracing. If Mr. Biden wins by five percentage points or more — if he beats Donald Trump by more than seven million votes — he’s a virtual shoo-in. If he wins 4.5 million more votes than the president? He’s still got a three-in-four chance to be president.
Anything less, however, and Mr. Biden’s odds drop like a rock. A mere three million-vote Biden victory? A second Trump term suddenly becomes more likely than not. If Mr. Biden’s margin drops to 1.5 million — about the populations of Rhode Island and Wyoming combined — forget about it. The chance of a Biden presidency in that scenario is less than one in 10.
I don’t know about you, but this makes me really angry. Yes, I am aware that the United States has never elected its president by a direct popular vote; I wrote a whole book about it. I still cannot fathom why, in a representative democracy based on the principle that all votes are equal, the person who wins the most votes can — and does, repeatedly — lose the most consequential election in the land.
It happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, who won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump — a margin of more than two percentage points — but lost because of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Two months away from Election Day, the odds of something like this happening again are disconcertingly high. That’s a bad thing. The presidency is the only office whose occupant must represent all Americans equally, no matter where they live. The person who holds that office should have to win the most votes from all Americans, everywhere.
The Electoral College as it functions today is the most glaring reminder of many that our democracy is not fair, not equal and not representative. No other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like it, and for good reason. The election, as Mr. Trump would say — though not for the right reasons — is rigged.
The main problem with the Electoral College today is not, as both its supporters and detractors believe, the disproportionate power it gives smaller states. Those states do get a boost from their two Senate-based electoral votes, but that benefit pales in comparison to the real culprit: statewide winner-take-all laws. Under these laws, which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nation’s early years, even though it was never raised by the framers — states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state. The effect is to erase all the voters in that state who didn’t vote for the top candidate.
Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. As a result, most are considered “safe,” that is, comfortably in hand for one party or the other. No amount of campaigning will change that. The only states that matter to either party are the “battleground” states — especially bigger ones like Florida and Pennsylvania, where a swing of a few thousand or even a few hundred votes can shift the entire pot of electors from one candidate to the other.
The corrosiveness of this system isn’t only a modern concern. James Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, was very disturbed by the state winner-take-all rule, which he considered one of the central flaws of the Electoral College as it took shape in the early 19th century.
As Madison wrote in an 1823 letter, states using the winner-take-all rule “are a string of beads” and fail to reflect the true political diversity of their citizens. He disliked the practice so much he called for a constitutional amendment barring it.
It’s not only liberals who understand the problem with winner-take-all. In 1950, a Texas representative named Ed Gossett took to the floor of Congress to vent about the unfairness of a system that gave some voters more influence in the election than others, solely because of where they live. New York was at the time the nation’s largest and most important swing state, and the voters who decided which way it swung were racial and ethnic minorities in large urban areas.
“Now, please understand, I have no objection to the Negro in Harlem voting and to his vote being counted,” Gossett said, “but I do resent the fact that both parties will spend a hundred times as much money to get his vote and that his vote is worth a hundred times as much in the scale of national politics as is the vote of a white man in Texas.”
“Is it fair, is it honest, is it democratic, is it to the best interest of anyone in fact, to place such a premium on a few thousand” votes from racial and ethnic minorities, he went on, “simply because they happen to be located in two or three large, industrial pivotal states?”
Two hundred years after James Madison’s letter, the state winner-take-all rule is still crippling our politics and artificially dividing us. Every four years, tens of millions of Americans’ votes magically disappear before the real election for president happens — about six weeks after Election Day, when 538 electors convene in state capitals across the country to cast their votes for president. “Blue” states give all their electors to the Democrat, no matter how many Republicans voted for their candidate; vice versa in the “red” states.
Given that abolishing the Electoral College is not on the table at the moment, for a number of reasons, the best solution would be to do what Madison tried to do more than two centuries ago: get rid of statewide winner-take-all laws. That can be achieved through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electors to the candidate who wins the most votes in the whole country, not just within their borders. When states representing a majority of electoral votes join, the compact takes effect, making all Americans’ votes relevant, and all of them equal to one another. The popular-vote winner then automatically becomes president.
If you think this is a plot by bitter Democrats who just want to win, consider this: Texas is going to turn blue. Maybe not this year, maybe not even in 2024. But it’s headed in that direction, and when it gets there, Republicans will be in for an unpleasant surprise. In 2016, Donald Trump won about 4.5 million votes in Texas. The moment the Democratic nominee wins more, all those Republican voters suddenly disappear, along with any realistic shot at winning the White House. As Ed Gossett asked, how is that fair?
Every time a new national poll on the presidential election is released, it’s followed by a chorus of responses along the lines of, Who cares? The national popular vote is meaningless. Well, I care. So do tens of millions of other Americans.
And so does Donald Trump. “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy,” he tweeted on election night 2012. Why? Because he believed Mitt Romney would win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College. Not only has he never taken that tweet down, but he continues to claim that he won the popular vote in 2016. Why does he care so much about making that case unless he believed in his heart, like the rest of us do, that the person who gets the most votes should win?
THE FBI WARNED FOR YEARS THAT POLICE ARE COZY WITH THE FAR RIGHT. IS NO ONE LISTENING?
By Mike German, former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program
For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.
I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.
A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.
If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.
In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.
But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.
The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”
More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.
Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.
Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.
A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.
A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.
In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.
Prosecutors have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers
Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far-right militia groups at protests is confounding because many states, including California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have laws barring unregulated paramilitary activities and far-right militants have often killed police officers. The overlap between militia members and the Boogaloo movement – whose adherents have been arrested for inciting a riot in South Carolina, and shooting, bombing and killing police officers in California – highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups poses to their law enforcement partners.
Law enforcement agencies must do more to strengthen their anti-discrimination policies, improve applicant and employee screening, establish reporting mechanisms, and protect and reward officers who report their colleagues’ racist misconduct.
Prosecutors also have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers. Prosecutors keep a register of law enforcement officers whose previous misconduct could reasonably undermine the reliability of their testimony and need to be disclosed to defense attorneys. This register is often referred to as a “Brady list”.
The Georgetown law professor Vida B Johnson has argued that evidence of a law enforcement officer’s explicitly racist behavior could reasonably be expected to impeach his or her testimony. Prosecutors should be required to include these officers on Brady lists to ensure defendants they testify against have access to the potentially exculpating evidence of their explicitly racist behavior.
My 1992 undercover investigation didn’t reveal any connections between the neo-Nazi bombmakers and weapons traffickers and law enforcement. In fact, the local law enforcement officers that worked with me on the investigation were consummate professionals who I literally trusted with my life. There are many more just like them.
But, however small, the presence of active white supremacists in law enforcement must be treated as a matter of urgent concern. As Professor Johnson has argued, the criminal justice system “can never achieve its purported goal of fairness while white supremacists continue to hide within police departments”.
By Mike German, former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program
For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.
I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.
A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.
If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.
In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.
But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.
The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”
More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.
Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.
Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.
A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.
A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.
In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.
Prosecutors have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers
Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far-right militia groups at protests is confounding because many states, including California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have laws barring unregulated paramilitary activities and far-right militants have often killed police officers. The overlap between militia members and the Boogaloo movement – whose adherents have been arrested for inciting a riot in South Carolina, and shooting, bombing and killing police officers in California – highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups poses to their law enforcement partners.
Law enforcement agencies must do more to strengthen their anti-discrimination policies, improve applicant and employee screening, establish reporting mechanisms, and protect and reward officers who report their colleagues’ racist misconduct.
Prosecutors also have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers. Prosecutors keep a register of law enforcement officers whose previous misconduct could reasonably undermine the reliability of their testimony and need to be disclosed to defense attorneys. This register is often referred to as a “Brady list”.
The Georgetown law professor Vida B Johnson has argued that evidence of a law enforcement officer’s explicitly racist behavior could reasonably be expected to impeach his or her testimony. Prosecutors should be required to include these officers on Brady lists to ensure defendants they testify against have access to the potentially exculpating evidence of their explicitly racist behavior.
My 1992 undercover investigation didn’t reveal any connections between the neo-Nazi bombmakers and weapons traffickers and law enforcement. In fact, the local law enforcement officers that worked with me on the investigation were consummate professionals who I literally trusted with my life. There are many more just like them.
But, however small, the presence of active white supremacists in law enforcement must be treated as a matter of urgent concern. As Professor Johnson has argued, the criminal justice system “can never achieve its purported goal of fairness while white supremacists continue to hide within police departments”.
INSIDE THE COMPLETELY NUTSO UNIVERSE OF QANON
An explainer for the conspiracy theory that’s taking over the GOP.
By Will Sommer
The deranged QAnon conspiracy theory movement came close to a presidential endorsement this week when Donald Trump praised the group as “people that love our country,” while refusing to disavow their bizarre beliefs, which include a faith that he’ll eventually arrest and execute his political opponents.
Trump’s remarks were the latest, and perhaps most alarming, illustration of the gains QAnon adherents have made within the GOP even as the FBI warns that it’s a potential domestic terror movement.
But even as more people embrace QAnon—and as its believers are poised to win at least one congressional seat—much of the public remains unaware exactly what it means to believe in QAnon, why anyone should care about the movement, or what QAnon could mean for American politics.
The following is a helpful explanation of the rot taking hold in our political system.
What do QAnon supporters believe?
Nearly all QAnon believers sign on to one basic view: that the world has long been controlled by a sinister “cabal” responsible for a wide array of evils, from wars and famines to diseases, including the novel coronavirus pandemic. This cabal is believed to have tentacles in the top echelons of the Democratic Party, Hollywood, banking, and the government “deep state.”
QAnon believers baselessly think members of this cabal—including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and various Hollywood celebrities—torture and sexually abuse children in Satanic rituals. To stop this, in QAnon’s telling, the military recruited Donald Trump to win the presidency and dethrone the cabal.
Now QAnon believers are eagerly awaiting a day called the “Storm,” in which they believe Trump will order mass arrests of his political opponents and either ship them off to Guantanamo Bay or order them executed outright. QAnon believers think they themselves will play a small role in this purge by educating average citizens about QAnon ahead of the arrests as part of what they call the “Great Awakening.”
Why the hell would they believe this?
QAnon believers got all of these ideas from “Q,” an anonymous message board poster who started leaving messages on the anonymous, anarchic 4Chan message board, in October 2017 predicting Hillary Clinton’s arrest at the end of the month. That didn’t happen, of course, but QAnon grew anyway. Rather than decide that the failure of the Clinton arrest prediction meant QAnon had been discredited, supporters chose to believe that Q had to throw in disinformation into the clues to throw off the deep state—or convinced themselves that the real Hillary Clinton was in jail and the one we see in the news is a clone.
Over time, there have been more than 4,600 clues offered, on everything from imagined attempts to shoot down Air Force One to alleged CIA operations. QAnon fans call these clues “breadcrumbs” or “Q-Drops.”
QAnon believers think Q, whose name is thought to be a reference to a high-level Energy Department security clearance, is a mysterious Trump administration insider relaying encoded clues about the way the world really is. After initially posting on 4Chan, Q migrated to another message board, 8Chan. The most recent QAnon posts are made on 8Chan clone site 8kun, after 8Chan was shut down after hosting the El Paso mass shooter’s manifesto.
But degrees of QAnon belief derived from the clues can vary, ranging from people who have followed even the most twisted trails and now believe the idea that the government is run by reptilian aliens, to more moderate converts who are just convinced that the deep state is out to destroy Trump.
As a sort of mega-conspiracy theory, QAnon can encompass a wide array of other, often conflicting conspiratorial beliefs. Not every QAnon believer holds to the same tenets of QAnon, and the most committed are often engaged in furious online battles with each other over the exact meaning of a QAnon clue.
What does the term “QAnon” come from?
The “Q” in QAnon comes from “Q,” the mystery figure whose clues are closely studied by QAnon believes. Meanwhile, QAnon adherents or “researchers” call themselves “anons,” in a nod to their message-board anonymity. “QAnon” is a combination of “Q” and “Anon.”
So… Who is Q?
Almost nothing is publicly known about “Q.” It’s not even clear whether Q is one person or a group of people, or even whether control of the Q handle has changed hands since 2017. That last question has provoked plenty of schisms in the QAnon community, with various factions arguing over what constitutes a “real” QAnon clue.
QAnon believers, meanwhile, think Q could be anyone from former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to some other current or former administration official.
Just how big is QAnon?
It’s difficult to gauge how many people believe in QAnon, especially because degrees of belief vary—it’s hard to distinguish a hardcore QAnon “researcher” from someone who says they believe in QAnon because they think it just means ardently supporting Trump. Anecdotally, however, there is some evidence that QAnon has gained a significant, if still small, number of supporters.
QAnon believers with Q shirts and signs were visible at Trump rallies in 2018, until security imposed a ban on QAnon paraphernalia. QAnon videos have amassed millions of views, and a pro-QAnon book neared the top of Amazon’s bestseller chart.
Polls typically find that QAnon is unpopular nationally, but 5 percent of respondents in one 2019 poll said they believe in QAnon. While that’s far from a majority of the country, it’s a remarkably high number when you consider how bizarre QAnon believers’ ideas are.
Is QAnon actually dangerous?
The vast majority of QAnon believers will never be inspired to commit crimes or violence by the conspiracy theory. But a worrying fraction of them have, inspiring the FBI to label QAnon as a potential source of domestic terrorism.
In 2018, a QAnon believer with a gun and an improvised armored truck blocked a bridge near the Hoover Dam, demanding that Trump take steps to make a Q prediction “come true.” He ultimately pleaded guilty to one charge of making a terrorist threat, and faces a lengthy prison term. Two QAnon believers have been charged with murder, including the alleged killer of a reputed Mafia boss.
In a worrying sign of new organization among QAnon believers, The Daily Beast uncovered a network of QAnon believers preying on parents and convincing them that the deep state wanted to abduct their children. The network inspired two alleged child kidnapping plots, and appears to have harbored multiple fugitives wanted by law enforcement.
What do QAnon clues look like?
QAnon clues are deliberately cryptic, meaning that Q and their followers can have some plausible deniability when the events that QAnon predicts fail to come through. In one of the first clues, for example, Q wrote:
Where is HRC?
Why is the NG called up across 12 cities?
Trust in your President.
God bless, Patriots.
— Q
You might think it’s clear that “HRC” stands for Hillary Clinton, while “NG” presumably stands for “National Guard.” But these are the kinds of vagaries that QAnon followers can debate for days on their message boards or on Twitter.
Who is the typical QAnon follower?
For the first years of QAnon, the average QAnon follower at rallies looked a lot like the average Trump voter: older, white, Christian, and conservative.
More recently, though, QAnon has managed to diversify its audience, thanks in part to a growing public interest in conspiracy theories fueled by the pandemic and the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, which involves many of the same tenets: powerful people who actually are tied to child sex-trafficking.
QAnon fans also become better at hiding their more outlandish ideas. Using the popular #SaveTheChildren hashtag, for example, they can describe entry-level QAnon ideas as simply a movement against child sex-trafficking. In July, hundreds of people, many of them young and of color, turned out for a “Save The Children” march in Los Angeles carrying QAnon-related signs.
What have Trump and the GOP done about QAnon?
Rather than confront QAnon directly, Trump and many top Republicans have often winked at QAnon, or worse. Trump has frequently retweeted QAnon promoters and even invited some to the White House, while his son Eric Trump posted a QAnon meme on Instagram. Michael Flynn recorded himself in July taking the “QAnon oath,” which QAnon believers took as a powerful sign that their conspiracy theory is real.
QAnon believers have long fixated on the idea of someone asking Trump in a White House press briefing about whether QAnon is real—with the expectation that he would confirm it is. One QAnon believer even offered to infiltrate the White House press corps under a false name in 2018, alarming the Secret Service, according to government records obtained by The Daily Beast.
Trump’s remarks on Aug. 19 fell just short of a heartfelt QAnon endorsement. But Trump’s refusal to shoot down the obviously farcical conspiracy theory has strengthened QAnon believers’ convictions.
What have social networks done to stop QAnon?
While Q posts on anonymous message boards, QAnon relies on mainstream social networks to grow its message beyond the fringes of the internet. The message boards where the clues are published are difficult to use, but potential mainstream converts are used to using sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok.
Reddit banned QAnon in 2018, sending QAnon followers scrambling to other platforms. Twitter announced a partial crackdown in July, banning 7,000 accounts that had already broken the site’s rules. Twitter also made it harder for QAnon followers to harass their targets or launch trending hashtags. This week, Facebook announced a crackdown of its own targeting QAnon accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including an algorithm ban meant to stop the sites from recommending QAnon content automatically—thereby accidentally sending users down the QAnon rabbit hole.
What’s up with the John F. Kennedy Jr. stuff?
A faction of QAnon believers are convinced that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death in a plane crash in 1999, either to become Q or team up with Trump in some other way.
They’re even convinced that one particular Trump supporter, a man named Vincent Fusca Jr., is Kennedy in disguise. Fusca declined to be interviewed, and hasn’t publicly disputed the claim.
While the JFK Jr. fans are controversial even within QAnon, they’re unquestionably enthusiastic. At the Trump-centric Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, D.C., in 2019, several JFK Jr. fans bearing images of him wearing a MAGA hat circulated in Trump’s hotel lobby. When I asked one woman what her JFK Jr. sign meant, she leaned in and whispered, “He’s alive!” before running off.
What is adrenochrome?
Many QAnon adherents believe that the deep-state cabal members aren’t just abusing children for Satanic rituals. Instead, they claim that the torture and abuse produces a blood-like substance called “adrenochrome,” which they claim cabal members and celebrities drink to stay young.
The idea of world elites drinking children’s blood is rife with anti-Semitic tropes— an aspect of QAnon that often isn’t clear when people are first introduced to it.
What do I do if someone close to me starts believing in QAnon?
Reddit forums like QAnon Casualties are filled with stories of anguished people whose relationships with QAnon believers have become strained or which have ended entirely. Conversely, QAnon believers often post themselves about how they have become alienated from their families because of their belief in QAnon.
In this telling, the world of Q research becomes their new “family.”
If you are concerned that someone you know is becoming a QAnon believer, it’s important to not immediately ridicule their new worldview or point out its many factual flaws, according to writer David Neiwert. The author of Red Pill, Blue Pill, an upcoming book on how people can deal on an individual level with conspiracy theories, Neiwert warns that directly attacking QAnon beliefs will convince the QAnon supporter that their friend or relative is a part of the conspiracy themselves.
“It’s really important to maintain the friendship or the relationship that you have with that person throughout,” Neiwert said.
Instead, Neiwert advises people to draw out what personal problems may be drawing someone to QAnon, and talk about how to address those.
“What you’ll find is that everyone who is drawn into this stuff has usually unaddressed grievances or issues,” Neiwert siad.
Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any easy answers for how to convince a QAnon believer that it’s fake. And there aren’t really any prominent Q-defectors, whose stories could serve as a template for others to follow.
“It’s a long, slow, and frequently very painful process,” Neiwert said.
An explainer for the conspiracy theory that’s taking over the GOP.
By Will Sommer
The deranged QAnon conspiracy theory movement came close to a presidential endorsement this week when Donald Trump praised the group as “people that love our country,” while refusing to disavow their bizarre beliefs, which include a faith that he’ll eventually arrest and execute his political opponents.
Trump’s remarks were the latest, and perhaps most alarming, illustration of the gains QAnon adherents have made within the GOP even as the FBI warns that it’s a potential domestic terror movement.
But even as more people embrace QAnon—and as its believers are poised to win at least one congressional seat—much of the public remains unaware exactly what it means to believe in QAnon, why anyone should care about the movement, or what QAnon could mean for American politics.
The following is a helpful explanation of the rot taking hold in our political system.
What do QAnon supporters believe?
Nearly all QAnon believers sign on to one basic view: that the world has long been controlled by a sinister “cabal” responsible for a wide array of evils, from wars and famines to diseases, including the novel coronavirus pandemic. This cabal is believed to have tentacles in the top echelons of the Democratic Party, Hollywood, banking, and the government “deep state.”
QAnon believers baselessly think members of this cabal—including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and various Hollywood celebrities—torture and sexually abuse children in Satanic rituals. To stop this, in QAnon’s telling, the military recruited Donald Trump to win the presidency and dethrone the cabal.
Now QAnon believers are eagerly awaiting a day called the “Storm,” in which they believe Trump will order mass arrests of his political opponents and either ship them off to Guantanamo Bay or order them executed outright. QAnon believers think they themselves will play a small role in this purge by educating average citizens about QAnon ahead of the arrests as part of what they call the “Great Awakening.”
Why the hell would they believe this?
QAnon believers got all of these ideas from “Q,” an anonymous message board poster who started leaving messages on the anonymous, anarchic 4Chan message board, in October 2017 predicting Hillary Clinton’s arrest at the end of the month. That didn’t happen, of course, but QAnon grew anyway. Rather than decide that the failure of the Clinton arrest prediction meant QAnon had been discredited, supporters chose to believe that Q had to throw in disinformation into the clues to throw off the deep state—or convinced themselves that the real Hillary Clinton was in jail and the one we see in the news is a clone.
Over time, there have been more than 4,600 clues offered, on everything from imagined attempts to shoot down Air Force One to alleged CIA operations. QAnon fans call these clues “breadcrumbs” or “Q-Drops.”
QAnon believers think Q, whose name is thought to be a reference to a high-level Energy Department security clearance, is a mysterious Trump administration insider relaying encoded clues about the way the world really is. After initially posting on 4Chan, Q migrated to another message board, 8Chan. The most recent QAnon posts are made on 8Chan clone site 8kun, after 8Chan was shut down after hosting the El Paso mass shooter’s manifesto.
But degrees of QAnon belief derived from the clues can vary, ranging from people who have followed even the most twisted trails and now believe the idea that the government is run by reptilian aliens, to more moderate converts who are just convinced that the deep state is out to destroy Trump.
As a sort of mega-conspiracy theory, QAnon can encompass a wide array of other, often conflicting conspiratorial beliefs. Not every QAnon believer holds to the same tenets of QAnon, and the most committed are often engaged in furious online battles with each other over the exact meaning of a QAnon clue.
What does the term “QAnon” come from?
The “Q” in QAnon comes from “Q,” the mystery figure whose clues are closely studied by QAnon believes. Meanwhile, QAnon adherents or “researchers” call themselves “anons,” in a nod to their message-board anonymity. “QAnon” is a combination of “Q” and “Anon.”
So… Who is Q?
Almost nothing is publicly known about “Q.” It’s not even clear whether Q is one person or a group of people, or even whether control of the Q handle has changed hands since 2017. That last question has provoked plenty of schisms in the QAnon community, with various factions arguing over what constitutes a “real” QAnon clue.
QAnon believers, meanwhile, think Q could be anyone from former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to some other current or former administration official.
Just how big is QAnon?
It’s difficult to gauge how many people believe in QAnon, especially because degrees of belief vary—it’s hard to distinguish a hardcore QAnon “researcher” from someone who says they believe in QAnon because they think it just means ardently supporting Trump. Anecdotally, however, there is some evidence that QAnon has gained a significant, if still small, number of supporters.
QAnon believers with Q shirts and signs were visible at Trump rallies in 2018, until security imposed a ban on QAnon paraphernalia. QAnon videos have amassed millions of views, and a pro-QAnon book neared the top of Amazon’s bestseller chart.
Polls typically find that QAnon is unpopular nationally, but 5 percent of respondents in one 2019 poll said they believe in QAnon. While that’s far from a majority of the country, it’s a remarkably high number when you consider how bizarre QAnon believers’ ideas are.
Is QAnon actually dangerous?
The vast majority of QAnon believers will never be inspired to commit crimes or violence by the conspiracy theory. But a worrying fraction of them have, inspiring the FBI to label QAnon as a potential source of domestic terrorism.
In 2018, a QAnon believer with a gun and an improvised armored truck blocked a bridge near the Hoover Dam, demanding that Trump take steps to make a Q prediction “come true.” He ultimately pleaded guilty to one charge of making a terrorist threat, and faces a lengthy prison term. Two QAnon believers have been charged with murder, including the alleged killer of a reputed Mafia boss.
In a worrying sign of new organization among QAnon believers, The Daily Beast uncovered a network of QAnon believers preying on parents and convincing them that the deep state wanted to abduct their children. The network inspired two alleged child kidnapping plots, and appears to have harbored multiple fugitives wanted by law enforcement.
What do QAnon clues look like?
QAnon clues are deliberately cryptic, meaning that Q and their followers can have some plausible deniability when the events that QAnon predicts fail to come through. In one of the first clues, for example, Q wrote:
Where is HRC?
Why is the NG called up across 12 cities?
Trust in your President.
God bless, Patriots.
— Q
You might think it’s clear that “HRC” stands for Hillary Clinton, while “NG” presumably stands for “National Guard.” But these are the kinds of vagaries that QAnon followers can debate for days on their message boards or on Twitter.
Who is the typical QAnon follower?
For the first years of QAnon, the average QAnon follower at rallies looked a lot like the average Trump voter: older, white, Christian, and conservative.
More recently, though, QAnon has managed to diversify its audience, thanks in part to a growing public interest in conspiracy theories fueled by the pandemic and the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, which involves many of the same tenets: powerful people who actually are tied to child sex-trafficking.
QAnon fans also become better at hiding their more outlandish ideas. Using the popular #SaveTheChildren hashtag, for example, they can describe entry-level QAnon ideas as simply a movement against child sex-trafficking. In July, hundreds of people, many of them young and of color, turned out for a “Save The Children” march in Los Angeles carrying QAnon-related signs.
What have Trump and the GOP done about QAnon?
Rather than confront QAnon directly, Trump and many top Republicans have often winked at QAnon, or worse. Trump has frequently retweeted QAnon promoters and even invited some to the White House, while his son Eric Trump posted a QAnon meme on Instagram. Michael Flynn recorded himself in July taking the “QAnon oath,” which QAnon believers took as a powerful sign that their conspiracy theory is real.
QAnon believers have long fixated on the idea of someone asking Trump in a White House press briefing about whether QAnon is real—with the expectation that he would confirm it is. One QAnon believer even offered to infiltrate the White House press corps under a false name in 2018, alarming the Secret Service, according to government records obtained by The Daily Beast.
Trump’s remarks on Aug. 19 fell just short of a heartfelt QAnon endorsement. But Trump’s refusal to shoot down the obviously farcical conspiracy theory has strengthened QAnon believers’ convictions.
What have social networks done to stop QAnon?
While Q posts on anonymous message boards, QAnon relies on mainstream social networks to grow its message beyond the fringes of the internet. The message boards where the clues are published are difficult to use, but potential mainstream converts are used to using sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok.
Reddit banned QAnon in 2018, sending QAnon followers scrambling to other platforms. Twitter announced a partial crackdown in July, banning 7,000 accounts that had already broken the site’s rules. Twitter also made it harder for QAnon followers to harass their targets or launch trending hashtags. This week, Facebook announced a crackdown of its own targeting QAnon accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including an algorithm ban meant to stop the sites from recommending QAnon content automatically—thereby accidentally sending users down the QAnon rabbit hole.
What’s up with the John F. Kennedy Jr. stuff?
A faction of QAnon believers are convinced that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death in a plane crash in 1999, either to become Q or team up with Trump in some other way.
They’re even convinced that one particular Trump supporter, a man named Vincent Fusca Jr., is Kennedy in disguise. Fusca declined to be interviewed, and hasn’t publicly disputed the claim.
While the JFK Jr. fans are controversial even within QAnon, they’re unquestionably enthusiastic. At the Trump-centric Fourth of July celebrations in Washington, D.C., in 2019, several JFK Jr. fans bearing images of him wearing a MAGA hat circulated in Trump’s hotel lobby. When I asked one woman what her JFK Jr. sign meant, she leaned in and whispered, “He’s alive!” before running off.
What is adrenochrome?
Many QAnon adherents believe that the deep-state cabal members aren’t just abusing children for Satanic rituals. Instead, they claim that the torture and abuse produces a blood-like substance called “adrenochrome,” which they claim cabal members and celebrities drink to stay young.
The idea of world elites drinking children’s blood is rife with anti-Semitic tropes— an aspect of QAnon that often isn’t clear when people are first introduced to it.
What do I do if someone close to me starts believing in QAnon?
Reddit forums like QAnon Casualties are filled with stories of anguished people whose relationships with QAnon believers have become strained or which have ended entirely. Conversely, QAnon believers often post themselves about how they have become alienated from their families because of their belief in QAnon.
In this telling, the world of Q research becomes their new “family.”
If you are concerned that someone you know is becoming a QAnon believer, it’s important to not immediately ridicule their new worldview or point out its many factual flaws, according to writer David Neiwert. The author of Red Pill, Blue Pill, an upcoming book on how people can deal on an individual level with conspiracy theories, Neiwert warns that directly attacking QAnon beliefs will convince the QAnon supporter that their friend or relative is a part of the conspiracy themselves.
“It’s really important to maintain the friendship or the relationship that you have with that person throughout,” Neiwert said.
Instead, Neiwert advises people to draw out what personal problems may be drawing someone to QAnon, and talk about how to address those.
“What you’ll find is that everyone who is drawn into this stuff has usually unaddressed grievances or issues,” Neiwert siad.
Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any easy answers for how to convince a QAnon believer that it’s fake. And there aren’t really any prominent Q-defectors, whose stories could serve as a template for others to follow.
“It’s a long, slow, and frequently very painful process,” Neiwert said.
HOW HAS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SURVIVED FOR THIS LONG?
Resistance to eliminating it has long been connected to the idea of white supremacy.
By Alexander Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at Harvard.
As our revived national conversation on race has made clear, the legacies of slavery and white supremacy run wide and deep in American society and political life. One such legacy — which is particularly noteworthy in a presidential election season — has been the survival and preservation of the Electoral College, an institution that has been under fire for more than 200 years. Our complicated method of electing presidents has been the target of recurrent reform attempts since the early 19th century, and the politics of race and region have figured prominently in their defeat.
It is, of course, no secret that slavery played a role in the original design of our presidential election system — although historians disagree about the centrality of that role. The notorious formula that gave states representation in Congress for three-fifths of their slaves was carried over into the allocation of electoral votes; the number of electoral votes granted to each state was (and remains) equivalent to that state’s representation in both branches of Congress. This constitutional design gave white Southerners disproportionate influence in the choice of presidents, an edge that could and did affect the outcome of elections.
Not surprisingly, the slave states strenuously opposed any changes to the system that would diminish their advantage. In 1816, when a resolution calling for a national popular vote was introduced in Congress for the first time, it was derailed by the protestations of Southern senators. The slaveholding states “would lose the privilege the Constitution now allows them, of votes upon three-fifths of their population other than freemen,” objected William Wyatt Bibb of Georgia on the floor of the Senate. “It would be deeply injurious to them.”
What is far less known, or recognized, is that long after the abolition of slavery, Southern political leaders continued to resist any attempts to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote. (They sometimes supported other reforms, like the proportional division of each state’s electoral votes, but those are different strands of a multifaceted tale.) The reasoning behind this opposition was straightforward, if disturbing. After Reconstruction, the white “Redeemer” governments that came to power in Southern states became the political beneficiaries of what amounted to a “five-fifths” clause: African-Americans counted fully toward representation (and thus electoral votes), but they were again disenfranchised — despite the formal protections outlined in the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” White Southerners consequently derived an even greater benefit from the Electoral College than they had before the Civil War.
A national popular vote would have eliminated that benefit. As the region’s political leaders recognized, passage of a constitutional amendment instituting a national popular vote would have spawned strong legal and political pressures to enfranchise African-Americans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Alabama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, “with the Negro half of our people not voting, our voice in the national elections, which is now based upon total population, would then be based solely on our voting population and, therefore reduced by half.” The political consequences of a national popular vote could simply not be countenanced.
By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe that their disproportionate weight in presidential elections, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bulwark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge the civil and political rights of African-Americans. In 1947 Charles Collins’s “Whither Solid South?,” an influential states’ rights and segregationist treatise, implored Southerners to repel “any attempt to do away with the College because it alone can enable the Southern States to preserve their rights within the Union.” The book, which became must reading among the Dixiecrats who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948, was highly praised and freely distributed by (among others) the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland, who served in the Senate from 1943 until 1978.
Driven by such convictions, the white supremacist regimes of the South stood as a roadblock in the path of a national popular vote from the latter decades of the 19th century into the 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act and other measures compelled the region to enfranchise African-Americans. There was, of course, resistance to the idea of a national vote elsewhere in the country, but it was the South’s well-known adamance — and the fact that Southern states alone could come close to blocking a constitutional amendment in Congress — that kept the idea on the outskirts of public debate for decades. Numerous political leaders who personally favored a national popular vote, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. of Massachusetts, a Republican, in the 1940s, concluded that such a reform had no realistic chance of success, and they shifted their advocacy to less sweeping measures.
The politics of race and region also figured prominently in the stinging defeat of a national popular vote amendment in the Senate in 1970 — the closest that the United States has come to transforming its presidential election system since 1821. Popular and elite support for the idea had mushroomed in the 1960s, leading in 1969 to the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College. The proposal then got bogged down in the Senate during a year when regional tensions were high: two Southern nominees to the Supreme Court were rejected by the Senate, and the Voting Rights Act was renewed over the vocal opposition of Southern senators. Meanwhile, the national popular vote amendment was stalled in the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by none other than Senator Eastland.
When the amendment resolution finally came to the floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the prodigious efforts of an Indiana senator, Birch Bayh, it was greeted by a filibuster led by segregationists Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things were changing in the South, its political leaders remained steeped in the values and perspectives that had informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. “The Electoral College,” wrote Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, “is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”
The filibuster succeeded, dooming the proposal: attempts to invoke cloture — to end the debate and vote on the amendment itself — fell a few votes short of the two-thirds majority then needed to break a filibuster. The regional lineups in the crucial cloture votes (there were two) were starkly visible. More than 75 percent of Southern senators voted against cloture; a similar proportion of senators from outside the South voted favorably.
Southern political leaders, shaped by segregation and white supremacist beliefs, thus kept the idea of a national popular vote off the table for many decades and played a crucial role in blocking its passage through Congress at a historical juncture when change actually seemed possible. To be sure, electoral reform is almost always a complex, difficult process, with diverse actors competing to defend their ideas and interests. But had the politics of race been less salient, both in the 19th century and the 20th, the Electoral College would most likely have been relegated long ago to the status of a historical curiosity. We might want to keep that sobering fact in mind as we look ahead to an election whose outcome is in question only because of the peculiar manner in which we choose our presidents.
Resistance to eliminating it has long been connected to the idea of white supremacy.
By Alexander Keyssar, professor of history and social policy at Harvard.
As our revived national conversation on race has made clear, the legacies of slavery and white supremacy run wide and deep in American society and political life. One such legacy — which is particularly noteworthy in a presidential election season — has been the survival and preservation of the Electoral College, an institution that has been under fire for more than 200 years. Our complicated method of electing presidents has been the target of recurrent reform attempts since the early 19th century, and the politics of race and region have figured prominently in their defeat.
It is, of course, no secret that slavery played a role in the original design of our presidential election system — although historians disagree about the centrality of that role. The notorious formula that gave states representation in Congress for three-fifths of their slaves was carried over into the allocation of electoral votes; the number of electoral votes granted to each state was (and remains) equivalent to that state’s representation in both branches of Congress. This constitutional design gave white Southerners disproportionate influence in the choice of presidents, an edge that could and did affect the outcome of elections.
Not surprisingly, the slave states strenuously opposed any changes to the system that would diminish their advantage. In 1816, when a resolution calling for a national popular vote was introduced in Congress for the first time, it was derailed by the protestations of Southern senators. The slaveholding states “would lose the privilege the Constitution now allows them, of votes upon three-fifths of their population other than freemen,” objected William Wyatt Bibb of Georgia on the floor of the Senate. “It would be deeply injurious to them.”
What is far less known, or recognized, is that long after the abolition of slavery, Southern political leaders continued to resist any attempts to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote. (They sometimes supported other reforms, like the proportional division of each state’s electoral votes, but those are different strands of a multifaceted tale.) The reasoning behind this opposition was straightforward, if disturbing. After Reconstruction, the white “Redeemer” governments that came to power in Southern states became the political beneficiaries of what amounted to a “five-fifths” clause: African-Americans counted fully toward representation (and thus electoral votes), but they were again disenfranchised — despite the formal protections outlined in the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which stated that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” White Southerners consequently derived an even greater benefit from the Electoral College than they had before the Civil War.
A national popular vote would have eliminated that benefit. As the region’s political leaders recognized, passage of a constitutional amendment instituting a national popular vote would have spawned strong legal and political pressures to enfranchise African-Americans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Alabama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, “with the Negro half of our people not voting, our voice in the national elections, which is now based upon total population, would then be based solely on our voting population and, therefore reduced by half.” The political consequences of a national popular vote could simply not be countenanced.
By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe that their disproportionate weight in presidential elections, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bulwark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge the civil and political rights of African-Americans. In 1947 Charles Collins’s “Whither Solid South?,” an influential states’ rights and segregationist treatise, implored Southerners to repel “any attempt to do away with the College because it alone can enable the Southern States to preserve their rights within the Union.” The book, which became must reading among the Dixiecrats who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948, was highly praised and freely distributed by (among others) the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland, who served in the Senate from 1943 until 1978.
Driven by such convictions, the white supremacist regimes of the South stood as a roadblock in the path of a national popular vote from the latter decades of the 19th century into the 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act and other measures compelled the region to enfranchise African-Americans. There was, of course, resistance to the idea of a national vote elsewhere in the country, but it was the South’s well-known adamance — and the fact that Southern states alone could come close to blocking a constitutional amendment in Congress — that kept the idea on the outskirts of public debate for decades. Numerous political leaders who personally favored a national popular vote, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. of Massachusetts, a Republican, in the 1940s, concluded that such a reform had no realistic chance of success, and they shifted their advocacy to less sweeping measures.
The politics of race and region also figured prominently in the stinging defeat of a national popular vote amendment in the Senate in 1970 — the closest that the United States has come to transforming its presidential election system since 1821. Popular and elite support for the idea had mushroomed in the 1960s, leading in 1969 to the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College. The proposal then got bogged down in the Senate during a year when regional tensions were high: two Southern nominees to the Supreme Court were rejected by the Senate, and the Voting Rights Act was renewed over the vocal opposition of Southern senators. Meanwhile, the national popular vote amendment was stalled in the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by none other than Senator Eastland.
When the amendment resolution finally came to the floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the prodigious efforts of an Indiana senator, Birch Bayh, it was greeted by a filibuster led by segregationists Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things were changing in the South, its political leaders remained steeped in the values and perspectives that had informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. “The Electoral College,” wrote Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, “is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”
The filibuster succeeded, dooming the proposal: attempts to invoke cloture — to end the debate and vote on the amendment itself — fell a few votes short of the two-thirds majority then needed to break a filibuster. The regional lineups in the crucial cloture votes (there were two) were starkly visible. More than 75 percent of Southern senators voted against cloture; a similar proportion of senators from outside the South voted favorably.
Southern political leaders, shaped by segregation and white supremacist beliefs, thus kept the idea of a national popular vote off the table for many decades and played a crucial role in blocking its passage through Congress at a historical juncture when change actually seemed possible. To be sure, electoral reform is almost always a complex, difficult process, with diverse actors competing to defend their ideas and interests. But had the politics of race been less salient, both in the 19th century and the 20th, the Electoral College would most likely have been relegated long ago to the status of a historical curiosity. We might want to keep that sobering fact in mind as we look ahead to an election whose outcome is in question only because of the peculiar manner in which we choose our presidents.
IT’S NEVER BEEN EASIER FOR THE RICH TO EVADE TAXES
By Gus Wezerek, The New York Times
The Internal Revenue Service is one of the few government agencies that make money. For every 33 cents in its budget, the I.R.S. collects $100. Its budget-to-revenue ratio ranks among the lowest for tax collection agencies in the world.
Yet the I.R.S. also lets hundreds of billions of dollars slip through its fingers each year. This “tax gap” — recent estimates pegged it at $381 billion a year between 2011 and 2013 — comes from people and businesses that underreport their income, pay less than what they owe or owe taxes but simply don’t file a return.
Most of the gap is owed by the wealthy, who can pay accountants to mask their income and lawyers to protect them if the taxman comes knocking.
The I.R.S. asked Congress for $900 million in additional funding to help recover some of the tax gap as part of its 2021 budget request. Clawing back even a quarter of the revenue could pay for proposals like tuition-free public college or an expanded border wall.
But over the past decade, Congress has starved the I.R.S. of badly needed resources. Budget cuts have whittled away at staffing levels and forced auditors to leave hundreds of thousands of identified tax violations on the shelf, essentially unchallenged.
The I.R.S. is facing historically low funding levels this year, even after a $500 million boost from a coronavirus relief bill. The agency’s enforcement budget, which funds tax audits, has been hit especially hard.
As a result of the budget cuts, the I.R.S. instituted a hiring freeze in 2011. Since then, the number of employees has dropped from 94,700 to 73,600 in 2019.
A relatively large share of the staffing losses has been among revenue agents, who take on the complicated, in-person examinations of high-income taxpayer cases.
As enforcement withered, so did the share of returns that were audited and the amount of unpaid taxes that auditors uncovered.
The wealthy have benefited the most from hobbled enforcement.Audits of people making more than $1 million and corporations worth more than $20 billion have plummeted.
All these cuts haven’t gone unnoticed by people looking to skirt the law.One of the few statistics that’s increased since 2010? The number of people who aren’t filing their taxes.
The pandemic has presented a special challenge for the I.R.S. So much unanswered mail flowed in while employees were sheltering at home that the agency rented trailers to store the backlog.
On top of the disruptions due to the coronavirus, the agency was asked to distribute more than 160 million payments as part of coronavirus relief efforts. Also on the agency’s docket: implementing last year’s Taxpayer First Act, which aims to improve the agency’s customer service efforts and expand electronic filing programs.
Add to that the continuing work of modernizing the department’s software (“We still have applications that were running when John F. Kennedy was president,” wrote John Koskinen in 2015, when he was the I.R.S. commissioner) and you have a picture of an agency stretched to its limit. The I.R.S. doesn’t have the resources to give high-income tax audits the attention they deserve.
“There’s no question that more lower-income people are being examined than upper-income people,” said J. Russell George, a Treasury Department inspector general who oversees tax administration, at a House appropriations meeting last year.
Asked to explain the disparities, Mr. George said that “the short answer is resources. A lot of the work that relates to poor people is the type of work that’s relatively simple for the I.R.S. to conduct, especially with the work of junior I.R.S. employees. The more sophisticated the income tax, the more involved it is and the longer it takes.”
When revenue agents do have time to pursue high-income audits, the returns are astounding.
In 2013, agents conducted more than 6,000 audits on taxpayers who made more than $5 million. Those audits resulted in about $880 million of recommended additional taxes. That works out to $4,545 for every hour each agent spent on those cases.
A report last week from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is one more reminder that investing in the I.R.S. pays off. The budget office conservatively estimated that adding $20 billion more to the I.R.S.’s coffers over the next 10 years would result in $61 billion more in revenue.
As the government looks for ways to keep Americans afloat during the recession, Congress can’t afford to keep the I.R.S.’s hands tied. Authorizing the agency’s 2021 budget request in full is the least the government can do to make sure every taxpayer — especially the rich ones — pay their fair share.
By Gus Wezerek, The New York Times
The Internal Revenue Service is one of the few government agencies that make money. For every 33 cents in its budget, the I.R.S. collects $100. Its budget-to-revenue ratio ranks among the lowest for tax collection agencies in the world.
Yet the I.R.S. also lets hundreds of billions of dollars slip through its fingers each year. This “tax gap” — recent estimates pegged it at $381 billion a year between 2011 and 2013 — comes from people and businesses that underreport their income, pay less than what they owe or owe taxes but simply don’t file a return.
Most of the gap is owed by the wealthy, who can pay accountants to mask their income and lawyers to protect them if the taxman comes knocking.
The I.R.S. asked Congress for $900 million in additional funding to help recover some of the tax gap as part of its 2021 budget request. Clawing back even a quarter of the revenue could pay for proposals like tuition-free public college or an expanded border wall.
But over the past decade, Congress has starved the I.R.S. of badly needed resources. Budget cuts have whittled away at staffing levels and forced auditors to leave hundreds of thousands of identified tax violations on the shelf, essentially unchallenged.
The I.R.S. is facing historically low funding levels this year, even after a $500 million boost from a coronavirus relief bill. The agency’s enforcement budget, which funds tax audits, has been hit especially hard.
As a result of the budget cuts, the I.R.S. instituted a hiring freeze in 2011. Since then, the number of employees has dropped from 94,700 to 73,600 in 2019.
A relatively large share of the staffing losses has been among revenue agents, who take on the complicated, in-person examinations of high-income taxpayer cases.
As enforcement withered, so did the share of returns that were audited and the amount of unpaid taxes that auditors uncovered.
The wealthy have benefited the most from hobbled enforcement.Audits of people making more than $1 million and corporations worth more than $20 billion have plummeted.
All these cuts haven’t gone unnoticed by people looking to skirt the law.One of the few statistics that’s increased since 2010? The number of people who aren’t filing their taxes.
The pandemic has presented a special challenge for the I.R.S. So much unanswered mail flowed in while employees were sheltering at home that the agency rented trailers to store the backlog.
On top of the disruptions due to the coronavirus, the agency was asked to distribute more than 160 million payments as part of coronavirus relief efforts. Also on the agency’s docket: implementing last year’s Taxpayer First Act, which aims to improve the agency’s customer service efforts and expand electronic filing programs.
Add to that the continuing work of modernizing the department’s software (“We still have applications that were running when John F. Kennedy was president,” wrote John Koskinen in 2015, when he was the I.R.S. commissioner) and you have a picture of an agency stretched to its limit. The I.R.S. doesn’t have the resources to give high-income tax audits the attention they deserve.
“There’s no question that more lower-income people are being examined than upper-income people,” said J. Russell George, a Treasury Department inspector general who oversees tax administration, at a House appropriations meeting last year.
Asked to explain the disparities, Mr. George said that “the short answer is resources. A lot of the work that relates to poor people is the type of work that’s relatively simple for the I.R.S. to conduct, especially with the work of junior I.R.S. employees. The more sophisticated the income tax, the more involved it is and the longer it takes.”
When revenue agents do have time to pursue high-income audits, the returns are astounding.
In 2013, agents conducted more than 6,000 audits on taxpayers who made more than $5 million. Those audits resulted in about $880 million of recommended additional taxes. That works out to $4,545 for every hour each agent spent on those cases.
A report last week from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is one more reminder that investing in the I.R.S. pays off. The budget office conservatively estimated that adding $20 billion more to the I.R.S.’s coffers over the next 10 years would result in $61 billion more in revenue.
As the government looks for ways to keep Americans afloat during the recession, Congress can’t afford to keep the I.R.S.’s hands tied. Authorizing the agency’s 2021 budget request in full is the least the government can do to make sure every taxpayer — especially the rich ones — pay their fair share.
THE REAL HORROR OF ‘JAWS’ ISN’T THE SHARK
It’s the leader who initially values capitalism over saving lives.
By Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times
I didn’t recall the real horror of the movie. Or maybe, the last time I saw it, I was too young to understand that the shark was simply doing what a shark is built to do, and that the true villain is not the coldblooded predator — it’s the warm-blooded mayor.
“All I’m saying is that Amity is a summer town — we need summer dollars,” Mayor Larry Vaughn argues after the first attack, when the chief of police wants to close the beaches. It was a phrase that could have been ripped off for a speech by one of the Republican officials who initially refused to shut down his state’s beaches or insisted on reopening the bars.
Even in the face of the gruesome evidence, Mayor Vaughn decides that the victim had been killed by a fishing boat. He tells the police chief that he’s being too hasty — “You yell ‘shark,’ we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”
The beaches stay open. The shark kills again, its victim, this time, a young boy.
On the dock, the boy’s grieving mother gives the chief of police — the one man who had been trying to do the right thing — a hard slap across his face. “You knew there was a shark out there,” she says. “You knew it was dangerous. But you let people go swimming anyway. You knew all those things. But still my boy is dead now.”
I found myself bracing for a Trumpian response — for the police chief to say that he didn’t take responsibility, or to talk up Amity’s great job numbers, or to point out that most swimmers will not get bitten by a shark, and that almost all young people who do get attacked make complete recoveries. I prepared for fringe theories or culture-war distractions, maybe a rant about how the hippies were the real threat to Amity’s way of life.
But the chief, Martin Brody, doesn’t bluster, doesn’t counterpunch or pass the buck or stage a photo op. When the mayor apologizes after the mother’s outburst, saying, “I’m sorry, Martin. She’s wrong,” Chief Brody responds, “No, she’s not.” His shoulders slump, as if he’s taken on the weight of the mother’s grief and sorrow, and he walks away without another word.
The chastened mayor releases funds for a shark hunt, and the police chief, in the company of a nerdy scientist and a grizzled old salt, goes off to vanquish the underwater enemy. There is tension. There’s tragedy. Finally, there is triumph. The police chief blows up the shark and dog-paddles home.
It was hard not to think about our real-life, real-time horror: a pandemic that continues to disproportionately affect the poor, Black people and Latinos (and that has taken the life of the actress who played that mourning mother in “Jaws”).
Masks have been politicized to the point that donning one is akin to sporting a “Biden for President” bumper sticker on your face. And instead of a leader who steps up to do the right thing, we’ve got a president who delights in divisiveness and wallows in woe-is-me, while too many of his fellow Republicans, loath to cross him, seem to care more about those summer dollars than dead citizens or grieving families. Instead of a boat on the water, we’ve got heads in the sand.
I imagined our country as the first girl to die in every horror movie, the pretty one who falls victim to the monster or the serial killer. The one who is blithely certain of her own invincibility, or maybe just bored with taking precautions. The one who goes down to the basement or up to the attic as the audience screams that she shouldn’t, knowing what will happen to her if she does.
This shouldn’t be so hard. It shouldn’t be so hard for the government to support workers. It shouldn’t be so hard for citizens to stay home as much as possible, to wear a cloth mask, to postpone birthday parties and barbecues. From the Ozarks to Fire Island to the Jersey Shore, we’ve all seen pictures of Americans who won’t deny themselves their summer pleasures, insisting they happen just as they always have.
But how can we be surprised? Our leader is standing knee-deep in the shallows, smiling and beckoning and telling us that the water’s fine.
It’s the leader who initially values capitalism over saving lives.
By Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times
I didn’t recall the real horror of the movie. Or maybe, the last time I saw it, I was too young to understand that the shark was simply doing what a shark is built to do, and that the true villain is not the coldblooded predator — it’s the warm-blooded mayor.
“All I’m saying is that Amity is a summer town — we need summer dollars,” Mayor Larry Vaughn argues after the first attack, when the chief of police wants to close the beaches. It was a phrase that could have been ripped off for a speech by one of the Republican officials who initially refused to shut down his state’s beaches or insisted on reopening the bars.
Even in the face of the gruesome evidence, Mayor Vaughn decides that the victim had been killed by a fishing boat. He tells the police chief that he’s being too hasty — “You yell ‘shark,’ we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”
The beaches stay open. The shark kills again, its victim, this time, a young boy.
On the dock, the boy’s grieving mother gives the chief of police — the one man who had been trying to do the right thing — a hard slap across his face. “You knew there was a shark out there,” she says. “You knew it was dangerous. But you let people go swimming anyway. You knew all those things. But still my boy is dead now.”
I found myself bracing for a Trumpian response — for the police chief to say that he didn’t take responsibility, or to talk up Amity’s great job numbers, or to point out that most swimmers will not get bitten by a shark, and that almost all young people who do get attacked make complete recoveries. I prepared for fringe theories or culture-war distractions, maybe a rant about how the hippies were the real threat to Amity’s way of life.
But the chief, Martin Brody, doesn’t bluster, doesn’t counterpunch or pass the buck or stage a photo op. When the mayor apologizes after the mother’s outburst, saying, “I’m sorry, Martin. She’s wrong,” Chief Brody responds, “No, she’s not.” His shoulders slump, as if he’s taken on the weight of the mother’s grief and sorrow, and he walks away without another word.
The chastened mayor releases funds for a shark hunt, and the police chief, in the company of a nerdy scientist and a grizzled old salt, goes off to vanquish the underwater enemy. There is tension. There’s tragedy. Finally, there is triumph. The police chief blows up the shark and dog-paddles home.
It was hard not to think about our real-life, real-time horror: a pandemic that continues to disproportionately affect the poor, Black people and Latinos (and that has taken the life of the actress who played that mourning mother in “Jaws”).
Masks have been politicized to the point that donning one is akin to sporting a “Biden for President” bumper sticker on your face. And instead of a leader who steps up to do the right thing, we’ve got a president who delights in divisiveness and wallows in woe-is-me, while too many of his fellow Republicans, loath to cross him, seem to care more about those summer dollars than dead citizens or grieving families. Instead of a boat on the water, we’ve got heads in the sand.
I imagined our country as the first girl to die in every horror movie, the pretty one who falls victim to the monster or the serial killer. The one who is blithely certain of her own invincibility, or maybe just bored with taking precautions. The one who goes down to the basement or up to the attic as the audience screams that she shouldn’t, knowing what will happen to her if she does.
This shouldn’t be so hard. It shouldn’t be so hard for the government to support workers. It shouldn’t be so hard for citizens to stay home as much as possible, to wear a cloth mask, to postpone birthday parties and barbecues. From the Ozarks to Fire Island to the Jersey Shore, we’ve all seen pictures of Americans who won’t deny themselves their summer pleasures, insisting they happen just as they always have.
But how can we be surprised? Our leader is standing knee-deep in the shallows, smiling and beckoning and telling us that the water’s fine.
WHAT IF WE TREATED CONFEDERATE SYMBOLS THE WAY WE TREATED THE DEFEATED NAZIS?
By John Semley
Earlier this month, amid America’s confrontation with its racist legacy – which has seen monuments to Jefferson Davis toppled, the Mississippi state flag lowered, Gone With the Wind pulled from HBO’s streaming service, and music groups such as Lady Antebellum and the Dixie Chicks rebranding in an effort to distance themselves from memory of the Confederacy – I came across a tweet that put these headline-grabbing goings-on, and the backlash to them, in perspective: “Trying to imagine a version of WW2 where the Nazis just get pushed into Bavaria and surrender, but keep the swastika on the state flag, slap it on their cars and say stuff like ‘The Third Reich is my heritage.’”
The tweet, by the popular history YouTuber Three Arrows, was tagged with “lol” – as if to drive home just how absurd it would be to see the grandkids of former Nazis puttering around Munich in VWs adorned with swastika bumper stickers, like something out of a pulpy alt-history novel. It’s an idea so sinister as to seem cartoonish, and laughable. But something similar goes on in America all of the time.
In Germany, you won’t hear debates about Nazi statues. As the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, notes, there’s a good reason for that: there aren’t any Nazi statues. The program of denazification began almost immediately after the second world war, established as one of “Four Ds” (along with demilitarization, decentralization and democratization) outlined in the Potsdam agreement of 1945. An Allied order in 1946 declared illegal “any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party”.
Known Nazi party members were sacked from their jobs, and forced into cinemas screening footage of concentration camps. To this day, section 86a of the German criminal code prohibits the “use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations”, the Nazi party chief among them.
America’s post-civil war treatment of the slave-owning Confederate states has proved, in a word, different. Although the Confederacy lost the war, it hasn’t always felt that way for Black southerners. After Union troops departed, Black Americans endured decades of terrorist violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Black paramilitary groups, plus segregation and humiliation under Jim Crow.
After their historic drubbing, white southerners waged skirmishes on new fronts, reframing Confederate troops as valiant heroes in the “War of Yankee Aggression”, and recasting chattel slavery not as an abject moral horror, but a matter of states’ rights. The Confederate battle flag was raised over government buildings, monuments to anti-abolitionists were erected in town squares, and popular entertainments such as Gone With the Wind posited the Confederacy as a noble “lost cause”.
The civil war was followed by more than a century of calculated misremembering, proving the French historian Ernest Renan’s maxim that forgetting is “a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”. This southern memorialization, which unfolded against the backdrop of southern segregation as a means of enshrining the legacy of white supremacy, is itself the sort of “erasure of history” that contemporary apologists drone on about when confronted with the righteous keeling of a statue, or the narrowing availability of an 80-year-old movie most people have already seen.
Drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous
This commemoration morphed, throughout the 20th century, into kitsch. Confederate iconography was embossed on to truck stop baseball caps, covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, and the roofs of souped-up Dodge Chargers. Where neo-Nazism is rightly regarded as a detestable fringe concern, southern pride became a point of acceptable cultural affiliation, like rooting for a given sports team or preferring a certain brand of beer.
Deliberately drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous. In fact, the Confederacy was about upholding the institution of slavery in a nation that pretends to hold the equality of all as self-evident truth.
Looking to Germany for lessons on how to respond to historical crimes is incredibly valuable. As Neiman and others have argued, the process of denazification didn’t happen overnight. Many Germans resisted re-education. A 1952 poll showed two in five West Germans freely admitting they believed their nation would be better without Jews. It wasn’t enough to merely denazify. Germany, and Germans, had to be confronted with their horrors. A culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) emerged to implicate citizens in, and engage them with, their terrible history. German police cadets, for example, are required to visit former death camps, in order to understand first-hand the atrocities of Nazi policing. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig began installing raised stones called Stolpersteine (or “stumbling blocks”) at the shops or last known residences of Nazism’s victims.
Changing public conceptions of historical memory is hard work. But the case of postwar Germany shows that a serious national self-reckoning is not only doable, but worth it. Perhaps, in time, the very idea of a truck ripping around the American south, proudly brandishing a Confederate bumper sticker, will seem so ludicrous as to be laughable.
By John Semley
Earlier this month, amid America’s confrontation with its racist legacy – which has seen monuments to Jefferson Davis toppled, the Mississippi state flag lowered, Gone With the Wind pulled from HBO’s streaming service, and music groups such as Lady Antebellum and the Dixie Chicks rebranding in an effort to distance themselves from memory of the Confederacy – I came across a tweet that put these headline-grabbing goings-on, and the backlash to them, in perspective: “Trying to imagine a version of WW2 where the Nazis just get pushed into Bavaria and surrender, but keep the swastika on the state flag, slap it on their cars and say stuff like ‘The Third Reich is my heritage.’”
The tweet, by the popular history YouTuber Three Arrows, was tagged with “lol” – as if to drive home just how absurd it would be to see the grandkids of former Nazis puttering around Munich in VWs adorned with swastika bumper stickers, like something out of a pulpy alt-history novel. It’s an idea so sinister as to seem cartoonish, and laughable. But something similar goes on in America all of the time.
In Germany, you won’t hear debates about Nazi statues. As the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, notes, there’s a good reason for that: there aren’t any Nazi statues. The program of denazification began almost immediately after the second world war, established as one of “Four Ds” (along with demilitarization, decentralization and democratization) outlined in the Potsdam agreement of 1945. An Allied order in 1946 declared illegal “any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party”.
Known Nazi party members were sacked from their jobs, and forced into cinemas screening footage of concentration camps. To this day, section 86a of the German criminal code prohibits the “use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations”, the Nazi party chief among them.
America’s post-civil war treatment of the slave-owning Confederate states has proved, in a word, different. Although the Confederacy lost the war, it hasn’t always felt that way for Black southerners. After Union troops departed, Black Americans endured decades of terrorist violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Black paramilitary groups, plus segregation and humiliation under Jim Crow.
After their historic drubbing, white southerners waged skirmishes on new fronts, reframing Confederate troops as valiant heroes in the “War of Yankee Aggression”, and recasting chattel slavery not as an abject moral horror, but a matter of states’ rights. The Confederate battle flag was raised over government buildings, monuments to anti-abolitionists were erected in town squares, and popular entertainments such as Gone With the Wind posited the Confederacy as a noble “lost cause”.
The civil war was followed by more than a century of calculated misremembering, proving the French historian Ernest Renan’s maxim that forgetting is “a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”. This southern memorialization, which unfolded against the backdrop of southern segregation as a means of enshrining the legacy of white supremacy, is itself the sort of “erasure of history” that contemporary apologists drone on about when confronted with the righteous keeling of a statue, or the narrowing availability of an 80-year-old movie most people have already seen.
Drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous
This commemoration morphed, throughout the 20th century, into kitsch. Confederate iconography was embossed on to truck stop baseball caps, covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, and the roofs of souped-up Dodge Chargers. Where neo-Nazism is rightly regarded as a detestable fringe concern, southern pride became a point of acceptable cultural affiliation, like rooting for a given sports team or preferring a certain brand of beer.
Deliberately drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous. In fact, the Confederacy was about upholding the institution of slavery in a nation that pretends to hold the equality of all as self-evident truth.
Looking to Germany for lessons on how to respond to historical crimes is incredibly valuable. As Neiman and others have argued, the process of denazification didn’t happen overnight. Many Germans resisted re-education. A 1952 poll showed two in five West Germans freely admitting they believed their nation would be better without Jews. It wasn’t enough to merely denazify. Germany, and Germans, had to be confronted with their horrors. A culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) emerged to implicate citizens in, and engage them with, their terrible history. German police cadets, for example, are required to visit former death camps, in order to understand first-hand the atrocities of Nazi policing. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig began installing raised stones called Stolpersteine (or “stumbling blocks”) at the shops or last known residences of Nazism’s victims.
Changing public conceptions of historical memory is hard work. But the case of postwar Germany shows that a serious national self-reckoning is not only doable, but worth it. Perhaps, in time, the very idea of a truck ripping around the American south, proudly brandishing a Confederate bumper sticker, will seem so ludicrous as to be laughable.
THE U.S. IS LAGGING BEHIND MANY RICH COUNTRIES. AVAILABLE INFORMATION SHOW WHY.
By David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez, The New York Times
The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.
But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.
Why has this happened? There are multiple causes. But one big one is a lack of political power among the bulk of the population.
Government policy and economic forces have combined to make corporations and the wealthy more powerful, and most workers and their families less powerful. These workers receive a smaller share of society’s resources than they once did and often have less control over their lives. Those lives are generally shorter and more likely to be affected by pollution and chronic health problems.
Here, we show you a series of measures — about power, living standards and more — for a variety of countries. Together, they portray the disturbing new version of American exceptionalism.
We’ll start with union membership.
People in labor unions make substantially more money than similar nonunionized workers, academic research shows. And the share of Americans in unions has plummeted from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to about 10 percent today. The rate is even lower — about 6.2 percent — for private-sector workers.
The decline has happened largely because employers have become more aggressive about keeping out unions and government policy has made it easier for them to do so.
Unionization rates in many other countries are higher:
The decline in unionization is one reason that the share of total national income flowing to corporate profits has risen — and the share going to worker pay has declined. The trend is starker in the U.S. than in Europe.
Share of the economy going to worker pay
Higher profits have helped make the United States an outlier on executive pay, too. Although executives’ salaries have risen in most countries, relative to those of workers, in recent decades, the trend is more extreme in the U.S.:
Government policy plays an important role: The minimum wage is higher in other countries than it is in much of the United States. Some states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal standard, but many states in the South — home to large Black populations — have not.
In addition to minimum wage, the United States has done less to combat rising corporate concentration. Large U.S. companies are better able to hold down the wages of workers, who don’t always have good employment options, and are also able to charge higher prices because of less competition.
One example: American consumers pay significantly more for cellphone service than people in many other countries.
Arguably the biggest outlier is the American health care system. Prices for drugs, medical procedures and doctors’ visits are all substantially higher in the United States than in other countries. The U.S. also suffers from bureaucratic inefficiency, because of a complex health care system that spans the private sector, state governments and the federal government.
In all, Americans pay almost twice as much on average for medical care as citizens of other rich countries. And as you may remember from the opening chart in this article, Americans are far from the world’s healthiest people.
Incarceration plays an important role, too. No other wealthy country puts as many people behind bars — and the prison population is disproportionately Black and Latino.
Time in prison casts a long shadow, leaving people with lingering health problems as well as permanently damaging their ability to find decent-paying work. Mass incarceration is a major reason that, even before the pandemic hit, about 30 percent of middle-aged Black men were not working in a typical week. Many of them do not count as unemployed because they are incarcerated or because they have stopped looking for work.
And a final example of how government policy exacerbates the unique inequality in the United States: tax policy.
In some other countries, like France, high-income households still pay more than half of their income in taxes on average. In the U.S., tax rates on the affluent are lower — and have fallen sharply in recent decades.
These trends have combined to increase economic inequality. The middle class and poor receive a smaller share of national income in the U.S. than in much of Europe, while the rich receive a greater share:
If anything, these statistics understate American exceptionalism on inequality, because Americans also work longer hours for their pay than workers in many other places:
The most common way to think about inequality is as an economic story. And it is that. But it is also a story about political power, quality of life and even the amount of time that members of different classes can expect to live.
By David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez, The New York Times
The United States is different. In nearly every other high-income country, people have both become richer over the last three decades and been able to enjoy substantially longer lifespans.
But not in the United States. Even as average incomes have risen, much of the economic gains have gone to the affluent — and life expectancy has risen only three years since 1990. There is no other developed country that has suffered such a stark slowdown in lifespans.
Why has this happened? There are multiple causes. But one big one is a lack of political power among the bulk of the population.
Government policy and economic forces have combined to make corporations and the wealthy more powerful, and most workers and their families less powerful. These workers receive a smaller share of society’s resources than they once did and often have less control over their lives. Those lives are generally shorter and more likely to be affected by pollution and chronic health problems.
Here, we show you a series of measures — about power, living standards and more — for a variety of countries. Together, they portray the disturbing new version of American exceptionalism.
We’ll start with union membership.
People in labor unions make substantially more money than similar nonunionized workers, academic research shows. And the share of Americans in unions has plummeted from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to about 10 percent today. The rate is even lower — about 6.2 percent — for private-sector workers.
The decline has happened largely because employers have become more aggressive about keeping out unions and government policy has made it easier for them to do so.
Unionization rates in many other countries are higher:
The decline in unionization is one reason that the share of total national income flowing to corporate profits has risen — and the share going to worker pay has declined. The trend is starker in the U.S. than in Europe.
Share of the economy going to worker pay
Higher profits have helped make the United States an outlier on executive pay, too. Although executives’ salaries have risen in most countries, relative to those of workers, in recent decades, the trend is more extreme in the U.S.:
Government policy plays an important role: The minimum wage is higher in other countries than it is in much of the United States. Some states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal standard, but many states in the South — home to large Black populations — have not.
In addition to minimum wage, the United States has done less to combat rising corporate concentration. Large U.S. companies are better able to hold down the wages of workers, who don’t always have good employment options, and are also able to charge higher prices because of less competition.
One example: American consumers pay significantly more for cellphone service than people in many other countries.
Arguably the biggest outlier is the American health care system. Prices for drugs, medical procedures and doctors’ visits are all substantially higher in the United States than in other countries. The U.S. also suffers from bureaucratic inefficiency, because of a complex health care system that spans the private sector, state governments and the federal government.
In all, Americans pay almost twice as much on average for medical care as citizens of other rich countries. And as you may remember from the opening chart in this article, Americans are far from the world’s healthiest people.
Incarceration plays an important role, too. No other wealthy country puts as many people behind bars — and the prison population is disproportionately Black and Latino.
Time in prison casts a long shadow, leaving people with lingering health problems as well as permanently damaging their ability to find decent-paying work. Mass incarceration is a major reason that, even before the pandemic hit, about 30 percent of middle-aged Black men were not working in a typical week. Many of them do not count as unemployed because they are incarcerated or because they have stopped looking for work.
And a final example of how government policy exacerbates the unique inequality in the United States: tax policy.
In some other countries, like France, high-income households still pay more than half of their income in taxes on average. In the U.S., tax rates on the affluent are lower — and have fallen sharply in recent decades.
These trends have combined to increase economic inequality. The middle class and poor receive a smaller share of national income in the U.S. than in much of Europe, while the rich receive a greater share:
If anything, these statistics understate American exceptionalism on inequality, because Americans also work longer hours for their pay than workers in many other places:
The most common way to think about inequality is as an economic story. And it is that. But it is also a story about political power, quality of life and even the amount of time that members of different classes can expect to live.
WHY DO THE RICH HAVE SO MUCH POWER?
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
America is, in principle, a democracy, in which every vote counts the same. It’s also a nation in which income inequality has soared, a development that hurts many more people than it helps. So if you didn’t know better, you might have expected to see a political backlash: demands for higher taxes on the rich, more spending on the working class and higher wages.
In reality, however, policy has mostly gone the other way. Tax rates on corporations and high incomes have gone down, unions have been crushed, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s. How is that possible?
The answer is that huge disparities in income and wealth translate into comparable disparities in political influence. To see how this works, let’s look at a fairly recent example: the budgetary Grand Bargain that almost happened in 2011.
At the time, Washington was firmly in the grip of deficit fever. Even though the federal government was able to borrow at historically low interest rates, everyone who mattered seemed to be saying that the budget deficit was the most important issue facing America and that it was essential to rein in spending on Social Security and Medicare.
So the Obama administration offered congressional Republicans a deal: cuts in Social Security and Medicare in return for slightly higher taxes on the wealthy. The deal foundered only because the party refused to accept even a small tax increase.
The question is, who wanted such a deal? Not the American public.
Voters in general weren’t all that worried about budget deficits. While most Americans believed that the deficit should be reduced — they always do — a CBS poll in early 2011 found only 6 percent of the public named the deficit as the most important issue, compared with 51 percent citing the economy and jobs.
Both the Obama administration and Republicans were staking out positions that flew in the face of public desires. A large majority has consistently wanted to see Social Security benefits expanded, not cut. A comparably large majority has consistently said that upper-income Americans pay too little, not too much, in taxes.
So whose interests were actually reflected in the 2011 budget fight? The wealthy.
A groundbreaking study of rich Americans’ policy preferences in 2011 found that the wealthy, unlike voters in general, did prioritize deficit reduction over everything else. They also, in stark contrast with the general public, favored cuts in Social Security and health spending.
And while a few high-profile billionaires like Warren Buffett have called for higher taxes on people like themselves, the reality is that most billionaires are obsessed with cutting taxes, like the estate tax, that only the rich pay.
In other words, in 2011 a Democratic administration went all-in on behalf of a policy concern that only the rich gave priority and failed to reach a deal only because Republicans didn’t want the rich to bear any burden at all.
Why do the wealthy have so much influence over politics?
Campaign contributions, historically dominated by the wealthy, are part of the story. A 2015 Times report found that at that point fewer than 400 families accounted for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign. This matters both directly — politicians who propose big tax increases on the rich can’t expect to see much of their money — and indirectly: Wealthy donors have access to politicians in a way ordinary Americans don’t and play a disproportionate role in shaping policymakers’ worldview.
However, the influence of money on politics goes far beyond campaign contributions. Outright bribery probably isn’t much of a factor , but there are nonetheless major personal financial rewards for political figures who support the interests of the wealthy. Pro-plutocrat politicians who stumble, like Eric Cantor, the former House whip — who famously celebrated Labor Day by honoring business owners — quickly find lucrative positions in the private sector, jobs in right-wing media or well-paid sinecures at conservative think tanks. Do you think there’s a comparable safety net in place for the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar?
And even the issues that the news media discuss often reflect a rich person’s agenda. Advertising dollars explain some of this bias, but a lot of it probably reflects subtler factors, like the (often false) belief that people who’ve made a lot of money have special insight into how the nation as a whole can achieve prosperity.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the fixation on cutting benefits in the early 2010s was the extent to which it was treated not as a controversial position but as the undeniably right thing to do. As Ezra Klein pointed out in The Washington Post at the time: “For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions.”
In a variety of ways, then, America’s wealthy exert huge political influence. Our ideals say that all men are created equal, but in practice a small minority is far more equal than the rest of us.
You don’t want to be too cynical about this. No, America isn’t simply an oligarchy in which the rich always get what they want. In the end, President Barack Obama presided over both the Affordable Care Act, the biggest expansion in government benefits since the 1960s, and a substantial increase in federal taxes on the top 1 percent, to 34 percent from 28 percent.
And no, the parties aren’t equally in the wealthiest Americans’ pocket. Democrats have become increasingly progressive, while the rich dominate the Republican agenda. Donald Trump may have run as a populist, but once in office he reversed much of that Obama tax hike, while trying (but failing, so far) to take away health insurance from as many as 23 million Americans.
But while you shouldn’t be too much of a cynic, it remains true that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy than we like to think. And to tackle inequality, we’ll have to confront unequal political power as well as unequal income and wealth.
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
America is, in principle, a democracy, in which every vote counts the same. It’s also a nation in which income inequality has soared, a development that hurts many more people than it helps. So if you didn’t know better, you might have expected to see a political backlash: demands for higher taxes on the rich, more spending on the working class and higher wages.
In reality, however, policy has mostly gone the other way. Tax rates on corporations and high incomes have gone down, unions have been crushed, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s. How is that possible?
The answer is that huge disparities in income and wealth translate into comparable disparities in political influence. To see how this works, let’s look at a fairly recent example: the budgetary Grand Bargain that almost happened in 2011.
At the time, Washington was firmly in the grip of deficit fever. Even though the federal government was able to borrow at historically low interest rates, everyone who mattered seemed to be saying that the budget deficit was the most important issue facing America and that it was essential to rein in spending on Social Security and Medicare.
So the Obama administration offered congressional Republicans a deal: cuts in Social Security and Medicare in return for slightly higher taxes on the wealthy. The deal foundered only because the party refused to accept even a small tax increase.
The question is, who wanted such a deal? Not the American public.
Voters in general weren’t all that worried about budget deficits. While most Americans believed that the deficit should be reduced — they always do — a CBS poll in early 2011 found only 6 percent of the public named the deficit as the most important issue, compared with 51 percent citing the economy and jobs.
Both the Obama administration and Republicans were staking out positions that flew in the face of public desires. A large majority has consistently wanted to see Social Security benefits expanded, not cut. A comparably large majority has consistently said that upper-income Americans pay too little, not too much, in taxes.
So whose interests were actually reflected in the 2011 budget fight? The wealthy.
A groundbreaking study of rich Americans’ policy preferences in 2011 found that the wealthy, unlike voters in general, did prioritize deficit reduction over everything else. They also, in stark contrast with the general public, favored cuts in Social Security and health spending.
And while a few high-profile billionaires like Warren Buffett have called for higher taxes on people like themselves, the reality is that most billionaires are obsessed with cutting taxes, like the estate tax, that only the rich pay.
In other words, in 2011 a Democratic administration went all-in on behalf of a policy concern that only the rich gave priority and failed to reach a deal only because Republicans didn’t want the rich to bear any burden at all.
Why do the wealthy have so much influence over politics?
Campaign contributions, historically dominated by the wealthy, are part of the story. A 2015 Times report found that at that point fewer than 400 families accounted for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign. This matters both directly — politicians who propose big tax increases on the rich can’t expect to see much of their money — and indirectly: Wealthy donors have access to politicians in a way ordinary Americans don’t and play a disproportionate role in shaping policymakers’ worldview.
However, the influence of money on politics goes far beyond campaign contributions. Outright bribery probably isn’t much of a factor , but there are nonetheless major personal financial rewards for political figures who support the interests of the wealthy. Pro-plutocrat politicians who stumble, like Eric Cantor, the former House whip — who famously celebrated Labor Day by honoring business owners — quickly find lucrative positions in the private sector, jobs in right-wing media or well-paid sinecures at conservative think tanks. Do you think there’s a comparable safety net in place for the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar?
And even the issues that the news media discuss often reflect a rich person’s agenda. Advertising dollars explain some of this bias, but a lot of it probably reflects subtler factors, like the (often false) belief that people who’ve made a lot of money have special insight into how the nation as a whole can achieve prosperity.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the fixation on cutting benefits in the early 2010s was the extent to which it was treated not as a controversial position but as the undeniably right thing to do. As Ezra Klein pointed out in The Washington Post at the time: “For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions.”
In a variety of ways, then, America’s wealthy exert huge political influence. Our ideals say that all men are created equal, but in practice a small minority is far more equal than the rest of us.
You don’t want to be too cynical about this. No, America isn’t simply an oligarchy in which the rich always get what they want. In the end, President Barack Obama presided over both the Affordable Care Act, the biggest expansion in government benefits since the 1960s, and a substantial increase in federal taxes on the top 1 percent, to 34 percent from 28 percent.
And no, the parties aren’t equally in the wealthiest Americans’ pocket. Democrats have become increasingly progressive, while the rich dominate the Republican agenda. Donald Trump may have run as a populist, but once in office he reversed much of that Obama tax hike, while trying (but failing, so far) to take away health insurance from as many as 23 million Americans.
But while you shouldn’t be too much of a cynic, it remains true that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy than we like to think. And to tackle inequality, we’ll have to confront unequal political power as well as unequal income and wealth.
TAX THE RICH AND THEIR HEIRS
How to tax inheritances more fairly.
By Lily Batchelder, professor at New York University School of Law.
A massive transfer of wealth is underway and will accelerate in the coming years. Baby boomers and the generation that preceded them currently own $84 trillion, or 81 percent of all U.S. household wealth — wealth that will before long be inherited by their children and other beneficiaries.
This extraordinary transfer of resources will further cement the economic inequality that plagues the United States because this wealth is tightly concentrated in the hands of a few. And it will be passed on as taxes on such transfers are at historic lows.
Among high-income countries, the United States has one of the lowest levels of intergenerational economic mobility, meaning a child’s economic future is heavily influenced by his or her parents’ income. We have the second-highest level of income inequality after taxes and government transfers, and the highest level of wealth inequality. These disparities are sharply skewed by race. Median black household wealth is only 9 percent that of white households, a racial wealth gap that is even larger than in 1968. New research suggests the pandemic will further increase wealth inequality, as the affluent save more and the poor earn less.
Effectively addressing these systemic inequalities will require many things. But increasing the taxation of inheritances is one vital component.
This year, Americans will inherit about $765 billion. People who were already rich will inherit a lot more than people who weren’t wealthy. So will white households; they are twice as likely as black households to receive an inheritance, and receiving an inheritance is associated with an increase in wealth that is 26 times larger for white families than for black families. (This accounting of inheritances includes gifts and bequests, other than those to spouses or to support minor children.)
Roughly 40 percent of all household wealth stems from inheritances. This means that 40 percent of why some Americans are extraordinarily well off has nothing to do with smarts, hard work, frugality, lucky gambles or entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is simply because they were born to rich parents.
Inheritances compound over generations, one reason societies often choose to tax them as a way to combat rising inequality and level the playing field. Our tax system has always been one of our most potent tools for expressing and acting upon our values. But in this area, it is failing and only getting worse.
Consider a wealthy couple who bequeaths $50 million to their son. The couple will probably not have paid income or payroll tax on a large share of the bequest, thanks to a provision called stepped-up basis, which exempts gains on bequeathed assets from tax. Their son can exclude the entire $50 million he receives from his income and payroll tax returns.
The estate tax was meant to partially correct for these omissions. Indeed, it is the only tax that will apply to the son’s inheritance. But over time Congress has hollowed out the estate tax and its cousins, most recently in the 2017 tax law. Today, the first $23 million that a couple transfers is entirely exempt from the estate tax. Amounts above that threshold are taxed only at a 40 percent rate.
As a result, the effective tax rate on this lucky heir’s $50 million inheritance will only be 21 percent. And that’s if his parents didn’t use any estate-tax planning techniques to reduce his tax burden. If they did, his tax rate could easily approach zero.
Some will argue that this example ignores any income and payroll tax the wealthy parents paid when they originally earned the $50 million. But if the couple paid their personal chef’s wages out of after-tax income, we wouldn’t think their personal chef should get credit for the taxes they paid. Similarly, we should ignore any income or payroll tax the couple paid when considering how much their son should contribute to the costs of government.
Combining the effects of estate, income and payroll taxes, the average federal tax rate on income in the form of inheritances is a minuscule one-seventh of the average tax rate on income from saving and good old-fashioned hard work.
A fairer tax system would tax inheritances at higher rates than income from working, not lower. Someone who inherits millions is better off than someone who had to work for their millions because, let’s face it, most of us would rather not work. Moreover, wealthy heirs are better off because typically they can earn much higher salaries if they do work, benefiting from the education, connections and safety net available to those from well-off families.
A large body of research also finds that wealth transfer taxes do relatively little to reduce the amount of work, saving and entrepreneurship by donors. Meanwhile, such taxes increase work by heirs and charitable giving. This research suggests that the optimal tax rate on very large inheritances is between 60 percent and 80 percent.
Americans agree that inheritances should be taxed relatively heavily. According to one study, they support taxing wealth from inheritances at almost four times the tax rate on wealth from savings.
There are plenty of sensible options for increasing taxes on inheritances. Returning the estate tax to its 2009 levels would raise $270 billion over the next decade. Further increasing the rate so that it rises to 65 percent on estates over $1 billion would raise an additional $100 billion.
An even better approach would be to replace the estate tax with an inheritance tax. Under an inheritance tax, heirs would simply pay income and payroll taxes on their inheritance above a large exemption, just as others do on their wages.
If an inheritance tax exempted the first $1 million received over one’s lifetime and applied the highest income and payroll tax rates to amounts above that threshold, it would raise $790 billion over the next decade. Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, is drafting a proposal along these lines, and some former presidential candidates including Julián Castro endorsed the idea. Under this type of plan, only 0.08 percent of households would owe the tax each year. The revenue could be used to invest in children who aren’t lucky enough to inherit millions, whether through universal pre-K, paid parental leave or a fully refundable child tax credit.
Regardless of whether we shift to an inheritance tax, we should tax accrued gains on large bequests. This would raise $450 billion when combined with other reforms. And we should reverse the deep cuts to the I.R.S. enforcement budget, which have resulted in a 61 percent decline in audits of millionaires since 2010.
Finally, we should reform the rules governing transfers through trusts and similar devices, which the wealthy exploit to slash their tax liability. In one strategy, people put easy-to-sell assets into a partnership to artificially deflate the assets’ value. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, these and similar strategies can reduce the value of transferred assets by 15 percent to 60 percent or more. The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson used a different strategy involving trusts to avoid $2.8 billion in estate and gift taxes between 2010 and 2013.
Others create trusts to benefit their descendants for centuries. The beneficiaries of such dynastic trusts should have to pay tax on their inheritances. While the total tax revenue at stake is unclear, trusts most likely hold trillions of dollars in assets.
President Franklin Roosevelt said “inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our government.” The same is true today.
We know how to tax inheritances more fairly. We need to act before the massive wealth transfers on the horizon further entrench a hereditary economic elite.
How to tax inheritances more fairly.
By Lily Batchelder, professor at New York University School of Law.
A massive transfer of wealth is underway and will accelerate in the coming years. Baby boomers and the generation that preceded them currently own $84 trillion, or 81 percent of all U.S. household wealth — wealth that will before long be inherited by their children and other beneficiaries.
This extraordinary transfer of resources will further cement the economic inequality that plagues the United States because this wealth is tightly concentrated in the hands of a few. And it will be passed on as taxes on such transfers are at historic lows.
Among high-income countries, the United States has one of the lowest levels of intergenerational economic mobility, meaning a child’s economic future is heavily influenced by his or her parents’ income. We have the second-highest level of income inequality after taxes and government transfers, and the highest level of wealth inequality. These disparities are sharply skewed by race. Median black household wealth is only 9 percent that of white households, a racial wealth gap that is even larger than in 1968. New research suggests the pandemic will further increase wealth inequality, as the affluent save more and the poor earn less.
Effectively addressing these systemic inequalities will require many things. But increasing the taxation of inheritances is one vital component.
This year, Americans will inherit about $765 billion. People who were already rich will inherit a lot more than people who weren’t wealthy. So will white households; they are twice as likely as black households to receive an inheritance, and receiving an inheritance is associated with an increase in wealth that is 26 times larger for white families than for black families. (This accounting of inheritances includes gifts and bequests, other than those to spouses or to support minor children.)
Roughly 40 percent of all household wealth stems from inheritances. This means that 40 percent of why some Americans are extraordinarily well off has nothing to do with smarts, hard work, frugality, lucky gambles or entrepreneurial ingenuity. It is simply because they were born to rich parents.
Inheritances compound over generations, one reason societies often choose to tax them as a way to combat rising inequality and level the playing field. Our tax system has always been one of our most potent tools for expressing and acting upon our values. But in this area, it is failing and only getting worse.
Consider a wealthy couple who bequeaths $50 million to their son. The couple will probably not have paid income or payroll tax on a large share of the bequest, thanks to a provision called stepped-up basis, which exempts gains on bequeathed assets from tax. Their son can exclude the entire $50 million he receives from his income and payroll tax returns.
The estate tax was meant to partially correct for these omissions. Indeed, it is the only tax that will apply to the son’s inheritance. But over time Congress has hollowed out the estate tax and its cousins, most recently in the 2017 tax law. Today, the first $23 million that a couple transfers is entirely exempt from the estate tax. Amounts above that threshold are taxed only at a 40 percent rate.
As a result, the effective tax rate on this lucky heir’s $50 million inheritance will only be 21 percent. And that’s if his parents didn’t use any estate-tax planning techniques to reduce his tax burden. If they did, his tax rate could easily approach zero.
Some will argue that this example ignores any income and payroll tax the wealthy parents paid when they originally earned the $50 million. But if the couple paid their personal chef’s wages out of after-tax income, we wouldn’t think their personal chef should get credit for the taxes they paid. Similarly, we should ignore any income or payroll tax the couple paid when considering how much their son should contribute to the costs of government.
Combining the effects of estate, income and payroll taxes, the average federal tax rate on income in the form of inheritances is a minuscule one-seventh of the average tax rate on income from saving and good old-fashioned hard work.
A fairer tax system would tax inheritances at higher rates than income from working, not lower. Someone who inherits millions is better off than someone who had to work for their millions because, let’s face it, most of us would rather not work. Moreover, wealthy heirs are better off because typically they can earn much higher salaries if they do work, benefiting from the education, connections and safety net available to those from well-off families.
A large body of research also finds that wealth transfer taxes do relatively little to reduce the amount of work, saving and entrepreneurship by donors. Meanwhile, such taxes increase work by heirs and charitable giving. This research suggests that the optimal tax rate on very large inheritances is between 60 percent and 80 percent.
Americans agree that inheritances should be taxed relatively heavily. According to one study, they support taxing wealth from inheritances at almost four times the tax rate on wealth from savings.
There are plenty of sensible options for increasing taxes on inheritances. Returning the estate tax to its 2009 levels would raise $270 billion over the next decade. Further increasing the rate so that it rises to 65 percent on estates over $1 billion would raise an additional $100 billion.
An even better approach would be to replace the estate tax with an inheritance tax. Under an inheritance tax, heirs would simply pay income and payroll taxes on their inheritance above a large exemption, just as others do on their wages.
If an inheritance tax exempted the first $1 million received over one’s lifetime and applied the highest income and payroll tax rates to amounts above that threshold, it would raise $790 billion over the next decade. Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, is drafting a proposal along these lines, and some former presidential candidates including Julián Castro endorsed the idea. Under this type of plan, only 0.08 percent of households would owe the tax each year. The revenue could be used to invest in children who aren’t lucky enough to inherit millions, whether through universal pre-K, paid parental leave or a fully refundable child tax credit.
Regardless of whether we shift to an inheritance tax, we should tax accrued gains on large bequests. This would raise $450 billion when combined with other reforms. And we should reverse the deep cuts to the I.R.S. enforcement budget, which have resulted in a 61 percent decline in audits of millionaires since 2010.
Finally, we should reform the rules governing transfers through trusts and similar devices, which the wealthy exploit to slash their tax liability. In one strategy, people put easy-to-sell assets into a partnership to artificially deflate the assets’ value. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, these and similar strategies can reduce the value of transferred assets by 15 percent to 60 percent or more. The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson used a different strategy involving trusts to avoid $2.8 billion in estate and gift taxes between 2010 and 2013.
Others create trusts to benefit their descendants for centuries. The beneficiaries of such dynastic trusts should have to pay tax on their inheritances. While the total tax revenue at stake is unclear, trusts most likely hold trillions of dollars in assets.
President Franklin Roosevelt said “inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our government.” The same is true today.
We know how to tax inheritances more fairly. We need to act before the massive wealth transfers on the horizon further entrench a hereditary economic elite.
THE JOBS WE NEED
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Over the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power, manifest in their wages, benefits and working conditions. The annual economic output of the United States has almost tripled, but, with the help of policymakers from both political parties, the wealthy hoarded the fruits.
In the nation’s slaughterhouses, the average worker in 1982 made $24 an hour in inflation-adjusted dollars, or $50,000 a year. Today the average meatpacker processes significantly more meat — and makes less than $14 an hour.
The hundreds of thousands of home health care aides, often female, often minorities, who care for a nation of aging baby boomers rarely receive paid time to care for their own families.
Even in the high-flying technology sector, companies have found ways to leave their workers behind. More than half of the people who work for Google do not actually work for Google. They are classified as contractors, which means they do not need to be treated as employees.
Picture the nation as a pirate crew: In recent decades, the owners of the ship have gradually claimed a larger share of booty at the expense of the crew. The annual sum that has shifted from workers to owners now tops $1 trillion.
Or consider the power shift from the perspective of an individual worker. If income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, every American worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a richer person in the top 10 percent.
American workers need a raise. But it is not enough to transfer wealth from the rich to the desperate. In confronting the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that a sustainable improvement in the quality of most American lives required an overhaul of the institutions of government.
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said in 1936. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
Now as then, the profound inequities of American life are the result of laws written at the behest of the wealthy and public institutions managed in their interest. Now as then, the nation’s economic problems are rooted in political problems. And now as then, the revival of broad prosperity — and the stability of American democracy — require the imposition of limits on the political influence of the wealthy. It requires the government to serve the interests of the governed.
Americans especially need to confront the fact that minorities are disproportionately the victims of economic inequality — the people most often denied the dignity of a decent wage. That inequity is the result of historic and continuing racism, and it should be addressed with the same sense of fierce urgency that has motivated the wave of protests against overt displays of racism.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a civil-rights leader who emphasizes the foundational importance of economic justice, has pointed to the constitution that North Carolina adopted after the Civil War. The document affirms the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But African-Americans were among the state’s legislators for the first time, and the former slaves got another principle enshrined as well: that workers are entitled to “the fruits of their own labor.” They understood that economic security makes other freedoms meaningful.
It is time to ensure that all Americans can share in the nation’s prosperity.
In February 1970, student protesters broke into a Bank of America branch near the University of California, Santa Barbara. They scattered the bank’s files and pushed a burning dumpster into the lobby, setting the building on fire.
One protester explained, “It was the biggest capitalist thing around.”
California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, condemning the protesters as “cowardly little bums,” sent in the National Guard. For Reagan and others, the bank fire was more than an isolated act of vandalism. Lewis F. Powell, a prominent corporate lawyer, described it as part of a larger assault on the business of America in a 1971 memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Powell listed threats including Ralph Nader’s campaign for consumer safety regulations, the rise of the environmental movement and the expansion of social welfare programs. Warning that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late,” he urged businesses to fight.
Corporations began to invest in politics on an unprecedented scale. The beer magnate Joseph Coors said Powell’s memo prompted him to create the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that greatly influenced Reagan’s presidential policy agenda. The National Association of Manufacturers moved to Washington from New York. Blue chips including General Electric, Exxon and IBM funded a “boot camp” where economists lectured federal judges on free enterprise. By 1990, 40 percent of the judiciary had been re-educated.
Powell continued his corporate advocacy as a member of the Supreme Court, which he joined in 1972, writing important decisions removing restraints on corporate concentration and campaign spending.
The counterrevolutionaries embraced a radical view of the role of corporations: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” as the economist Milton Friedman wrote in an influential 1970 essay in The New York Times Magazine.
General Electric, the quintessential American industrial conglomerate, had boasted in a 1953 report that it paid a lot of money in federal taxes.
It also boasted about its payments to suppliers, its spending on wages and benefits and its investments in long-term research.
The report was explicit: The company’s income was shared among “those whose services of various kinds made this output possible.” GE understood its success as intertwined with the health of the government, the prosperity of its workforce and the growth of the U.S. economy.
Under Jack Welch, GE’s chairman from 1981 to 2001, the company’s primary objective shifted from making light bulbs to making money. There was no more boasting about paying taxes.
During the first three years of Mr. Welch’s tenure, G.E. recorded $6.5 billion in profits and didn’t pay the federal government a single penny in corporate income taxes. Instead of boasting about paying workers, Mr. Welch boasted about layoffs.
This unapologetic pursuit of profit reached new heights with the deregulation of financial markets.
Lending surged as the federal government lifted strict limits on interest rates and on foreign investment in the United States. Investors bought companies and squeezed them like lemons, while surviving firms scrambled to keep shareholders happy. In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission — led by a Wall Street banker for the first time since the Great Depression — provided a new way for corporations to shovel money to shareholders by voting to let companies buy back shares of their own stock.
Companies also began to compensate executives primarily with options to purchase stock. The chief executives of large American corporations made about 20 times more than the median worker at those companies in the mid-1960s. By 2018, the gap was some 278 times.
Meanwhile, the union movement declined, removing an important counterweight to corporate power. Unions lost traction partly under the weight of their own shortcomings, including endemic corruption and a focus on preserving employment in declining industries rather than expanding membership in growing industries.
Companies also became more militant in their opposition to unions. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell University, surveyed workers who had participated in unionization drives between 1999 and 2003 and found 57 percent of their employers had threatened to close the business if a union was formed; 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits; and 34 percent fired workers who supported unionization.
To sustain the goals of the private sector at the expense of the public interest, corporations poured money into lobbying. They told policymakers that the decline in the fortunes of American workers was the tough-but-fair result of market forces.
“People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” John Snow, an economist then serving as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, explained in 2006. On this theory, thanks to new technologies and increased foreign competition, most Americans just weren’t worth what they used to be.
Politicians didn’t pay much attention to the flaws in that logic: that U.S. workers have fared more poorly than those in other nations, and that wage growth also has lagged far behind the rising value of the average worker’s output. In a recent study, the Harvard economists Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers tied those trends to the shift in political power from workers to employers.
Wages are substantially determined by a tug of war between workers and employers and, with the help of government, employers have been winning. The hostility of the Republican Party was nothing new, but Democrats also parted ways with workers. As Americans moved from thinking of themselves primarily as workers to thinking of themselves primarily as consumers, the Democratic Party recast itself.
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off,” said Alfred Kahn, an economic adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.”
Kahn and other economists insisted that reducing union wages would benefit everyone else. And as unions faded, the government demurred from championing the rights of workers. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage peaked in 1968; it’s been falling ever since. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employers illegally deprive workers of more than $50 billion in wages each year by underpaying them or requiring unpaid work; violators are rarely punished.
Workers could track the loss of power in their paychecks: Weekly wages have stagnated since the late 1970s. Newer employers, like mobile phone companies, simply refused to treat workers in the same way as older employers like the landline telephone companies. And old-line companies that survived, like the heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, gradually forced workers to accept less compensation.
“Working on the railroad is a mentally taxing and challenging job; I would say it has gotten harder and the compensation is now less than it once was,” said Daniel Lyon, a 63-year-old locomotive engineer from Cheyenne, Wyo. “And the cost of everything has gone up all these years.”
Employers also took advantage of the growing number of women in the work force. As the share of female workers in a given industry increased, wages fell for employees of both sexes.
Over the past decade, as the gilded class enjoyed the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in American history, many middle- and lower-income Americans borrowed to maintain their standard of living. Household debt as a share of the economy has roughly doubled since 1980. Many less affluent Americans effectively are paying wealthier Americans for the money that they once were paid in wages.
In recent months, the government has reinforced those patterns, responding to the coronavirus pandemic by pumping into the economy trillions of dollars aimed mostly at preserving wealth rather than jobs. The government has backstopped corporate borrowing while allowing companies to lay off millions of workers. As a result, stock prices have soared even as people stand in long lines at unemployment offices and food pantries.
And those who waited longest for new opportunities after the 2008 financial crisis have often been among the first to lose their jobs. Black people and women have been especially hard-hit. Astonishingly, just 54 percent of black men in America were employed in May, up slightly from a modern low of 53 percent in April.
The coronavirus recession has driven unemployment in America to the highest levels since the Great Depression. For many workers, for many years to come, the limits of the political horizon may seem to be defined by the bitter truth that a poorly paid job is better than none.
Yet this is the moment to insist that workers deserve more.
The nation has ample resources to ensure that every worker is paid enough to afford housing, food and other necessities of daily life. Anything less is intolerable. Yet in 2017, more than 17 million workers — disproportionately minorities and women — labored for wages too meager to lift their households above the federal poverty line.
Many workers similarly are deprived of benefits that federal law ought to guarantee. Millions lack affordable health insurance.
Many large employers, particularly in the restaurant and retail sectors, do not provide paid sick leave to all their workers, a refusal that is not only callous, but has endangered workers and customers during the pandemic.
The United States is the only developed democracy that does not require companies to provide paid time off for workers to care for a baby or a dying parent.
When people are deprived of means and opportunity, society is deprived of their potential contributions.
In June 1933, President Roosevelt called on employers to embrace an “industrial covenant” — a commitment to provide “living wages and sustained employment.” He argued this was greatly in the interest of industry, because well-paid workers would become customers, too.
Almost a century later, employers continue to resist that basic logic, seeking short-term savings at the expense of their own long-term prosperity.
Change is possible. A government more inclined to help workers would have ample opportunity. But as in the early 1930s, political change must proceed economic change. For the voices of workers to be heard, the influence of the wealthy must be curbed.
The power of the wealthy also has been amplified by the willingness of many Americans to accept cheap goods as a substitute for good jobs. A more equitable society requires a willingness to pay a little more for the burger or the bicycle — and for the welfare of the Americans who make and sell those products.
Americans need robust minimum standards for employee compensation and benefits, and the revitalization of institutions to safeguard those guarantees. The federal minimum wage needs to be raised to $15 an hour, with regular adjustments for inflation. Corporations have long warned that raising the minimum, now $7.25 an hour, will force companies to get rid of workers.
But a growing number of state and local governments have made the leap, with no evidence of dire consequences. If McDonald’s can turn a profit in Denmark, where even the most junior workers earn the equivalent of more than $20 an hour, it can turn a profit paying $15 an hour in America.
Lyndon Johnson fought for the creation of a federal minimum wage as a first-term congressman in 1938. Three decades later, as president, he signed an increase in the minimum wage to what remains the highest level on record, after adjusting for inflation.
The purpose, Johnson said, was “to bring a larger piece of this country’s prosperity, and a greater share of personal dignity, to millions of our workers, their wives and their children. And for me, frankly, that is what being president is all about.”
Americans also need the government to restrain the power of corporations. The dominance of a few large companies in a growing number of industries limits wage growth because workers have fewer alternatives, a problem that could be checked by a revival of antitrust enforcement. Companies also have made a mockery of legal protections for employees by classifying a growing share of workers as contractors, a farce embodied by Uber’s fierce insistence that Uber drivers are not Uber drivers.
The government can also make it easier for workers to switch jobs, which is often the best route upward. Ensuring that workers are not dependent on employers for affordable health insurance would make a big difference.
The government also should prohibit noncompete clauses, which impose contractual limitations on job-hopping. Once reserved for executives and other highly paid employees, the practice has become widespread, binding an estimated 30 million workers. One measure of the madness: A recent survey found 30 percent of the nation’s hair salons require noncompete clauses.
There are signs that some corporate leaders recognize the need for change. The Business Roundtable, a trade group for some of the nation’s largest companies, issued a new version of its mission statement last year acknowledging that corporations have responsibilities beyond making money. It is a purely symbolic gesture, but it points in the necessary direction.
Policymakers can encourage that new direction, for example by reversing the legalization of share buybacks and policing the classification of workers as independent contractors. And workers who want to join unions should be able to do so without the fear of reprisals.
The jobs that Americans do will continue to change as technology improves and tastes drift. But the need to work will not change, nor will the basic imperative to ensure that workers are compensated fairly and treated with dignity.
We live in an era of profits without broad prosperity, but the power to rewrite the rules of the market is in our hands. In 2016, Dr. Barber was arrested in Durham, N.C., while protesting for a $15 minimum wage. He said that he was pursuing the fulfillment of the language written into the state’s constitution by freed slaves more than 150 years ago.
The injustice remains. So does the opportunity.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
Over the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power, manifest in their wages, benefits and working conditions. The annual economic output of the United States has almost tripled, but, with the help of policymakers from both political parties, the wealthy hoarded the fruits.
In the nation’s slaughterhouses, the average worker in 1982 made $24 an hour in inflation-adjusted dollars, or $50,000 a year. Today the average meatpacker processes significantly more meat — and makes less than $14 an hour.
The hundreds of thousands of home health care aides, often female, often minorities, who care for a nation of aging baby boomers rarely receive paid time to care for their own families.
Even in the high-flying technology sector, companies have found ways to leave their workers behind. More than half of the people who work for Google do not actually work for Google. They are classified as contractors, which means they do not need to be treated as employees.
Picture the nation as a pirate crew: In recent decades, the owners of the ship have gradually claimed a larger share of booty at the expense of the crew. The annual sum that has shifted from workers to owners now tops $1 trillion.
Or consider the power shift from the perspective of an individual worker. If income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year, on average. In effect, every American worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a richer person in the top 10 percent.
American workers need a raise. But it is not enough to transfer wealth from the rich to the desperate. In confronting the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that a sustainable improvement in the quality of most American lives required an overhaul of the institutions of government.
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt said in 1936. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
Now as then, the profound inequities of American life are the result of laws written at the behest of the wealthy and public institutions managed in their interest. Now as then, the nation’s economic problems are rooted in political problems. And now as then, the revival of broad prosperity — and the stability of American democracy — require the imposition of limits on the political influence of the wealthy. It requires the government to serve the interests of the governed.
Americans especially need to confront the fact that minorities are disproportionately the victims of economic inequality — the people most often denied the dignity of a decent wage. That inequity is the result of historic and continuing racism, and it should be addressed with the same sense of fierce urgency that has motivated the wave of protests against overt displays of racism.
The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a civil-rights leader who emphasizes the foundational importance of economic justice, has pointed to the constitution that North Carolina adopted after the Civil War. The document affirms the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But African-Americans were among the state’s legislators for the first time, and the former slaves got another principle enshrined as well: that workers are entitled to “the fruits of their own labor.” They understood that economic security makes other freedoms meaningful.
It is time to ensure that all Americans can share in the nation’s prosperity.
In February 1970, student protesters broke into a Bank of America branch near the University of California, Santa Barbara. They scattered the bank’s files and pushed a burning dumpster into the lobby, setting the building on fire.
One protester explained, “It was the biggest capitalist thing around.”
California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, condemning the protesters as “cowardly little bums,” sent in the National Guard. For Reagan and others, the bank fire was more than an isolated act of vandalism. Lewis F. Powell, a prominent corporate lawyer, described it as part of a larger assault on the business of America in a 1971 memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Powell listed threats including Ralph Nader’s campaign for consumer safety regulations, the rise of the environmental movement and the expansion of social welfare programs. Warning that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late,” he urged businesses to fight.
Corporations began to invest in politics on an unprecedented scale. The beer magnate Joseph Coors said Powell’s memo prompted him to create the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that greatly influenced Reagan’s presidential policy agenda. The National Association of Manufacturers moved to Washington from New York. Blue chips including General Electric, Exxon and IBM funded a “boot camp” where economists lectured federal judges on free enterprise. By 1990, 40 percent of the judiciary had been re-educated.
Powell continued his corporate advocacy as a member of the Supreme Court, which he joined in 1972, writing important decisions removing restraints on corporate concentration and campaign spending.
The counterrevolutionaries embraced a radical view of the role of corporations: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” as the economist Milton Friedman wrote in an influential 1970 essay in The New York Times Magazine.
General Electric, the quintessential American industrial conglomerate, had boasted in a 1953 report that it paid a lot of money in federal taxes.
It also boasted about its payments to suppliers, its spending on wages and benefits and its investments in long-term research.
The report was explicit: The company’s income was shared among “those whose services of various kinds made this output possible.” GE understood its success as intertwined with the health of the government, the prosperity of its workforce and the growth of the U.S. economy.
Under Jack Welch, GE’s chairman from 1981 to 2001, the company’s primary objective shifted from making light bulbs to making money. There was no more boasting about paying taxes.
During the first three years of Mr. Welch’s tenure, G.E. recorded $6.5 billion in profits and didn’t pay the federal government a single penny in corporate income taxes. Instead of boasting about paying workers, Mr. Welch boasted about layoffs.
This unapologetic pursuit of profit reached new heights with the deregulation of financial markets.
Lending surged as the federal government lifted strict limits on interest rates and on foreign investment in the United States. Investors bought companies and squeezed them like lemons, while surviving firms scrambled to keep shareholders happy. In 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission — led by a Wall Street banker for the first time since the Great Depression — provided a new way for corporations to shovel money to shareholders by voting to let companies buy back shares of their own stock.
Companies also began to compensate executives primarily with options to purchase stock. The chief executives of large American corporations made about 20 times more than the median worker at those companies in the mid-1960s. By 2018, the gap was some 278 times.
Meanwhile, the union movement declined, removing an important counterweight to corporate power. Unions lost traction partly under the weight of their own shortcomings, including endemic corruption and a focus on preserving employment in declining industries rather than expanding membership in growing industries.
Companies also became more militant in their opposition to unions. Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at Cornell University, surveyed workers who had participated in unionization drives between 1999 and 2003 and found 57 percent of their employers had threatened to close the business if a union was formed; 47 percent threatened to cut wages or benefits; and 34 percent fired workers who supported unionization.
To sustain the goals of the private sector at the expense of the public interest, corporations poured money into lobbying. They told policymakers that the decline in the fortunes of American workers was the tough-but-fair result of market forces.
“People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise,” John Snow, an economist then serving as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, explained in 2006. On this theory, thanks to new technologies and increased foreign competition, most Americans just weren’t worth what they used to be.
Politicians didn’t pay much attention to the flaws in that logic: that U.S. workers have fared more poorly than those in other nations, and that wage growth also has lagged far behind the rising value of the average worker’s output. In a recent study, the Harvard economists Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers tied those trends to the shift in political power from workers to employers.
Wages are substantially determined by a tug of war between workers and employers and, with the help of government, employers have been winning. The hostility of the Republican Party was nothing new, but Democrats also parted ways with workers. As Americans moved from thinking of themselves primarily as workers to thinking of themselves primarily as consumers, the Democratic Party recast itself.
“I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off,” said Alfred Kahn, an economic adviser to President Jimmy Carter. “I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.”
Kahn and other economists insisted that reducing union wages would benefit everyone else. And as unions faded, the government demurred from championing the rights of workers. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage peaked in 1968; it’s been falling ever since. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employers illegally deprive workers of more than $50 billion in wages each year by underpaying them or requiring unpaid work; violators are rarely punished.
Workers could track the loss of power in their paychecks: Weekly wages have stagnated since the late 1970s. Newer employers, like mobile phone companies, simply refused to treat workers in the same way as older employers like the landline telephone companies. And old-line companies that survived, like the heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, gradually forced workers to accept less compensation.
“Working on the railroad is a mentally taxing and challenging job; I would say it has gotten harder and the compensation is now less than it once was,” said Daniel Lyon, a 63-year-old locomotive engineer from Cheyenne, Wyo. “And the cost of everything has gone up all these years.”
Employers also took advantage of the growing number of women in the work force. As the share of female workers in a given industry increased, wages fell for employees of both sexes.
Over the past decade, as the gilded class enjoyed the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in American history, many middle- and lower-income Americans borrowed to maintain their standard of living. Household debt as a share of the economy has roughly doubled since 1980. Many less affluent Americans effectively are paying wealthier Americans for the money that they once were paid in wages.
In recent months, the government has reinforced those patterns, responding to the coronavirus pandemic by pumping into the economy trillions of dollars aimed mostly at preserving wealth rather than jobs. The government has backstopped corporate borrowing while allowing companies to lay off millions of workers. As a result, stock prices have soared even as people stand in long lines at unemployment offices and food pantries.
And those who waited longest for new opportunities after the 2008 financial crisis have often been among the first to lose their jobs. Black people and women have been especially hard-hit. Astonishingly, just 54 percent of black men in America were employed in May, up slightly from a modern low of 53 percent in April.
The coronavirus recession has driven unemployment in America to the highest levels since the Great Depression. For many workers, for many years to come, the limits of the political horizon may seem to be defined by the bitter truth that a poorly paid job is better than none.
Yet this is the moment to insist that workers deserve more.
The nation has ample resources to ensure that every worker is paid enough to afford housing, food and other necessities of daily life. Anything less is intolerable. Yet in 2017, more than 17 million workers — disproportionately minorities and women — labored for wages too meager to lift their households above the federal poverty line.
Many workers similarly are deprived of benefits that federal law ought to guarantee. Millions lack affordable health insurance.
Many large employers, particularly in the restaurant and retail sectors, do not provide paid sick leave to all their workers, a refusal that is not only callous, but has endangered workers and customers during the pandemic.
The United States is the only developed democracy that does not require companies to provide paid time off for workers to care for a baby or a dying parent.
When people are deprived of means and opportunity, society is deprived of their potential contributions.
In June 1933, President Roosevelt called on employers to embrace an “industrial covenant” — a commitment to provide “living wages and sustained employment.” He argued this was greatly in the interest of industry, because well-paid workers would become customers, too.
Almost a century later, employers continue to resist that basic logic, seeking short-term savings at the expense of their own long-term prosperity.
Change is possible. A government more inclined to help workers would have ample opportunity. But as in the early 1930s, political change must proceed economic change. For the voices of workers to be heard, the influence of the wealthy must be curbed.
The power of the wealthy also has been amplified by the willingness of many Americans to accept cheap goods as a substitute for good jobs. A more equitable society requires a willingness to pay a little more for the burger or the bicycle — and for the welfare of the Americans who make and sell those products.
Americans need robust minimum standards for employee compensation and benefits, and the revitalization of institutions to safeguard those guarantees. The federal minimum wage needs to be raised to $15 an hour, with regular adjustments for inflation. Corporations have long warned that raising the minimum, now $7.25 an hour, will force companies to get rid of workers.
But a growing number of state and local governments have made the leap, with no evidence of dire consequences. If McDonald’s can turn a profit in Denmark, where even the most junior workers earn the equivalent of more than $20 an hour, it can turn a profit paying $15 an hour in America.
Lyndon Johnson fought for the creation of a federal minimum wage as a first-term congressman in 1938. Three decades later, as president, he signed an increase in the minimum wage to what remains the highest level on record, after adjusting for inflation.
The purpose, Johnson said, was “to bring a larger piece of this country’s prosperity, and a greater share of personal dignity, to millions of our workers, their wives and their children. And for me, frankly, that is what being president is all about.”
Americans also need the government to restrain the power of corporations. The dominance of a few large companies in a growing number of industries limits wage growth because workers have fewer alternatives, a problem that could be checked by a revival of antitrust enforcement. Companies also have made a mockery of legal protections for employees by classifying a growing share of workers as contractors, a farce embodied by Uber’s fierce insistence that Uber drivers are not Uber drivers.
The government can also make it easier for workers to switch jobs, which is often the best route upward. Ensuring that workers are not dependent on employers for affordable health insurance would make a big difference.
The government also should prohibit noncompete clauses, which impose contractual limitations on job-hopping. Once reserved for executives and other highly paid employees, the practice has become widespread, binding an estimated 30 million workers. One measure of the madness: A recent survey found 30 percent of the nation’s hair salons require noncompete clauses.
There are signs that some corporate leaders recognize the need for change. The Business Roundtable, a trade group for some of the nation’s largest companies, issued a new version of its mission statement last year acknowledging that corporations have responsibilities beyond making money. It is a purely symbolic gesture, but it points in the necessary direction.
Policymakers can encourage that new direction, for example by reversing the legalization of share buybacks and policing the classification of workers as independent contractors. And workers who want to join unions should be able to do so without the fear of reprisals.
The jobs that Americans do will continue to change as technology improves and tastes drift. But the need to work will not change, nor will the basic imperative to ensure that workers are compensated fairly and treated with dignity.
We live in an era of profits without broad prosperity, but the power to rewrite the rules of the market is in our hands. In 2016, Dr. Barber was arrested in Durham, N.C., while protesting for a $15 minimum wage. He said that he was pursuing the fulfillment of the language written into the state’s constitution by freed slaves more than 150 years ago.
The injustice remains. So does the opportunity.
THE IRS IS FAILING TO COLLECT BILLIONS IN BACK TAXES OWED BY SUPER RICH AMERICANS
By Janna Herron
The federal government is failing to go after rich Americans who’ve skipped paying their taxes for years, according to a new oversight report.
“In the past, the IRS has focused on the tax compliance of high-income individuals because their noncompliance can have a significant corrosive effect on tax administration,” the report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration stated. “Intentional non-filing of tax returns by those with significant financial resources and sophistication is a brazen form of noncompliance.”
Almost 880,000 high-income Americans owe $45.7 billion in overdue taxes from 2014 to 2016, the report found. The top 100 high-income non-filers during that time had estimated tax due totaling $9.9 billion.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) didn’t investigate 42% of those cases, representing $20.8 billion in lost tax revenue, because of lack of oversight and dwindling resources.
High-income non-filers owe $45.7 billion in back taxes from 2014 to 2016, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. (Screenshot from TIGTA report)
Of the outstanding 879,415 high-income tax cases, the IRS never investigated 369,180 of them, according to the report. The IRS never placed 326,579 cases in line to be further investigated after non-filers ignored a second delinquency notice. Another 42,601 cases were closed out without ever being investigated.
The remaining 510,235 cases, or an estimated $24.9 billion in taxes, are still waiting to be investigated but likely won’t because of a lack of resources at the agency, according to the report.
Additionally, the agency shelved 37,217 cases totaling $3.2 billion in estimated tax dollars. These will not likely be worked by the IRS, the report found.
Intentional failure to file federal tax returns is a crime and can also result in civil fraud penalties.
The non-filing of tax returns also makes up part of the tax gap, or the difference between the amount taxpayers are estimated to pay and the amount paid voluntarily on time. The report estimated that non-filers make up 9% of that gap.
By Janna Herron
The federal government is failing to go after rich Americans who’ve skipped paying their taxes for years, according to a new oversight report.
“In the past, the IRS has focused on the tax compliance of high-income individuals because their noncompliance can have a significant corrosive effect on tax administration,” the report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration stated. “Intentional non-filing of tax returns by those with significant financial resources and sophistication is a brazen form of noncompliance.”
Almost 880,000 high-income Americans owe $45.7 billion in overdue taxes from 2014 to 2016, the report found. The top 100 high-income non-filers during that time had estimated tax due totaling $9.9 billion.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) didn’t investigate 42% of those cases, representing $20.8 billion in lost tax revenue, because of lack of oversight and dwindling resources.
High-income non-filers owe $45.7 billion in back taxes from 2014 to 2016, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. (Screenshot from TIGTA report)
Of the outstanding 879,415 high-income tax cases, the IRS never investigated 369,180 of them, according to the report. The IRS never placed 326,579 cases in line to be further investigated after non-filers ignored a second delinquency notice. Another 42,601 cases were closed out without ever being investigated.
The remaining 510,235 cases, or an estimated $24.9 billion in taxes, are still waiting to be investigated but likely won’t because of a lack of resources at the agency, according to the report.
Additionally, the agency shelved 37,217 cases totaling $3.2 billion in estimated tax dollars. These will not likely be worked by the IRS, the report found.
Intentional failure to file federal tax returns is a crime and can also result in civil fraud penalties.
The non-filing of tax returns also makes up part of the tax gap, or the difference between the amount taxpayers are estimated to pay and the amount paid voluntarily on time. The report estimated that non-filers make up 9% of that gap.
WE DID THE MATH TO CALCULATE HOW MANY HOURS IT TAKES AMERICA'S TOP CEOS TO MAKE WHAT THEIR WORKERS EARN IN ONE YEAR
By Andy Kiersz
CEOs make a lot more than the workers they oversee. We took a look at just how big that gap is at some of America's biggest corporations.
One of the provisions of the post-financial-crisis Dodd-Frank reform bill requires corporations to disclose the ratio of their CEO's pay to that of the median employee at the company. Using those pay ratios, we calculated how long it would take the CEOs of big US companies to make what the median employee earned in a year.
So far, 19 of the 100 largest corporations in the S&P 500 as measured by their market capitalizations have filed their CEO compensation figures and pay ratios for the 2019 fiscal year. More companies will follow over the next several months.
The gap between what a CEO makes and what a typical employee makes varies widely from company to company. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had a total compensation 88 times larger than the typical employee at his company, meaning it took him a little over four days to earn the median employee's annual salary. Meanwhile, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon made 1,076 times what the typical Walmart worker made, and thus earned a median Walmart employee's annual salary in just eight hours.
As with any discussion of executive compensation, it's worth noting that pay for people at the top is a bit more complicated than just getting a biweekly direct deposit. Many CEOs receive the bulk of their compensation in the form of equity in the companies they run, and so they may not realize the full value of their pay as reported to the SEC for years.
Here's the full list, along with the CEOs' fiscal year 2019 compensation, median employee pay, and the CEO to median worker pay ratio:
19. Oracle co-CEO Safra Katz took 30 days and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee did in a year.
CEO compensation: $965,981 Typical employee salary: $83,813
Ratio: 12:1
18. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took 4 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,642,838 Typical employee salary: $155,035
Ratio: 88:1
17. Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi took 3 days and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,933,345 Typical employee salary: $157,232
Ratio: 114:1
16. Costco CEO W. Craig Jelinek took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $8,016,200 Typical employee salary: $47,312
Ratio: 169:1
15. Visa CEO Alfred F. Kelly Jr. took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $24,265,771 Typical employee salary: $142,494
Ratio: 170:1
14. Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins took 2 days to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $25,829,833 Typical employee salary: $142,593
Ratio: 181:1
13. Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff took 1 day and 23 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $28,391,846 Typical employee salary: $151,955
Ratio: 187:1
Salesforce's other co-CEO Keith Block made $16,961,156 in 2019, meaning it took him 3 days, 6 hours to make what a typical employee did in a year.
12. Apple CEO Tim Cook took 1 day and 20 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $11,555,466 Typical employee salary: $57,596
Ratio: 201:1
11. Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak took 1 day and 13 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,796,325 Typical employee salary: $74,206
Ratio: 240:1
10. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took 1 day and 11 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $42,910,21 Typical employee salary: $172,512
Ratio: 249:1
9. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf took 1 day and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,065,052 Typical employee salary: $90,259
Ratio: 256:1
8. ADP CEO Carlos Rodriguez took 1 day and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,000,187 Typical employee salary: $63,225
Ratio: 301:1
7. Former Nike CEO Mark G. Parker took 15 hours and 56 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,968,022 Typical employee salary: $25,386
Ratio: 550:1
6. Estée Lauder CEO Fabrizio Freda took 12 hours and 34 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
Fabrizio Freda
CEO compensation: $21,435,428 Typical employee salary: $30,733
Ratio: 697:1
5. Former Accenture Interim CEO David P. Rowland took 10 hours and 43 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $15,031,875
Typical employee salary: $18,392
Ratio: 817:1
4. Disney CEO Bob Iger took 9 hours and 37 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $47,517,762 Typical employee salary: $52,184
Ratio: 911:1
3. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon took 8 hours and 8 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,618,233 Typical employee salary: $21,952
Ratio: 1,076:1
2. TJX CEO Ernie Herrman took 5 hours and 29 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $18,822,770 Typical employee salary: $11,791
Ratio: 1,596:1
1. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson took 5 hours and 14 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,241,950 Typical employee salary: $11,489
Ratio: 1,675:1
By Andy Kiersz
CEOs make a lot more than the workers they oversee. We took a look at just how big that gap is at some of America's biggest corporations.
One of the provisions of the post-financial-crisis Dodd-Frank reform bill requires corporations to disclose the ratio of their CEO's pay to that of the median employee at the company. Using those pay ratios, we calculated how long it would take the CEOs of big US companies to make what the median employee earned in a year.
So far, 19 of the 100 largest corporations in the S&P 500 as measured by their market capitalizations have filed their CEO compensation figures and pay ratios for the 2019 fiscal year. More companies will follow over the next several months.
The gap between what a CEO makes and what a typical employee makes varies widely from company to company. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had a total compensation 88 times larger than the typical employee at his company, meaning it took him a little over four days to earn the median employee's annual salary. Meanwhile, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon made 1,076 times what the typical Walmart worker made, and thus earned a median Walmart employee's annual salary in just eight hours.
As with any discussion of executive compensation, it's worth noting that pay for people at the top is a bit more complicated than just getting a biweekly direct deposit. Many CEOs receive the bulk of their compensation in the form of equity in the companies they run, and so they may not realize the full value of their pay as reported to the SEC for years.
Here's the full list, along with the CEOs' fiscal year 2019 compensation, median employee pay, and the CEO to median worker pay ratio:
19. Oracle co-CEO Safra Katz took 30 days and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee did in a year.
CEO compensation: $965,981 Typical employee salary: $83,813
Ratio: 12:1
18. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took 4 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,642,838 Typical employee salary: $155,035
Ratio: 88:1
17. Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi took 3 days and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,933,345 Typical employee salary: $157,232
Ratio: 114:1
16. Costco CEO W. Craig Jelinek took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $8,016,200 Typical employee salary: $47,312
Ratio: 169:1
15. Visa CEO Alfred F. Kelly Jr. took 2 days and 4 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $24,265,771 Typical employee salary: $142,494
Ratio: 170:1
14. Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins took 2 days to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $25,829,833 Typical employee salary: $142,593
Ratio: 181:1
13. Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff took 1 day and 23 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $28,391,846 Typical employee salary: $151,955
Ratio: 187:1
Salesforce's other co-CEO Keith Block made $16,961,156 in 2019, meaning it took him 3 days, 6 hours to make what a typical employee did in a year.
12. Apple CEO Tim Cook took 1 day and 20 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $11,555,466 Typical employee salary: $57,596
Ratio: 201:1
11. Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak took 1 day and 13 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $17,796,325 Typical employee salary: $74,206
Ratio: 240:1
10. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took 1 day and 11 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $42,910,21 Typical employee salary: $172,512
Ratio: 249:1
9. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf took 1 day and 10 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,065,052 Typical employee salary: $90,259
Ratio: 256:1
8. ADP CEO Carlos Rodriguez took 1 day and 5 hours to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,000,187 Typical employee salary: $63,225
Ratio: 301:1
7. Former Nike CEO Mark G. Parker took 15 hours and 56 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $13,968,022 Typical employee salary: $25,386
Ratio: 550:1
6. Estée Lauder CEO Fabrizio Freda took 12 hours and 34 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
Fabrizio Freda
CEO compensation: $21,435,428 Typical employee salary: $30,733
Ratio: 697:1
5. Former Accenture Interim CEO David P. Rowland took 10 hours and 43 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $15,031,875
Typical employee salary: $18,392
Ratio: 817:1
4. Disney CEO Bob Iger took 9 hours and 37 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $47,517,762 Typical employee salary: $52,184
Ratio: 911:1
3. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon took 8 hours and 8 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $23,618,233 Typical employee salary: $21,952
Ratio: 1,076:1
2. TJX CEO Ernie Herrman took 5 hours and 29 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $18,822,770 Typical employee salary: $11,791
Ratio: 1,596:1
1. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson took 5 hours and 14 minutes to earn what a typical employee made in a year.
CEO compensation: $19,241,950 Typical employee salary: $11,489
Ratio: 1,675:1
OBAMA WAS RIGHT, ALITO WAS WRONG: CITIZENS UNITED HAS CORRUPTED AMERICAN POLITICS
By Tiffany Muller
Ten years ago this week, a narrow majority of the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance law, giving wealthy donors and corporations nearly unlimited ability to influence our elections. In his State of the Union address a week later, President Barack Obama said the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision “will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Samuel Alito famously shook his head, mouthing “not true.”
A decade later, it’s clear that President Obama was right and Justice Alito was wrong. With its decision, the court threw out restrictions on corporate and union election spending, narrowed the legal definition of “corruption” and set the stage for an influx of undisclosed dark money spending on our elections.
The court’s naive view of our electoral process set the stage for 10 years of billions of dollars corrupting our politics and dictating national policy on everything from the cost of prescription drugs to climate change to gun violence.
For example, during the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, a Republican super PAC publicly withdrew its support of Rep. David Young of Iowa because he expressed opposition to the GOP health care bill. Young soon switched his position, voted for the bill, and millions from the super PAC flowed into his district to help him win.
Wealthy donors have a bullhorn
That is corruption pure and simple, and it happens all the time in American politics. It now happens so often that the Supreme Court’s naiveté begins to look more like willful ignorance.
Our campaign finance system was broken long before Citizens United, but it has given a bullhorn to wealthy donors, who already had the loudest voices in the room. The overwhelmingly white, male and older donor class has become even more homogeneous. This elite set of Americans has scored political power on a magnitude not seen since the Gilded Age. In fact, just 11 people gave $1 billion — or a fifth of all donations to super PACs — from 2010 to 2018.
We now have elections where the candidates themselves play secondary roles in their own campaigns. For example, in Pennsylvania’s 2016 U.S. Senate race, outside spending topped $123 million, while the candidates combined for less than $50 million. This arms race not only impacts who can run for and win political office, but it also changes policy debates.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller (in gray) mark the 10th anniversary of the decision on Jan. 14, 2020, at the Capitol in Washington.
Climate change used to be a bipartisan issue, but that ended with Citizens United, even as global temperatures continued to rise. Meanwhile, since the decision, the energy sector has poured over $719 million into our federal elections, about a quarter of it in unlimited expenditures. The NRA has invested nearly $125 million in federal elections since the decision, nearly all of it in unlimited spending — helping to effectively block every attempt to pass universal background checks, though almost all Americans (75%-93% in recent polls) support that reform.
It’s not hyperbolic to state that the success of our democracy depends on our ability to restore guardrails that protect against the influence of big money and corruption in our elections. A constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United is a good place to start. That process isn’t quick, but it must be a priority.
In the short term, new laws could blunt the impact of the decision. Last year, the House passed the For the People Act (H.R. 1), the most sweeping package of anti-corruption reforms since Watergate. It has not even received consideration in the Senate. This bill would bring undisclosed “dark money” into the light, allow candidates to run for office on the strength of grassroots support by creating a small-donor matching program, and strengthen oversight over and accountability of federal officials.
We must also protect every eligible voters’ right to cast their ballot easily and free from discrimination. In addition to the major voter registration reforms included in H.R. 1, the House also passed the Voting Rights Advancement Act to prevent places with a history of discrimination from continuing to engage in voter suppression.
Red and blue states fight corruption
These are ambitious goals, but Americans have come together over the past decade to prove they are attainable. Twenty states and over 800 municipalities representing 141 million Americans have passed resolutions calling to overturn Citizens United, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.
We’ve seen new anti-corruption laws passed in red and blue states. In 2015, Montana’s Republican-led legislature passed a dark money disclosure law. In 2016, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved contribution limits the same year they delivered 10 electoral votes to Donald Trump. In the past decade there have been new, innovative small-donor public financing programs passed or enacted across the country, from Seattle and Portland to Washington, D.C.
H.R. 1 is a direct result of this overwhelming public support for reform. The freshman class of House Democrats ran on a platform of ending corruption in Washington, and it was a key reason they retook the majority. All the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have sworn off corporate PAC money, and they have said that passing a bold democracy reform bill will be their first order of business or a top priority.
All of this is happening because voters are demanding change. They’re tired of corruption and big donors buying access and influence. They want to vote for leaders who’ll stand up and fight for them. Every candidate, from state houses to president, should take this anger seriously as they weigh whether they’ll be champions of reform or defenders of the broken status quo.
By Tiffany Muller
Ten years ago this week, a narrow majority of the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance law, giving wealthy donors and corporations nearly unlimited ability to influence our elections. In his State of the Union address a week later, President Barack Obama said the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision “will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Samuel Alito famously shook his head, mouthing “not true.”
A decade later, it’s clear that President Obama was right and Justice Alito was wrong. With its decision, the court threw out restrictions on corporate and union election spending, narrowed the legal definition of “corruption” and set the stage for an influx of undisclosed dark money spending on our elections.
The court’s naive view of our electoral process set the stage for 10 years of billions of dollars corrupting our politics and dictating national policy on everything from the cost of prescription drugs to climate change to gun violence.
For example, during the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, a Republican super PAC publicly withdrew its support of Rep. David Young of Iowa because he expressed opposition to the GOP health care bill. Young soon switched his position, voted for the bill, and millions from the super PAC flowed into his district to help him win.
Wealthy donors have a bullhorn
That is corruption pure and simple, and it happens all the time in American politics. It now happens so often that the Supreme Court’s naiveté begins to look more like willful ignorance.
Our campaign finance system was broken long before Citizens United, but it has given a bullhorn to wealthy donors, who already had the loudest voices in the room. The overwhelmingly white, male and older donor class has become even more homogeneous. This elite set of Americans has scored political power on a magnitude not seen since the Gilded Age. In fact, just 11 people gave $1 billion — or a fifth of all donations to super PACs — from 2010 to 2018.
We now have elections where the candidates themselves play secondary roles in their own campaigns. For example, in Pennsylvania’s 2016 U.S. Senate race, outside spending topped $123 million, while the candidates combined for less than $50 million. This arms race not only impacts who can run for and win political office, but it also changes policy debates.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and End Citizens United President Tiffany Muller (in gray) mark the 10th anniversary of the decision on Jan. 14, 2020, at the Capitol in Washington.
Climate change used to be a bipartisan issue, but that ended with Citizens United, even as global temperatures continued to rise. Meanwhile, since the decision, the energy sector has poured over $719 million into our federal elections, about a quarter of it in unlimited expenditures. The NRA has invested nearly $125 million in federal elections since the decision, nearly all of it in unlimited spending — helping to effectively block every attempt to pass universal background checks, though almost all Americans (75%-93% in recent polls) support that reform.
It’s not hyperbolic to state that the success of our democracy depends on our ability to restore guardrails that protect against the influence of big money and corruption in our elections. A constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United is a good place to start. That process isn’t quick, but it must be a priority.
In the short term, new laws could blunt the impact of the decision. Last year, the House passed the For the People Act (H.R. 1), the most sweeping package of anti-corruption reforms since Watergate. It has not even received consideration in the Senate. This bill would bring undisclosed “dark money” into the light, allow candidates to run for office on the strength of grassroots support by creating a small-donor matching program, and strengthen oversight over and accountability of federal officials.
We must also protect every eligible voters’ right to cast their ballot easily and free from discrimination. In addition to the major voter registration reforms included in H.R. 1, the House also passed the Voting Rights Advancement Act to prevent places with a history of discrimination from continuing to engage in voter suppression.
Red and blue states fight corruption
These are ambitious goals, but Americans have come together over the past decade to prove they are attainable. Twenty states and over 800 municipalities representing 141 million Americans have passed resolutions calling to overturn Citizens United, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.
We’ve seen new anti-corruption laws passed in red and blue states. In 2015, Montana’s Republican-led legislature passed a dark money disclosure law. In 2016, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved contribution limits the same year they delivered 10 electoral votes to Donald Trump. In the past decade there have been new, innovative small-donor public financing programs passed or enacted across the country, from Seattle and Portland to Washington, D.C.
H.R. 1 is a direct result of this overwhelming public support for reform. The freshman class of House Democrats ran on a platform of ending corruption in Washington, and it was a key reason they retook the majority. All the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have sworn off corporate PAC money, and they have said that passing a bold democracy reform bill will be their first order of business or a top priority.
All of this is happening because voters are demanding change. They’re tired of corruption and big donors buying access and influence. They want to vote for leaders who’ll stand up and fight for them. Every candidate, from state houses to president, should take this anger seriously as they weigh whether they’ll be champions of reform or defenders of the broken status quo.
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE’S RACIST ORIGINS
More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.
By Wilfred Codrington III, Fellow at NYU School of Law
Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.
In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.
For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.
Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.
Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.
But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.
In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.
The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.
Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.
More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.
Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.
The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.
More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.
By Wilfred Codrington III, Fellow at NYU School of Law
Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.
In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.
For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.
Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.
Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.
But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:
There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.
Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.
In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.
The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.
Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.
More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.
Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.
The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.
THE TERROR GAP: U.S. LAWS LET WHITE SUPREMACISTS OPERATE LIKE ISIS
By Rita Katz
The recent arrests of Jarrett William Smith, a former U.S. Army soldier who discussed plans to “bomb a major U.S. news network,” and Conor Climo, a Las Vegas man who plotted attacks on a synagogue and LGBT bar, give an inkling of the growing threat posed by far-right terrorists in the United States.
The problem of white supremacist violence is international. From the horrific attack on a mosque in Christ Church, New Zealand, to the assault on a synagogue in the German city of Halle, the movement often follows the same horrific script—live-streaming the carnage, disseminating a manifesto, comments full of tongue-in-cheek internet references—and governments are scrambling to counter this threat.
But U.S. laws have a special problem, what might be called a “terror gap” between “foreign” and “domestic” terror organizations.
While the arrests of Smith and Climo mark a new level of initiative by the federal government, there is still much more to be done. What allows far-right terrorist groups to thrive in the U.S. is a legal double standard that binds the hands of even the most proactive members of law enforcement.
This double standard is exemplified by groups like Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group with major influence in the far-right online community. A video this past May shows people with Atomwaffen patches on their arms carrying out paramilitary drills with assault rifles. They then burn the flags of Israel, the United Nations, the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, the gay pride rainbow, Black Lives Matter, the police-supporting Thin Blue Line—designating any and all as enemies. If it weren’t for the Atomwaffen branding, you’d think you were watching footage of an ISIS training camp on American soil.
Now combine this militancy with a widely aimed recruitment operation. Messages on Telegram, the far-right’s current online hub, recruit on behalf of Atomwaffen, directing prospects to different email addresses of region-specific chapters across the US, Europe, South America, and Australia.
Minding its popularity, it’s not surprising to see that Atomwaffen has inspired other neo-Nazis to launch offshoot chapters or like-minded groups across the globe, such as Feuerkrieg Division, a growing neo-Nazi organization which both Climo and Smith were associated with.
Media by such groups often advocate for terrorism and praise far-right attackers, including the Halle shooter and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers.
This type of propaganda is a major lifeblood to the far-right community, just as it is for any extremist group or movement—no terrorist organization can grow without it.
The world witnessed the power of media with the rise of ISIS, leading governments to counter propagandists with the same urgency as fighters or financiers.
That is precisely why last October, a 34-year-old man named Ashraf Al Safoo was arrested for his work with Khattab Media Foundation, a prominent ISIS-linked media group that issued scores of threats and incitements against elections, public events, and other targets. Safoo himself never killed or planned to kill anyone, but the media he created helped amplify ISIS’ dangerous message, making him no less guilty of aiding the group.
Taking note of Safoo’s story, you might ask yourself how groups like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division can run their threat propaganda machines—let alone carry out paramilitary drills with the objective of overthrowing the U.S. government—with little to no interference. The answer is simple: what they do is, for the most part, not illegal.
The reason the U.S. government can arrest ISIS recruiters or media workers like Safoo and others is because the groups they support are Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), making their activities grounds for, in the language of court documents, “conspiracy to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” To support or be a member of an FTO in any capacity is a crime.
While actual acts of domestic terrorism—killing, assaulting, harassing—are obvious crimes, being a member of domestic terrorist organizations like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division in and of itself is not, despite their blatantly stated goals to spark collapse of the U.S. through terrorism.
The very phrase “domestic terrorist group” is in many ways legally meaningless. As assistant FBI Director Michael McGarrity explained before the House Homeland Security Committee in May: “A white supremacist organization is an ideology, it's a belief. But they're not designated as a terrorist organization.”
This lack of adequate domestic terror laws too often leaves far-right terrorist propaganda, incitement, and recruitment messages under the classification of hate speech, something protected under the First Amendment. A group like Atomwaffen, which bluntly and loudly states its goals for violence, is a perfect example of why this makes for a domestic security crisis.
Noting this problem, I’d like to echo the yet small but growing voices of legislators and others seeking to end this double standard in how we protect our nation from terrorism. The world has made immense progress against ISIS online and on the ground, in no small part due to the clear-cut laws against promoting it, whether financially, militarily, through its incitement propaganda machine.
That said, the U.S. legal system shouldn’t have to wait until the brink of an attack—or, as it too often does, the aftermath of one—to prosecute terrorists like Climo or Smith.
Membership of a group like Atomwaffen should bear all the same legal weight as ISIS, al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organization we don’t flinch at pursuing.
Any such list of designations should be regularly updated to address the rapidly changing landscape of groups that either form or, under pressure, dissolve only to reemerge under different names.
Such laws will make it immensely clearer to these far-right organizations and the platforms hosting them that they cannot remain online.
I don’t embrace such measures lightly. I’ve been very vocal throughout my counter-terrorism career speaking out against overreaching measures by the government, whether attempting to regulating encrypted messenger services or other ill-guided policies.
But the far-right community has grown dramatically in the last year, with new waves of attacks and uninterrupted online spaces that inspire them—a very similar condition to that of ISIS shortly before it established its so-called Caliphate. This is a critical moment for the U.S. government to prove if it is capable of learning from history. While terrorist legislation will not be a silver bullet to stop the threat of attacks by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, it would mark a major step in the right direction.
As it’s increasingly said these days, "Terrorism is terrorism.” So why perpetuate the legal double standard?
By Rita Katz
The recent arrests of Jarrett William Smith, a former U.S. Army soldier who discussed plans to “bomb a major U.S. news network,” and Conor Climo, a Las Vegas man who plotted attacks on a synagogue and LGBT bar, give an inkling of the growing threat posed by far-right terrorists in the United States.
The problem of white supremacist violence is international. From the horrific attack on a mosque in Christ Church, New Zealand, to the assault on a synagogue in the German city of Halle, the movement often follows the same horrific script—live-streaming the carnage, disseminating a manifesto, comments full of tongue-in-cheek internet references—and governments are scrambling to counter this threat.
But U.S. laws have a special problem, what might be called a “terror gap” between “foreign” and “domestic” terror organizations.
While the arrests of Smith and Climo mark a new level of initiative by the federal government, there is still much more to be done. What allows far-right terrorist groups to thrive in the U.S. is a legal double standard that binds the hands of even the most proactive members of law enforcement.
This double standard is exemplified by groups like Atomwaffen, a neo-Nazi paramilitary group with major influence in the far-right online community. A video this past May shows people with Atomwaffen patches on their arms carrying out paramilitary drills with assault rifles. They then burn the flags of Israel, the United Nations, the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, the gay pride rainbow, Black Lives Matter, the police-supporting Thin Blue Line—designating any and all as enemies. If it weren’t for the Atomwaffen branding, you’d think you were watching footage of an ISIS training camp on American soil.
Now combine this militancy with a widely aimed recruitment operation. Messages on Telegram, the far-right’s current online hub, recruit on behalf of Atomwaffen, directing prospects to different email addresses of region-specific chapters across the US, Europe, South America, and Australia.
Minding its popularity, it’s not surprising to see that Atomwaffen has inspired other neo-Nazis to launch offshoot chapters or like-minded groups across the globe, such as Feuerkrieg Division, a growing neo-Nazi organization which both Climo and Smith were associated with.
Media by such groups often advocate for terrorism and praise far-right attackers, including the Halle shooter and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers.
This type of propaganda is a major lifeblood to the far-right community, just as it is for any extremist group or movement—no terrorist organization can grow without it.
The world witnessed the power of media with the rise of ISIS, leading governments to counter propagandists with the same urgency as fighters or financiers.
That is precisely why last October, a 34-year-old man named Ashraf Al Safoo was arrested for his work with Khattab Media Foundation, a prominent ISIS-linked media group that issued scores of threats and incitements against elections, public events, and other targets. Safoo himself never killed or planned to kill anyone, but the media he created helped amplify ISIS’ dangerous message, making him no less guilty of aiding the group.
Taking note of Safoo’s story, you might ask yourself how groups like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division can run their threat propaganda machines—let alone carry out paramilitary drills with the objective of overthrowing the U.S. government—with little to no interference. The answer is simple: what they do is, for the most part, not illegal.
The reason the U.S. government can arrest ISIS recruiters or media workers like Safoo and others is because the groups they support are Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), making their activities grounds for, in the language of court documents, “conspiracy to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” To support or be a member of an FTO in any capacity is a crime.
While actual acts of domestic terrorism—killing, assaulting, harassing—are obvious crimes, being a member of domestic terrorist organizations like Atomwaffen or Feuerkrieg Division in and of itself is not, despite their blatantly stated goals to spark collapse of the U.S. through terrorism.
The very phrase “domestic terrorist group” is in many ways legally meaningless. As assistant FBI Director Michael McGarrity explained before the House Homeland Security Committee in May: “A white supremacist organization is an ideology, it's a belief. But they're not designated as a terrorist organization.”
This lack of adequate domestic terror laws too often leaves far-right terrorist propaganda, incitement, and recruitment messages under the classification of hate speech, something protected under the First Amendment. A group like Atomwaffen, which bluntly and loudly states its goals for violence, is a perfect example of why this makes for a domestic security crisis.
Noting this problem, I’d like to echo the yet small but growing voices of legislators and others seeking to end this double standard in how we protect our nation from terrorism. The world has made immense progress against ISIS online and on the ground, in no small part due to the clear-cut laws against promoting it, whether financially, militarily, through its incitement propaganda machine.
That said, the U.S. legal system shouldn’t have to wait until the brink of an attack—or, as it too often does, the aftermath of one—to prosecute terrorists like Climo or Smith.
Membership of a group like Atomwaffen should bear all the same legal weight as ISIS, al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organization we don’t flinch at pursuing.
Any such list of designations should be regularly updated to address the rapidly changing landscape of groups that either form or, under pressure, dissolve only to reemerge under different names.
Such laws will make it immensely clearer to these far-right organizations and the platforms hosting them that they cannot remain online.
I don’t embrace such measures lightly. I’ve been very vocal throughout my counter-terrorism career speaking out against overreaching measures by the government, whether attempting to regulating encrypted messenger services or other ill-guided policies.
But the far-right community has grown dramatically in the last year, with new waves of attacks and uninterrupted online spaces that inspire them—a very similar condition to that of ISIS shortly before it established its so-called Caliphate. This is a critical moment for the U.S. government to prove if it is capable of learning from history. While terrorist legislation will not be a silver bullet to stop the threat of attacks by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, it would mark a major step in the right direction.
As it’s increasingly said these days, "Terrorism is terrorism.” So why perpetuate the legal double standard?
HERE'S WHAT A HIGHER MINIMUM WAGE REALLY DOES TO JOB GROWTH
By Andy Serwer with Max Zahn
I’ve been seeing all kinds of blather lately that increasing pay — particularly a higher minimum wage — is killing job growth. Meaning that because employers have to pay more in salaries, they aren’t hiring, or are even firing workers.
My response to that?
Please.
In fact, what we’ve seen lately in the job market should finally put that old canard — higher pay leads to job losses — to rest.
Fact One: The effective minimum wage (I’ll spell this out below) has been soaring recently and is at an all-time high.
Fact Two: At 3.5%, the U.S. unemployment rate hasn’t been this low since December 1969, almost exactly half a century ago. Nixon was in the White House, Neil Armstrong was on the moon, and the hippies were at Woodstock. A long time ago.
That’s pretty much it, case closed, except for another fact. That is, I think employers, business owners, and CEOs sometimes use higher wages, particularly those mandated by the government (i.e. minimum wage hikes), as an excuse or cover for weak performance by their businesses — and/or for other reasons.
Further, if you see a business predicated on paying workers the current federal minimum wage of $7.25, you have to ask yourself what kind of a life is that company providing for its employees.
I’ll tell you what kind of life.
That $7.25 an hour works out to be $15,080 a year. Federal guidelines mandate that a salary of $21,330 or below for a family of three is at poverty level and is eligible for certain federal programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. (Ok, sure, for an individual the poverty level is a salary of $12,490. Still.)
I’m not saying that pay hikes aren’t real money for an employer, particularly for a small business owner with a few employees. But the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since July 2009. If you haven’t factored in giving your workers a raise in, what, 123 months, I would submit you aren’t so hot in the planning department.
Or you’re taking advantage.
So if the federal minimum wage is $7.25, what do I mean by the effective minimum wage and why has that been climbing? First, understand that the federal minimum wage is binding only in 21 states, mostly in southern and western states. The other 29 have state minimum wages, all higher than the federal bar, and now some cities like New York City and Seattle are raising the bar, as well.
According to The New York Times, if you average all these minimums across the country, you get an effective national minimum wage of $11.80. That’s the number that I said has soared over the past decade — just as the unemployment rate was plummeting — and is at an all-time high.
Furthermore, it’s tough to make the case that the states with the low, federal minimum wage threshold have better economies.
And yet, businesses still complain. New York City raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in December and there was predictable howling, with some restaurant owners complaining they had to shut their steak house or Mexican restaurant because of higher wages (even though there are thousands of similar, thriving places). In any event, these are in fact real costs and it’s a hot button issue — I understand that. But get beyond the emotion and look at the numbers and you see another picture.
Yannet Lathrop, a researcher with the National Employment Law Project, co-authored a report on NYC restaurants showing that after five years of minimum wage increases, New York City’s restaurant industry is thriving. “People do feel passionately about the minimum wage increase,” says Lathrop. “[But the] overwhelming body of evidence suggests minimum wages do what [they’re] supposed to do: increase wages for workers affected and no distinguishable effects on employment. You can go by what you feel about minimum wage personally, or by what data says.”
Greg Biryla, state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, a group that advocates for small businesses, disagrees, saying higher wages have been “a significant burden. It’s raised the cost of doing business, raised the cost of hiring, raised the cost of growth.”
He might be right. But on the other hand this ignores that higher wages have benefitted millions of Americans who need help the most. It’s the right kind of trade-off if you ask me, particularly in this era of high income and wealth inequality.
Sure, there are differences in the cost of living between, say, Seattle ($16.09 minimum wage) and Buffalo (most affordable city in the U.S.). But increasingly, states may be looking to differentiate themselves based on wages, leading to more disparity and leverage available to states, a trend I’ve noted recently.
One last question: Is all this state-wide minimum wage lifting causing overall wages to spike, maybe too much?
Doesn’t look like it.
The September jobs report showed wage growth of just 2.9%, the lowest rate since July 2018.
What it looks like to me is that working poor people are finally getting a boost. And companies with business models based on paying people poverty level wages that haven’t risen in 10 years (!) are getting squeezed a bit.
Gee.
By Andy Serwer with Max Zahn
I’ve been seeing all kinds of blather lately that increasing pay — particularly a higher minimum wage — is killing job growth. Meaning that because employers have to pay more in salaries, they aren’t hiring, or are even firing workers.
My response to that?
Please.
In fact, what we’ve seen lately in the job market should finally put that old canard — higher pay leads to job losses — to rest.
Fact One: The effective minimum wage (I’ll spell this out below) has been soaring recently and is at an all-time high.
Fact Two: At 3.5%, the U.S. unemployment rate hasn’t been this low since December 1969, almost exactly half a century ago. Nixon was in the White House, Neil Armstrong was on the moon, and the hippies were at Woodstock. A long time ago.
That’s pretty much it, case closed, except for another fact. That is, I think employers, business owners, and CEOs sometimes use higher wages, particularly those mandated by the government (i.e. minimum wage hikes), as an excuse or cover for weak performance by their businesses — and/or for other reasons.
Further, if you see a business predicated on paying workers the current federal minimum wage of $7.25, you have to ask yourself what kind of a life is that company providing for its employees.
I’ll tell you what kind of life.
That $7.25 an hour works out to be $15,080 a year. Federal guidelines mandate that a salary of $21,330 or below for a family of three is at poverty level and is eligible for certain federal programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. (Ok, sure, for an individual the poverty level is a salary of $12,490. Still.)
I’m not saying that pay hikes aren’t real money for an employer, particularly for a small business owner with a few employees. But the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since July 2009. If you haven’t factored in giving your workers a raise in, what, 123 months, I would submit you aren’t so hot in the planning department.
Or you’re taking advantage.
So if the federal minimum wage is $7.25, what do I mean by the effective minimum wage and why has that been climbing? First, understand that the federal minimum wage is binding only in 21 states, mostly in southern and western states. The other 29 have state minimum wages, all higher than the federal bar, and now some cities like New York City and Seattle are raising the bar, as well.
According to The New York Times, if you average all these minimums across the country, you get an effective national minimum wage of $11.80. That’s the number that I said has soared over the past decade — just as the unemployment rate was plummeting — and is at an all-time high.
Furthermore, it’s tough to make the case that the states with the low, federal minimum wage threshold have better economies.
And yet, businesses still complain. New York City raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour in December and there was predictable howling, with some restaurant owners complaining they had to shut their steak house or Mexican restaurant because of higher wages (even though there are thousands of similar, thriving places). In any event, these are in fact real costs and it’s a hot button issue — I understand that. But get beyond the emotion and look at the numbers and you see another picture.
Yannet Lathrop, a researcher with the National Employment Law Project, co-authored a report on NYC restaurants showing that after five years of minimum wage increases, New York City’s restaurant industry is thriving. “People do feel passionately about the minimum wage increase,” says Lathrop. “[But the] overwhelming body of evidence suggests minimum wages do what [they’re] supposed to do: increase wages for workers affected and no distinguishable effects on employment. You can go by what you feel about minimum wage personally, or by what data says.”
Greg Biryla, state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, a group that advocates for small businesses, disagrees, saying higher wages have been “a significant burden. It’s raised the cost of doing business, raised the cost of hiring, raised the cost of growth.”
He might be right. But on the other hand this ignores that higher wages have benefitted millions of Americans who need help the most. It’s the right kind of trade-off if you ask me, particularly in this era of high income and wealth inequality.
Sure, there are differences in the cost of living between, say, Seattle ($16.09 minimum wage) and Buffalo (most affordable city in the U.S.). But increasingly, states may be looking to differentiate themselves based on wages, leading to more disparity and leverage available to states, a trend I’ve noted recently.
One last question: Is all this state-wide minimum wage lifting causing overall wages to spike, maybe too much?
Doesn’t look like it.
The September jobs report showed wage growth of just 2.9%, the lowest rate since July 2018.
What it looks like to me is that working poor people are finally getting a boost. And companies with business models based on paying people poverty level wages that haven’t risen in 10 years (!) are getting squeezed a bit.
Gee.
THE 'GLASS FLOOR' IS KEEPING AMERICA'S RICHEST IDIOTS AT THE TOP
By Michael Hobbes
In 2014, Zach Dell launched a dating app called Thread. It was nearly identical to Tinder: Users created a profile, uploaded photos and swiped through potential matches.
The only twist on the formula was that Thread was restricted to university students and explicitly designed to produce relationships rather than hookups. The app’s tagline was “Stay Classy.”
Zach Dell is the son of billionaire tech magnate Michael Dell. Though he told reporters that he wasn’t relying on family money, Thread’s early investors included a number of his father’s friends, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The app failed almost instantly. Perhaps the number of monogamy-seeking students just wasn’t large enough, or capping users at 10 matches per day limited the app’s addictiveness. It could also have been the mismatch between Thread’s chaste motto and its user experience. Users got just 70 characters to describe themselves on their profiles. Most of them resorted to catchphrases like “Hook ’em” and “Netflix is life.”
After Thread went bust, Dell moved into philanthropy with a startup called Sqwatt, which promised to deliver “low-cost sanitation solutions for the developing world.” Aside from an empty website and a promotional video with fewer than 100 views, the effort seems to have disappeared.
And yet, despite helming two failed ventures and having little work experience beyond an internship at a financial services company created to manage his father’s fortune, things seem to be working out for Zach Dell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is now an analyst for the private equity firm Blackstone. He is 22.
America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.
Most accounts of this trend focus on the breakdown of upward mobility: It’s getting harder for the poor to become rich. But equally important is the decline of downward mobility: The rich, regardless of their intelligence, are becoming more likely to stay that way.
“There’s a lot of talent being wasted because it’s not able to rise, but there’s also a lot of relatively untalented people who aren’t falling and end up occupying positions they shouldn’t,” said Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution researcher and the author of “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It.″
According to research carried out by Reeves and others, the likelihood of the rich passing their status down to their children — “stickiness,” in economist-speak — has surpassed the likelihood of poor children remaining poor.
“If we were becoming less of a class-bound society, stickiness at the top should have gone down,” Reeves said. “But the evidence shows that it’s gone up.”
This phenomenon — Reeves calls it “the glass floor” — has taken on a new political urgency. Over the last two years, Donald Trump has put his family members in charge of child care policy and Middle East peace. Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian board membership has highlighted how corporations and foreign governments seek to influence elected officials through their children.
And who can forget Koch nephew Wyatt and his line of $79 floral button-ups?
But billionaire heirs are only a tiny part of the problem. Over the last 30 years, nearly every institution of social mobility, from education to work to government spending, has been systematically tilted toward the wealthy. Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung.
“The sense that there’s a self-sustaining and self-dealing group at the top isn’t wrong,” Reeves said. “When you create a ‘meritocratic’ selection process where the production of merit is increasingly skewed by parental income, you end up with a hereditary meritocracy.”
The rich, in other words, are not sending their best. And the more institutions they control, the more of their kids will be running the country.
Elite Entrenchment Goes Far Beyond The Ivy League
Last month, a Duke University study revealed that 43% of white Harvard students were not admitted on merit. They were ALDCs: recruited athletes, legacies, students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. The “dean’s interest list” is a roster of applicants with ties to wealthy donors.
The study — and the racial discrimination lawsuit that forced Harvard to reveal its admissions data — demonstrated the extent to which elite universities concentrate the privilege of their already-privileged students. To pick just a few representative statistics, children from the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League schools than the poorest 20%. Harvard’s class of 2022 includes more legacy students than African American students.
Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college. Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college.
But when it comes to social mobility, the outsized scrutiny of the top-tier colleges conceals a much larger problem. Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Princeton admit only a tiny number of students each. In 2016, the University of Washington enrolled more low-income applicants than the entire student bodies of all four colleges combined. Among the nation’s top 10% of income earners, fewer than 1 in 20 attended the tiny number of “Ivy-plus” universities. Even if those elite schools enrolled low-income students exclusively, America’s abysmal social mobility statistics would barely budge.
The more important engine of elite entrenchment is the group of selective colleges that sit one rung lower in the rankings. More than half the children of the top .1% of income earners attend these schools, compared with fewer than 1 in 50 poor children.
Over the last 20 years, selective universities have become just as dominated by the wealthy as the elite colleges — while receiving a fraction of the attention. Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California, for example, admit higher percentages of legacy students than Princeton. Thirty-eight colleges — including upper-crust mainstays Colgate and Tufts — admit more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. At Washington University in St. Louis, the worst offender, the ratio is three-to-one.
“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions,” Reeves said. “They end up serving the children of today’s elite rather than preparing tomorrow’s elite.”
Public colleges are subject to the same trend. In 2017, University of Georgia students had a median family income of $129,800. Two-thirds of the students at the University of Michigan came from the richest fifth of the income distribution; just one in 30 came from the poorest fifth.
“This is what inherited wealth looks like for the top 20%,” Reeves said. “You don’t save your money and give it to your kids as a bequest. You spend it on your kids so they don’t need the bequest. It’s an upfront investment.”
But as universities tilt their admissions toward the wealthy, Reeves said, they aren’t just leaving talented low-income students behind. They’re also lifting mediocre rich students up. A 2005 study found that wealthy middle-schoolers with the lowest standardized test scores were more likely to graduate from college than poor middle-schoolers with the highest scores. Students with average SAT results are nearly six times more likely to be admitted to top-tier universities if their parents are alumni. One of Reeves’ studies found that 43% of the members of upper-class households had skills and intelligence that predicted lower incomes.
“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to demonstrate their skills. Less-talented kids, on the other hand, have to rely on credentials that make them seem intelligent — high SAT scores, top-tier diplomas and corporate internships.
As elites take over selective colleges, invest more in test-prep courses and reserve entry-level jobs for their peers, they will continue to monopolize these credentials for themselves.
By Michael Hobbes
In 2014, Zach Dell launched a dating app called Thread. It was nearly identical to Tinder: Users created a profile, uploaded photos and swiped through potential matches.
The only twist on the formula was that Thread was restricted to university students and explicitly designed to produce relationships rather than hookups. The app’s tagline was “Stay Classy.”
Zach Dell is the son of billionaire tech magnate Michael Dell. Though he told reporters that he wasn’t relying on family money, Thread’s early investors included a number of his father’s friends, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The app failed almost instantly. Perhaps the number of monogamy-seeking students just wasn’t large enough, or capping users at 10 matches per day limited the app’s addictiveness. It could also have been the mismatch between Thread’s chaste motto and its user experience. Users got just 70 characters to describe themselves on their profiles. Most of them resorted to catchphrases like “Hook ’em” and “Netflix is life.”
After Thread went bust, Dell moved into philanthropy with a startup called Sqwatt, which promised to deliver “low-cost sanitation solutions for the developing world.” Aside from an empty website and a promotional video with fewer than 100 views, the effort seems to have disappeared.
And yet, despite helming two failed ventures and having little work experience beyond an internship at a financial services company created to manage his father’s fortune, things seem to be working out for Zach Dell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is now an analyst for the private equity firm Blackstone. He is 22.
America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.
Most accounts of this trend focus on the breakdown of upward mobility: It’s getting harder for the poor to become rich. But equally important is the decline of downward mobility: The rich, regardless of their intelligence, are becoming more likely to stay that way.
“There’s a lot of talent being wasted because it’s not able to rise, but there’s also a lot of relatively untalented people who aren’t falling and end up occupying positions they shouldn’t,” said Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution researcher and the author of “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It.″
According to research carried out by Reeves and others, the likelihood of the rich passing their status down to their children — “stickiness,” in economist-speak — has surpassed the likelihood of poor children remaining poor.
“If we were becoming less of a class-bound society, stickiness at the top should have gone down,” Reeves said. “But the evidence shows that it’s gone up.”
This phenomenon — Reeves calls it “the glass floor” — has taken on a new political urgency. Over the last two years, Donald Trump has put his family members in charge of child care policy and Middle East peace. Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian board membership has highlighted how corporations and foreign governments seek to influence elected officials through their children.
And who can forget Koch nephew Wyatt and his line of $79 floral button-ups?
But billionaire heirs are only a tiny part of the problem. Over the last 30 years, nearly every institution of social mobility, from education to work to government spending, has been systematically tilted toward the wealthy. Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung.
“The sense that there’s a self-sustaining and self-dealing group at the top isn’t wrong,” Reeves said. “When you create a ‘meritocratic’ selection process where the production of merit is increasingly skewed by parental income, you end up with a hereditary meritocracy.”
The rich, in other words, are not sending their best. And the more institutions they control, the more of their kids will be running the country.
Elite Entrenchment Goes Far Beyond The Ivy League
Last month, a Duke University study revealed that 43% of white Harvard students were not admitted on merit. They were ALDCs: recruited athletes, legacies, students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. The “dean’s interest list” is a roster of applicants with ties to wealthy donors.
The study — and the racial discrimination lawsuit that forced Harvard to reveal its admissions data — demonstrated the extent to which elite universities concentrate the privilege of their already-privileged students. To pick just a few representative statistics, children from the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League schools than the poorest 20%. Harvard’s class of 2022 includes more legacy students than African American students.
Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college. Donald Trump Jr., right, graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Both joined the Trump Organization shortly after college.
But when it comes to social mobility, the outsized scrutiny of the top-tier colleges conceals a much larger problem. Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Princeton admit only a tiny number of students each. In 2016, the University of Washington enrolled more low-income applicants than the entire student bodies of all four colleges combined. Among the nation’s top 10% of income earners, fewer than 1 in 20 attended the tiny number of “Ivy-plus” universities. Even if those elite schools enrolled low-income students exclusively, America’s abysmal social mobility statistics would barely budge.
The more important engine of elite entrenchment is the group of selective colleges that sit one rung lower in the rankings. More than half the children of the top .1% of income earners attend these schools, compared with fewer than 1 in 50 poor children.
Over the last 20 years, selective universities have become just as dominated by the wealthy as the elite colleges — while receiving a fraction of the attention. Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina and the University of Southern California, for example, admit higher percentages of legacy students than Princeton. Thirty-eight colleges — including upper-crust mainstays Colgate and Tufts — admit more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. At Washington University in St. Louis, the worst offender, the ratio is three-to-one.
“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions,” Reeves said. “They end up serving the children of today’s elite rather than preparing tomorrow’s elite.”
Public colleges are subject to the same trend. In 2017, University of Georgia students had a median family income of $129,800. Two-thirds of the students at the University of Michigan came from the richest fifth of the income distribution; just one in 30 came from the poorest fifth.
“This is what inherited wealth looks like for the top 20%,” Reeves said. “You don’t save your money and give it to your kids as a bequest. You spend it on your kids so they don’t need the bequest. It’s an upfront investment.”
But as universities tilt their admissions toward the wealthy, Reeves said, they aren’t just leaving talented low-income students behind. They’re also lifting mediocre rich students up. A 2005 study found that wealthy middle-schoolers with the lowest standardized test scores were more likely to graduate from college than poor middle-schoolers with the highest scores. Students with average SAT results are nearly six times more likely to be admitted to top-tier universities if their parents are alumni. One of Reeves’ studies found that 43% of the members of upper-class households had skills and intelligence that predicted lower incomes.
“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to demonstrate their skills. Less-talented kids, on the other hand, have to rely on credentials that make them seem intelligent — high SAT scores, top-tier diplomas and corporate internships.
As elites take over selective colleges, invest more in test-prep courses and reserve entry-level jobs for their peers, they will continue to monopolize these credentials for themselves.
WE NEED UNIONS FOR ALL. IT'S A BOLD AGENDA FOR HELPING EVERYONE GET AHEAD IN OUR ECONOMY.
By Mary Kay Henry, USA TODAY
America’s labor laws were established 84 years ago on the basis of a racist compromise. And these laws, which were incomplete when they were written, are now completely useless to millions of workers — black, brown and white — who are demanding a union on the job.
The landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which among other things was meant to "encourage collective bargaining," was written for a different economy when manufacturing was the biggest industry. And to satisfy the demands of white supremacists in Congress, it excluded agricultural, domestic and various other service workers from the very start, as they were industries dominated by women and people of color.
In today's economy, millions of other Americans — including gig or app-based workers, so-called independent contractors and some public sector employees — are denied union rights under federal law.
Let gig, service workers join unions
Today, according to our research at the Service Employees International Union, a staggering share of all workers in the country — up to 45% — are legally excluded from the right to bargain collectively. It’s time to update our laws to fit an economy where most people work in service jobs.
That’s why members of our union — 2 million people who are janitors, health care workers and public service workers — are calling on all candidates for president to put forward serious plans to empower all workers to form unions, no matter what kind of job they do.
We are looking for more than lip service from political candidates and elected leaders about how much they support the broken laws we already have. Instead, we need big ideas about how to empower more people to join together in unions so everyone, no matter where they live or work, can negotiate for things like better pay, more affordable health care and more family-friendly schedules.
Demand for joining a union is at a four-decade high: Nearly half of all nonunion workers in the United States now say they would join a union if they could, according to a recent survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And a solid majority of all Americans today say they support unions.
More unions with more power
Workers across the country are demanding unions and fair contracts in a way I’ve never seen in my 40-year career in the labor movement. They include public school teachers from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Los Angeles. Amazon workers. Stop & Shop workers. Child care workers. Cooks and cashiers at McDonald’s and other companies across the $200 billion fast-food industry.
That’s why our endorsement in the 2020 election will be conditioned on support for “Unions for All,” a bold agenda to give working people more power in our society. Our demand for Unions for All is focused on four big changes.
First, we want the next president to use the power of the Oval Office to bring employers, workers and their unions together at industrywide bargaining tables to negotiate pay, benefits and working conditions nationwide, with government involvement, where necessary, to help close the huge income inequality gap.
Second, give states and cities the freedom to innovate and create new laws that empower workers to organize in a union more easily than federal law allows.
Unions can help transform economy
Third, government should use its spending power to require that any job funded by taxpayer dollars pays at least $15 an hour and allows workers to join together in a union for a bargaining process that can truly improve their lives.
Fourth, any major economic proposal — including plans for universal health care or the "Green New Deal" — must put good union jobs at the center.
Democrats are already taking notice. We've seen Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas propose bold solutions to unrig our economy and rewrite our labor laws, plans that are not just more of the same. We expect more 2020 presidential candidates to follow suit.
“Unions for All” is a demand we are making on behalf of working people who are fighting for their families, not just in our union but all across the country. Empowering more workers to join unions will give us the power to transform our economy into one where all of us can get ahead, no matter what our color or where we come from.
It’s a demand that will make the right to a union a reality not just for some, but for all.
By Mary Kay Henry, USA TODAY
America’s labor laws were established 84 years ago on the basis of a racist compromise. And these laws, which were incomplete when they were written, are now completely useless to millions of workers — black, brown and white — who are demanding a union on the job.
The landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which among other things was meant to "encourage collective bargaining," was written for a different economy when manufacturing was the biggest industry. And to satisfy the demands of white supremacists in Congress, it excluded agricultural, domestic and various other service workers from the very start, as they were industries dominated by women and people of color.
In today's economy, millions of other Americans — including gig or app-based workers, so-called independent contractors and some public sector employees — are denied union rights under federal law.
Let gig, service workers join unions
Today, according to our research at the Service Employees International Union, a staggering share of all workers in the country — up to 45% — are legally excluded from the right to bargain collectively. It’s time to update our laws to fit an economy where most people work in service jobs.
That’s why members of our union — 2 million people who are janitors, health care workers and public service workers — are calling on all candidates for president to put forward serious plans to empower all workers to form unions, no matter what kind of job they do.
We are looking for more than lip service from political candidates and elected leaders about how much they support the broken laws we already have. Instead, we need big ideas about how to empower more people to join together in unions so everyone, no matter where they live or work, can negotiate for things like better pay, more affordable health care and more family-friendly schedules.
Demand for joining a union is at a four-decade high: Nearly half of all nonunion workers in the United States now say they would join a union if they could, according to a recent survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And a solid majority of all Americans today say they support unions.
More unions with more power
Workers across the country are demanding unions and fair contracts in a way I’ve never seen in my 40-year career in the labor movement. They include public school teachers from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Los Angeles. Amazon workers. Stop & Shop workers. Child care workers. Cooks and cashiers at McDonald’s and other companies across the $200 billion fast-food industry.
That’s why our endorsement in the 2020 election will be conditioned on support for “Unions for All,” a bold agenda to give working people more power in our society. Our demand for Unions for All is focused on four big changes.
First, we want the next president to use the power of the Oval Office to bring employers, workers and their unions together at industrywide bargaining tables to negotiate pay, benefits and working conditions nationwide, with government involvement, where necessary, to help close the huge income inequality gap.
Second, give states and cities the freedom to innovate and create new laws that empower workers to organize in a union more easily than federal law allows.
Unions can help transform economy
Third, government should use its spending power to require that any job funded by taxpayer dollars pays at least $15 an hour and allows workers to join together in a union for a bargaining process that can truly improve their lives.
Fourth, any major economic proposal — including plans for universal health care or the "Green New Deal" — must put good union jobs at the center.
Democrats are already taking notice. We've seen Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas propose bold solutions to unrig our economy and rewrite our labor laws, plans that are not just more of the same. We expect more 2020 presidential candidates to follow suit.
“Unions for All” is a demand we are making on behalf of working people who are fighting for their families, not just in our union but all across the country. Empowering more workers to join unions will give us the power to transform our economy into one where all of us can get ahead, no matter what our color or where we come from.
It’s a demand that will make the right to a union a reality not just for some, but for all.
MINIMUM WAGE HASN'T BEEN RAISED FOR THE LONGEST TIME IN HISTORY
By Kristin Myers
June 16 marked the 12th year that Congress hadn’t raised the federal minimum wage, the longest amount of time the minimum wage has remained unchanged since it was first established in 1938. The last time the U.S. government raised the minimum wage was in May 2007 — that decision increased wages to $7.25 an hour starting July 24, 2009.
Since the minimum wage was created in 1938, it has been irregularly increased at the will of Congress. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the minimum wage has received a boost nine times since 1938. In the last 81 years, the minimum wage has increased from 25 cents to $7.25.
A January poll found that 55% of registered voters said they would support raising the the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and another 27% said it should be increased but to a lesser amount.
But despite the popularity of raising the minimum wage, Congress hasn’t acted on any measures in over a decade. EPI’s Senior Economic Analyst David Cooper says there has been “no openness” to do so among Republicans in Congress.
Weaker purchasing power
Until 1980, Cooper says, Congress increased the minimum wage “relatively regularly — every five years or so.” But in the last 40 years, he explained, Republicans started to strongly oppose minimum wage increases.
“It wasn’t raised at all during the Reagan administration,” he said. “That’s when we saw nine, 10 years between increases.”
While inflation levels are holding steady the purchasing power of the current minimum wage has steadily eroded over the last decade. Since the minimum wage was raised to $7.25, its purchasing power has declined by 17%. That’s a loss of $3,000 in annual earnings for full-time minimum wage workers. Since reaching its buying power peak in 1968, the minimum wage has lost 31% in purchasing power. That means that effectively, minimum wage workers are “earning” more than $6,800 less than they would have in 1968 — when the minimum wage was only $1.60.
“Imagine if someone took 30% out of your paycheck,” Cooper said. “They can afford 31% less than their counterparts five decades ago. That’s huge.”
But he explains this also has negative impacts on the economy, because the lowest-paid workers tend to inject their extra money right back into the economy.
“On a macro level, it’s also damaging,” Cooper said. “Seventy percent of the economy is consumer spending. We are shooting ourselves in the foot from a growth perspective.”
Fight for 15
Raising the minimum wage has been a priority for many politicians, particularly as the 2020 elections draw nearer. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently attacked Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos for paying workers “starvation wages.” Amazon, which raised its minimum wage to all workers to $15 per hour, responded to the congresswoman, calling her allegations “just wrong.”
Presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro and John Hickenlooper have all publicly declared to fight for a $15 minimum wage if they were to win the White House.
According to EPI’s analysis, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would boost the pay for roughly 40 million workers — more than a quarter of the wage-earning workforce.
And with those boosted wages, Cooper says there would be a “modest stimulative effect” on the economy as consumer spending increased. But the real question is: Are businesses able to handle paying workers more without laying off employees?
“A fair reading on all the literature on this is that past increases of the minimum wage have had their intended effect,” he said. “If there is an impact on employment, it’s so small the benefits outweigh the negatives.”
There would also be knock-on effects to social welfare systems, already facing budget cuts.
“It definitely would reduce the number of people that rely on public assistance, without a doubt,” Cooper said. “This would save money in terms of social assistance savings.” While Cooper argues this money should be reinvested back into those programs, he admits that it would “free up dollars.”
Automatic increases
But the best way to solve the problem is by implementing an automatic annual minimum wage increase, also called indexing, Cooper said. It’s already in place in 18 states and the District of Columbia.
Earlier this year a federal bill was proposed to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2024. Called the Raise the Wage Act of 2019, the bill would raise the minimum wage and then index wages in 2025 to median wage growth.
Currently, most states index wages by tying them to prices. This way, the minimum wage would increase by the same amount as inflation in the state. By indexing to median wage growth, the minimum wage adjusts automatically at the same rate as the growth in the median wage. According to EPI, the bill would also increase the minimum wage for tipped workers, “which has been fixed at $2.13 per hour since 1991, until it reaches parity with the regular minimum wage.”
By Kristin Myers
June 16 marked the 12th year that Congress hadn’t raised the federal minimum wage, the longest amount of time the minimum wage has remained unchanged since it was first established in 1938. The last time the U.S. government raised the minimum wage was in May 2007 — that decision increased wages to $7.25 an hour starting July 24, 2009.
Since the minimum wage was created in 1938, it has been irregularly increased at the will of Congress. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the minimum wage has received a boost nine times since 1938. In the last 81 years, the minimum wage has increased from 25 cents to $7.25.
A January poll found that 55% of registered voters said they would support raising the the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and another 27% said it should be increased but to a lesser amount.
But despite the popularity of raising the minimum wage, Congress hasn’t acted on any measures in over a decade. EPI’s Senior Economic Analyst David Cooper says there has been “no openness” to do so among Republicans in Congress.
Weaker purchasing power
Until 1980, Cooper says, Congress increased the minimum wage “relatively regularly — every five years or so.” But in the last 40 years, he explained, Republicans started to strongly oppose minimum wage increases.
“It wasn’t raised at all during the Reagan administration,” he said. “That’s when we saw nine, 10 years between increases.”
While inflation levels are holding steady the purchasing power of the current minimum wage has steadily eroded over the last decade. Since the minimum wage was raised to $7.25, its purchasing power has declined by 17%. That’s a loss of $3,000 in annual earnings for full-time minimum wage workers. Since reaching its buying power peak in 1968, the minimum wage has lost 31% in purchasing power. That means that effectively, minimum wage workers are “earning” more than $6,800 less than they would have in 1968 — when the minimum wage was only $1.60.
“Imagine if someone took 30% out of your paycheck,” Cooper said. “They can afford 31% less than their counterparts five decades ago. That’s huge.”
But he explains this also has negative impacts on the economy, because the lowest-paid workers tend to inject their extra money right back into the economy.
“On a macro level, it’s also damaging,” Cooper said. “Seventy percent of the economy is consumer spending. We are shooting ourselves in the foot from a growth perspective.”
Fight for 15
Raising the minimum wage has been a priority for many politicians, particularly as the 2020 elections draw nearer. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently attacked Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos for paying workers “starvation wages.” Amazon, which raised its minimum wage to all workers to $15 per hour, responded to the congresswoman, calling her allegations “just wrong.”
Presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro and John Hickenlooper have all publicly declared to fight for a $15 minimum wage if they were to win the White House.
According to EPI’s analysis, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would boost the pay for roughly 40 million workers — more than a quarter of the wage-earning workforce.
And with those boosted wages, Cooper says there would be a “modest stimulative effect” on the economy as consumer spending increased. But the real question is: Are businesses able to handle paying workers more without laying off employees?
“A fair reading on all the literature on this is that past increases of the minimum wage have had their intended effect,” he said. “If there is an impact on employment, it’s so small the benefits outweigh the negatives.”
There would also be knock-on effects to social welfare systems, already facing budget cuts.
“It definitely would reduce the number of people that rely on public assistance, without a doubt,” Cooper said. “This would save money in terms of social assistance savings.” While Cooper argues this money should be reinvested back into those programs, he admits that it would “free up dollars.”
Automatic increases
But the best way to solve the problem is by implementing an automatic annual minimum wage increase, also called indexing, Cooper said. It’s already in place in 18 states and the District of Columbia.
Earlier this year a federal bill was proposed to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2024. Called the Raise the Wage Act of 2019, the bill would raise the minimum wage and then index wages in 2025 to median wage growth.
Currently, most states index wages by tying them to prices. This way, the minimum wage would increase by the same amount as inflation in the state. By indexing to median wage growth, the minimum wage adjusts automatically at the same rate as the growth in the median wage. According to EPI, the bill would also increase the minimum wage for tipped workers, “which has been fixed at $2.13 per hour since 1991, until it reaches parity with the regular minimum wage.”
U.S. PAID VACATION POLICY IS EMBARRASSING: CHART
By Aarthi Swaminathan
America: the land of the free, and the vacation deprived.
A recent study by D.C.-based think-tank Center for Economic and Policy Research found that out of the 21 richest countries in the world, the U.S. “continues to be the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.” The report added that “without a federal paid vacation policy, close to one in four Americans have no paid vacation… [and] no paid holidays.”
It also revealed a massive gap between full-time and part-time workers, that while 90% of full-timers got paid vacation and paid holidays, less than half of part-timers received the same benefits.
This chart from Deutsche Bank illustrates the point:
(Source: Deutsche Bank)
‘Significant disparity between the United States and the rest of the world’s rich countries’
The key reason why the U.S. lags so far behind is because it is the “only advanced economy that does not mandate any paid vacation time for workers,” the study explained.
The U.S. is also one of the only countries that did not require employers to offer paid annual leave. So while “most developed countries offer at least six paid holidays a year… the United States provides none,” the report stated.
And even if employees are getting paid days off, the average private sector worker is only likely to see about 10 paid vacation days and 6 paid holidays — which is “far less than in almost every advanced economy except Japan.”
In contrast, thanks to the European Union’s rules, European countries had at least four weeks — or 20 working days — of paid vacation for all workers who are employed in EU member countries.
Spain ranked as the most generous, offering workers 14 paid holidays, followed by Austria, Germany, and Portugal.
‘Distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal’ between full-time and part-time workers
The study also found a big gap between full-time and part-time employees and how they were granted time off.
In the U.S., while 90% of full-time private sector workers received paid vacation and holiday time, only 40% of part-timers received paid vacation, and 44% got paid holidays.
There was an income gap as well: The top 25% of income earners received paid annual vacation and paid holidays at 91% and 93% respectively, while the bottom 25% received 52% and 54% respectively.
“For U.S. employees who do receive paid vacation and holidays, the distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal,” the report found.
By Aarthi Swaminathan
America: the land of the free, and the vacation deprived.
A recent study by D.C.-based think-tank Center for Economic and Policy Research found that out of the 21 richest countries in the world, the U.S. “continues to be the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.” The report added that “without a federal paid vacation policy, close to one in four Americans have no paid vacation… [and] no paid holidays.”
It also revealed a massive gap between full-time and part-time workers, that while 90% of full-timers got paid vacation and paid holidays, less than half of part-timers received the same benefits.
This chart from Deutsche Bank illustrates the point:
(Source: Deutsche Bank)
‘Significant disparity between the United States and the rest of the world’s rich countries’
The key reason why the U.S. lags so far behind is because it is the “only advanced economy that does not mandate any paid vacation time for workers,” the study explained.
The U.S. is also one of the only countries that did not require employers to offer paid annual leave. So while “most developed countries offer at least six paid holidays a year… the United States provides none,” the report stated.
And even if employees are getting paid days off, the average private sector worker is only likely to see about 10 paid vacation days and 6 paid holidays — which is “far less than in almost every advanced economy except Japan.”
In contrast, thanks to the European Union’s rules, European countries had at least four weeks — or 20 working days — of paid vacation for all workers who are employed in EU member countries.
Spain ranked as the most generous, offering workers 14 paid holidays, followed by Austria, Germany, and Portugal.
‘Distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal’ between full-time and part-time workers
The study also found a big gap between full-time and part-time employees and how they were granted time off.
In the U.S., while 90% of full-time private sector workers received paid vacation and holiday time, only 40% of part-timers received paid vacation, and 44% got paid holidays.
There was an income gap as well: The top 25% of income earners received paid annual vacation and paid holidays at 91% and 93% respectively, while the bottom 25% received 52% and 54% respectively.
“For U.S. employees who do receive paid vacation and holidays, the distribution of those benefits is extremely unequal,” the report found.
A HAVEN FOR WHITE SUPREMACISTS
By Gabriel Pogrund · The Washington Post
ULYSSES, Pa. – The traffic sign that greets visitors on the south side of Ulysses, a tiny town in rural far north-central Pennsylvania, is suitably quaint – a silhouette of a horse-drawn cart reminding drivers that the Amish use the roads, too. But on the north side of town, along the main thoroughfare, is a far different display: a home dedicated to Adolf Hitler, where star-spangled banners and Nazi flags flutter side by side and wooden swastikas stand on poles.
White supremacy has had a continuous presence in Ulysses and surrounding Potter County since the Ku Klux Klan arrived a century ago, giving the town – with a population today of about 650 – improbable national significance. In the mid-2000s, it hosted the World Aryan Congress, a gathering of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Klan members.
This year, after a sting operation, federal prosecutors charged six members of an Aryan Strike Force cell with weapons and drug offenses, contending that they had plotted a suicide attack at an anti-racist protest. A terminally ill member was willing to hide a bomb in his oxygen tank and blow himself up, prosecutors said. The group had met and conducted weapons training in Ulysses.
Neo-Nazis and their opponents here say that white extremists have grown more confident – and confrontational – since the rise of Donald Trump. Two months before the 2016 presidential election, the KKK established a “24 hour Klan Line” and sent goody bags containing lollipops and fliers to hundreds of homes. “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake,” the message read. A regional newspaper ran Klan advertisements saying, “God bless the KKK.”
Local police said the group had not openly recruited in years.
Two weeks later, the area’s two neo-Nazi groups, the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Strike Force, held a “white unity meeting” in Ulysses to discuss their response to Trump and plan joint action. One organizer would not say when the groups had last met, simply commenting: “It’s just a good time.”
Potter County is staunchly Republican and has voted Democratic once since 1888; Trump received 80 percent of the vote, tying with Herbert Hoover for the highest percentage won.
“I can tell you with certainty that since November 2016, activity has doubled, whether it’s feet on the street or money orders or people helping out,” said Daniel Burnside, 43, a woodcarver who owns the Nazi-themed home and directs the state chapter of the National Socialist Movement, a far-right group that was founded in Detroit in the mid-1970s. It has a presence in many states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, and the NSM was among the groups taking part in the violent August 2017 rally in defense of Confederate statues in Charlottesville.
“We have meetings every 30 days,” he said. ” There’s more collaboration.”
Burnside, who declined to say how many local residents were involved in his group, was born in Ulysses and raised there by a grandfather who he said was a Nazi sympathizer who fought in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Burnside said his beloved grandfather drank himself to death because of the war’s impact on him.
The younger Burnside said he joined NSM four years ago but has long harbored anti-Semitic views and is a practicing Odinist – the pagan religion Odinism is popular among some neo-Nazis. Burnside does not see Trump as a leader of the NSM cause but as a politician who amplified long-standing white-nationalist views at the right time.
“Personally, I don’t know about Trump,” he said. “You won’t necessarily see MAGA hats at an NSM meeting. We’re anti-Semitic. Something’s off about Trump with the Jews. That said, we’re strategically aligned. When Trump says something that aligns with us – close the borders, build the wall, look after your own – that’s good: We’ve been saying this for 25 years, but he has made it mainstream.”
“We’re still a white nation, and I respect that he supports that,’ Burnside added. “He’s also highlighted social problems. The kids who go to bed hungry, people who can’t pay their bills, the damage being done to society.”
Daniel Burnside is a woodcarver and a regional leader in the white-supremacist National Socialist Movement. Photo by Brett Carlsen for The Washington Post
Joe Leschner, 38, a white restaurant manager, fled the county this year because of what he said was abuse aimed at him and his wife, Sashena, who is black, after Trump’s election.
After he discovered a KKK leaflet outside their home, Leschner organized an anti-racism gathering in Ulysses. “And these guys drove by us and gave the gun signal, like they’re gonna shoot us,” he said.
One of those who Leschner said made a pistol gesture had previously been jailed for 10 years for an aggravated assault on a black man. This year he was convicted of possession of firearms he was not legally allowed to own and intent to sell drugs.
Photographs of the Leschners were circulated on VK, a Russian-run social media site, with users posting death threats, he said.
“A guy came up to us in a restaurant and said, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’ I wanted to say something, but just couldn’t. This was where I grew up, at the restaurant where I got my first job. My wife was almost in tears,” he recalled.
“We had to leave,” said Leschner, who now runs a restaurant in Frederick, Maryland. “Most people aren’t racist, but there are enough that are and enough who let it happen.”
Kathleen Blee, a University of Pittsburgh sociology professor and expert on white extremism, said Ulysses came to be a nexus of such thinking as like-minded residents gravitated to one another.
“Modern white extremism is different to the KKK in the 1920s or Nazi Germany in that it is exclusively produced through small networks. It is not a mass movement,” she said. “It’s just one person recruiting another. Somebody knowing somebody. . . . You get an extremist in an area, they attract other extremists.”
Ulysses’ most famous resident may have been August Kreis III, 63, a neo-Nazi from New Jersey who moved to town in the 1990s and left about 10 years ago. Kreis made Ulysses the national headquarters of the Aryan Nations group and organized events such as the Aryan World Congress. In 2015, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison on a child-molestation conviction.
Daniel Burnside signs his woodworks with a swastika carved into the bottom of each item he makes. Brett Carlsen For The Washington Post
Pennsylvania has 36 racial hate groups, more than Alabama, Arkansas or Kansas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“This area is well known for white supremacy. It’s got a rich history and the right conditions to thrive,” said Heidi Beirich of the SPLC. “It’s as significant as many areas in the South usually associated with white supremacy.”
Rural Appalachia, which includes Ulysses’s Potter County, has a wary attitude to outside forces – especially the state – that is often cited as a reason that anti-government militia groups and white extremists have prospered here. “There is also an extreme mind-your-own business approach and a belief in individual rights,” Blee said.
Months before the Leschners fled the area, another controversy erupted after a sheriff’s deputy from a neighboring county entered Burnside’s front yard and confiscated a Nazi flag. Burnside called his local police force, demanding that the deputy return the flag and record a video apology. When that did not happen, he went to state police and pursued a theft case. The 23-year-old deputy was forced to return the flag and pay damages. Local police confirmed that he was suspended and left his position shortly after the trial’s conclusion.
Many locals suggested that they were more upset by the deputy’s actions than by the neo-Nazism. One man, an Army veteran who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of being branded a racist, said there was no comparison between World War II Nazis and Ulysses residents.
“World War II was a totally different time period. It’s part of history,” he said. “He can do what he wants. . . . Everyone has their own thing.”
One day recently, Burnside, accompanied by a reporter, drove around town dressed in a shirt featuring Hitler’s face as the main design. None of the locals he chatted with objected to his attire.
City council president Roy Hunt insisted that this reflected the town’s generous spirit.
“We’re a laid-back town, and we’re gonna be nice to everybody,” Hunt said. “I’ve known Danny for twenty years. If you were in town and you walked around with him, you’re right, he’ll be welcome in every store. . . . If you’re nice, people will be nice to you 98 percent of the time.”
“If he were to put something up that said kill all members of a race, in my opinion that would be crossing the line, but he doesn’t have that sign up,” Hunt said.
He added that the town’s Nazi presence had been exaggerated by the news media and opposing groups.
Burnside said he serves the community. “I do fundraisers for American Legion with my artwork. Boys and Girls Clubs, regardless of race or ethnicity, I do fundraisers. . . . The only way I can help white people is by helping everyone.”
Other residents disagree about the impact of the white supremacists’ presence. As he shopped among Burnside’s carved wooden bears and eagle sculptures, some of them signed with a swastika, Tom Lee, a road construction manager, said that he supports the First Amendment and that the Nazi presence “ain’t nothing to do with me. It’s a free country.”
“After a while, you’re not what you were anymore,” he added. “It is America out here, but not in the inner cities anymore.”
William Fish, a 72-year old carpenter, recalled as a child accompanying his mother as she delivered blankets and shoes to the shacks where black field workers lived.
“We’re not a racist town, but there are people who will turn a blind eye when they see racism happening. That’s why we have this history,” he said. “I think it has got worse since Trump, I honestly do. I also think our young people do not today share the same rotten values as older people.”
Belinda Empson, 59, said it pained her that veterans in the Memorial Day parade had to march past Nazi signs.
“My grandson is 8 years old and he’s already asking about the Nazi flags,” said Empson, a retired waitress. “And I don’t want to explain to my grandson what it means, what they’re about. We should have settled this stuff years ago.”
Empson said Ulysses had been divided since Trump’s victory: “I think Trump has opened the gate and said, ‘It’s OK.’ It was not a license, but a subtle, ‘It’s OK.’ I think we are seeing that now.”
“It bothers me,” she added, “because we have good people in this town.”
Wanda Shirk, 68, an English teacher who worked at a Potter County school for 28 years, joked that the town had become LGBT – “Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump.”
“I don’t think everyone here is racist, but I think a lot are racially insensitive,” she said, “and Trump has allowed that to grow.”
By Gabriel Pogrund · The Washington Post
ULYSSES, Pa. – The traffic sign that greets visitors on the south side of Ulysses, a tiny town in rural far north-central Pennsylvania, is suitably quaint – a silhouette of a horse-drawn cart reminding drivers that the Amish use the roads, too. But on the north side of town, along the main thoroughfare, is a far different display: a home dedicated to Adolf Hitler, where star-spangled banners and Nazi flags flutter side by side and wooden swastikas stand on poles.
White supremacy has had a continuous presence in Ulysses and surrounding Potter County since the Ku Klux Klan arrived a century ago, giving the town – with a population today of about 650 – improbable national significance. In the mid-2000s, it hosted the World Aryan Congress, a gathering of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Klan members.
This year, after a sting operation, federal prosecutors charged six members of an Aryan Strike Force cell with weapons and drug offenses, contending that they had plotted a suicide attack at an anti-racist protest. A terminally ill member was willing to hide a bomb in his oxygen tank and blow himself up, prosecutors said. The group had met and conducted weapons training in Ulysses.
Neo-Nazis and their opponents here say that white extremists have grown more confident – and confrontational – since the rise of Donald Trump. Two months before the 2016 presidential election, the KKK established a “24 hour Klan Line” and sent goody bags containing lollipops and fliers to hundreds of homes. “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake,” the message read. A regional newspaper ran Klan advertisements saying, “God bless the KKK.”
Local police said the group had not openly recruited in years.
Two weeks later, the area’s two neo-Nazi groups, the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Strike Force, held a “white unity meeting” in Ulysses to discuss their response to Trump and plan joint action. One organizer would not say when the groups had last met, simply commenting: “It’s just a good time.”
Potter County is staunchly Republican and has voted Democratic once since 1888; Trump received 80 percent of the vote, tying with Herbert Hoover for the highest percentage won.
“I can tell you with certainty that since November 2016, activity has doubled, whether it’s feet on the street or money orders or people helping out,” said Daniel Burnside, 43, a woodcarver who owns the Nazi-themed home and directs the state chapter of the National Socialist Movement, a far-right group that was founded in Detroit in the mid-1970s. It has a presence in many states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, and the NSM was among the groups taking part in the violent August 2017 rally in defense of Confederate statues in Charlottesville.
“We have meetings every 30 days,” he said. ” There’s more collaboration.”
Burnside, who declined to say how many local residents were involved in his group, was born in Ulysses and raised there by a grandfather who he said was a Nazi sympathizer who fought in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Burnside said his beloved grandfather drank himself to death because of the war’s impact on him.
The younger Burnside said he joined NSM four years ago but has long harbored anti-Semitic views and is a practicing Odinist – the pagan religion Odinism is popular among some neo-Nazis. Burnside does not see Trump as a leader of the NSM cause but as a politician who amplified long-standing white-nationalist views at the right time.
“Personally, I don’t know about Trump,” he said. “You won’t necessarily see MAGA hats at an NSM meeting. We’re anti-Semitic. Something’s off about Trump with the Jews. That said, we’re strategically aligned. When Trump says something that aligns with us – close the borders, build the wall, look after your own – that’s good: We’ve been saying this for 25 years, but he has made it mainstream.”
“We’re still a white nation, and I respect that he supports that,’ Burnside added. “He’s also highlighted social problems. The kids who go to bed hungry, people who can’t pay their bills, the damage being done to society.”
Daniel Burnside is a woodcarver and a regional leader in the white-supremacist National Socialist Movement. Photo by Brett Carlsen for The Washington Post
Joe Leschner, 38, a white restaurant manager, fled the county this year because of what he said was abuse aimed at him and his wife, Sashena, who is black, after Trump’s election.
After he discovered a KKK leaflet outside their home, Leschner organized an anti-racism gathering in Ulysses. “And these guys drove by us and gave the gun signal, like they’re gonna shoot us,” he said.
One of those who Leschner said made a pistol gesture had previously been jailed for 10 years for an aggravated assault on a black man. This year he was convicted of possession of firearms he was not legally allowed to own and intent to sell drugs.
Photographs of the Leschners were circulated on VK, a Russian-run social media site, with users posting death threats, he said.
“A guy came up to us in a restaurant and said, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’ I wanted to say something, but just couldn’t. This was where I grew up, at the restaurant where I got my first job. My wife was almost in tears,” he recalled.
“We had to leave,” said Leschner, who now runs a restaurant in Frederick, Maryland. “Most people aren’t racist, but there are enough that are and enough who let it happen.”
Kathleen Blee, a University of Pittsburgh sociology professor and expert on white extremism, said Ulysses came to be a nexus of such thinking as like-minded residents gravitated to one another.
“Modern white extremism is different to the KKK in the 1920s or Nazi Germany in that it is exclusively produced through small networks. It is not a mass movement,” she said. “It’s just one person recruiting another. Somebody knowing somebody. . . . You get an extremist in an area, they attract other extremists.”
Ulysses’ most famous resident may have been August Kreis III, 63, a neo-Nazi from New Jersey who moved to town in the 1990s and left about 10 years ago. Kreis made Ulysses the national headquarters of the Aryan Nations group and organized events such as the Aryan World Congress. In 2015, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison on a child-molestation conviction.
Daniel Burnside signs his woodworks with a swastika carved into the bottom of each item he makes. Brett Carlsen For The Washington Post
Pennsylvania has 36 racial hate groups, more than Alabama, Arkansas or Kansas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“This area is well known for white supremacy. It’s got a rich history and the right conditions to thrive,” said Heidi Beirich of the SPLC. “It’s as significant as many areas in the South usually associated with white supremacy.”
Rural Appalachia, which includes Ulysses’s Potter County, has a wary attitude to outside forces – especially the state – that is often cited as a reason that anti-government militia groups and white extremists have prospered here. “There is also an extreme mind-your-own business approach and a belief in individual rights,” Blee said.
Months before the Leschners fled the area, another controversy erupted after a sheriff’s deputy from a neighboring county entered Burnside’s front yard and confiscated a Nazi flag. Burnside called his local police force, demanding that the deputy return the flag and record a video apology. When that did not happen, he went to state police and pursued a theft case. The 23-year-old deputy was forced to return the flag and pay damages. Local police confirmed that he was suspended and left his position shortly after the trial’s conclusion.
Many locals suggested that they were more upset by the deputy’s actions than by the neo-Nazism. One man, an Army veteran who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of being branded a racist, said there was no comparison between World War II Nazis and Ulysses residents.
“World War II was a totally different time period. It’s part of history,” he said. “He can do what he wants. . . . Everyone has their own thing.”
One day recently, Burnside, accompanied by a reporter, drove around town dressed in a shirt featuring Hitler’s face as the main design. None of the locals he chatted with objected to his attire.
City council president Roy Hunt insisted that this reflected the town’s generous spirit.
“We’re a laid-back town, and we’re gonna be nice to everybody,” Hunt said. “I’ve known Danny for twenty years. If you were in town and you walked around with him, you’re right, he’ll be welcome in every store. . . . If you’re nice, people will be nice to you 98 percent of the time.”
“If he were to put something up that said kill all members of a race, in my opinion that would be crossing the line, but he doesn’t have that sign up,” Hunt said.
He added that the town’s Nazi presence had been exaggerated by the news media and opposing groups.
Burnside said he serves the community. “I do fundraisers for American Legion with my artwork. Boys and Girls Clubs, regardless of race or ethnicity, I do fundraisers. . . . The only way I can help white people is by helping everyone.”
Other residents disagree about the impact of the white supremacists’ presence. As he shopped among Burnside’s carved wooden bears and eagle sculptures, some of them signed with a swastika, Tom Lee, a road construction manager, said that he supports the First Amendment and that the Nazi presence “ain’t nothing to do with me. It’s a free country.”
“After a while, you’re not what you were anymore,” he added. “It is America out here, but not in the inner cities anymore.”
William Fish, a 72-year old carpenter, recalled as a child accompanying his mother as she delivered blankets and shoes to the shacks where black field workers lived.
“We’re not a racist town, but there are people who will turn a blind eye when they see racism happening. That’s why we have this history,” he said. “I think it has got worse since Trump, I honestly do. I also think our young people do not today share the same rotten values as older people.”
Belinda Empson, 59, said it pained her that veterans in the Memorial Day parade had to march past Nazi signs.
“My grandson is 8 years old and he’s already asking about the Nazi flags,” said Empson, a retired waitress. “And I don’t want to explain to my grandson what it means, what they’re about. We should have settled this stuff years ago.”
Empson said Ulysses had been divided since Trump’s victory: “I think Trump has opened the gate and said, ‘It’s OK.’ It was not a license, but a subtle, ‘It’s OK.’ I think we are seeing that now.”
“It bothers me,” she added, “because we have good people in this town.”
Wanda Shirk, 68, an English teacher who worked at a Potter County school for 28 years, joked that the town had become LGBT – “Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump.”
“I don’t think everyone here is racist, but I think a lot are racially insensitive,” she said, “and Trump has allowed that to grow.”
A MINIMUM-WAGE WORKER NEEDS 2.5 FULL-TIME JOBS TO AFFORD A ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT IN MOST OF THE US
By Hillary Hoffower
What do you get when you combine minimum wage with increasing apartment rents? Many workers who can't afford a place to live.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition's (NLIHC) annual report recently took a look at the Housing Wage, an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker needs to earn to afford a rental home at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's fair-market rent. That means spending no more than 30% of their income on housing costs — the typical rule of thumb when budgeting for housing.
NLIHC found that a worker needs to earn $17.90 an hour at a full-time job — 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year — to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment. That's over $10 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Let's look at the math: If a worker holds two full-time minimum wage jobs, they'd be earning $14.50 an hour total — still under the $17.90 needed to afford rent and have 70% of your income left over for non-housing related expenses. The worker would have to take on another, part-time, minimum-wage job to make up the difference. All things considered, that's a 99-hour work week, 52 weeks a year.
The map below shows the hourly wage needed to afford a fair-market rent, one-bedroom apartment by state, assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks a year, as calculated by the NLIHC. This is also known as the "housing wage."
Only five states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington — have one-bedrooms affordable for minimum-wage workers across 22 counties.
All of these states have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage, but if you're looking for housing outside of the 22 counties, even these higher minimum wages aren't enough.
The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment in Washington is $21.65. A worker would need income from two jobs at Washington's minimum wage of $11.50 (the highest of all five states) to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Workers fare a little better in Arizona, where the minimum wage of $10.50 is actually the lowest of the five states. The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment there is $14.64.
Even Arkansas, which has the most affordable housing in the country, according to NLIHC data, has a higher one-bedroom housing wage ($10.98) than minimum wage ($8.50).
Lastly, Hawaii, the state with the most expensive housing: The minimum wage there is $10.10, and the housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment is $27.44. If a worker held 2.5 full-time jobs, they would make $25.70 an hour — that's more than the national housing wage, yet still not enough for Hawaii's steep real estate market. A worker in Hawaii would have to work almost three full-time jobs just to afford a one-bedroom rental.
By Hillary Hoffower
What do you get when you combine minimum wage with increasing apartment rents? Many workers who can't afford a place to live.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition's (NLIHC) annual report recently took a look at the Housing Wage, an estimate of the hourly wage a full-time worker needs to earn to afford a rental home at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's fair-market rent. That means spending no more than 30% of their income on housing costs — the typical rule of thumb when budgeting for housing.
NLIHC found that a worker needs to earn $17.90 an hour at a full-time job — 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year — to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment. That's over $10 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Let's look at the math: If a worker holds two full-time minimum wage jobs, they'd be earning $14.50 an hour total — still under the $17.90 needed to afford rent and have 70% of your income left over for non-housing related expenses. The worker would have to take on another, part-time, minimum-wage job to make up the difference. All things considered, that's a 99-hour work week, 52 weeks a year.
The map below shows the hourly wage needed to afford a fair-market rent, one-bedroom apartment by state, assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks a year, as calculated by the NLIHC. This is also known as the "housing wage."
Only five states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington — have one-bedrooms affordable for minimum-wage workers across 22 counties.
All of these states have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage, but if you're looking for housing outside of the 22 counties, even these higher minimum wages aren't enough.
The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment in Washington is $21.65. A worker would need income from two jobs at Washington's minimum wage of $11.50 (the highest of all five states) to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Workers fare a little better in Arizona, where the minimum wage of $10.50 is actually the lowest of the five states. The housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment there is $14.64.
Even Arkansas, which has the most affordable housing in the country, according to NLIHC data, has a higher one-bedroom housing wage ($10.98) than minimum wage ($8.50).
Lastly, Hawaii, the state with the most expensive housing: The minimum wage there is $10.10, and the housing wage for a one-bedroom apartment is $27.44. If a worker held 2.5 full-time jobs, they would make $25.70 an hour — that's more than the national housing wage, yet still not enough for Hawaii's steep real estate market. A worker in Hawaii would have to work almost three full-time jobs just to afford a one-bedroom rental.
BACKGROUND CHECKS CAN’T PREVENT GUN VIOLENCE — BECAUSE THE NRA DESIGNED THEM TO FAIL
Gun control advocates hope to expand the background-check system.
But it’s a fake solution crafted by the NRA
By Ladd Everitt
Since America’s instant check system for gun buyers went online in November 1998, the gun control movement and its allies in Congress have made the expansion of the system their primary focus. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was designed to be fast and easy. Licensed dealers call in a prospective gun buyer’s information to an FBI call center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where checkers run the name through three separate computer databases of past criminal offenders and those adjudicated for mental illness. The process takes only a few minutes.
But the efficiency comes with a price. NICS has failed spectacularly in one high-profile shooting after another, allowing individuals with a history of violence and/or severe mental illness to legally purchase weapons later used in a slaughter.
By ignoring this problem with NICS, gun control advocates seem to be forgetting the history of the Brady Bill and the method by which computer background checks came into being. The NRA, not the gun control movement, was the creator of the FBI call-in system. The system was designed to fail from the start.
The deliberate mediocrity of our background checks has its roots in an era when stopping violent gun buyers was a hopeless exercise.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Persuader, lobbied hard for the Gun Control Act of 1968, which he said should prevent “hardened criminals, or alcoholics, or drug addicts or mentally unstable” citizens from buying guns. But Congress sent him a weak bill, which he reluctantly signed on Oct. 22, 1968, with an accompanying statement:
“This bill — as big as this bill is — still falls short, because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I asked for the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those who carry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country — more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country. The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year. But the key to effective crime control remains, in my judgment, effective gun control. And those of us who are really concerned about crime just must — somehow, someday — make our voices felt. We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves — the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted … We have made much progress — but not nearly enough.”
When Americans bought guns, they filled out a form with questions about their criminal and mental health history. The problem was that no one was tasked by the Gun Control Act with checking buyers’ answers for validity. Forget about licensing and registration. America’s strategy to keep dangerous people from getting guns was an honor system, and Johnson knew it.
Thirteen years later, on March 30, 1981, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan, Press Secretary Jim Brady, and two law enforcement officers outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Reagan was hospitalized and nearly died. Brady was catastrophically injured and disabled for the rest of his life. The officers recovered.
Hinckley, a severely mentally ill college dropout, purchased his handgun from a Dallas pawnshop for $47.95. Americans were outraged that a man this deranged could legally arm himself without having any type of background check. Within weeks, legislation had been introduced in Congress to create a federal waiting period for handgun buyers while their criminal and mental health background would be checked by law enforcement.
The effort didn’t find traction, however, until Jim Brady and his wife Sarah began working with Handgun Control, Inc. in 1985 (HCI later became the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence). Two years later, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, dubbed the “Brady Bill,” was introduced in Congress for the first time by Rep. Ed Feighan, D-Ohio. The bill proposed creating a waiting period of seven business days for gun purchases, during which time state and local law enforcement (the people who know their communities the best) would conduct background investigations to determine if buyers were prohibited purchasers. This thorough look into a gun buyer’s criminal and mental health background would include contacts with courts, psychiatric institutions, character witnesses, physicians and other law enforcement agencies.
The NRA opposed the Brady Bill outright, claiming it would “impose total, strict gun control on all America.” The bill, however, was overwhelmingly popular with the public and supported by a large coalition of police groups, the powerful Law Enforcement Steering Committee headed by Baltimore police chief Neil Behan.
Author Osha Gray Davidson writes that on one occasion, 120 uniformed officers walked through the U.S. Capitol building handing out buttons that read “Cops Know Seven Days Can Save a Life.” The push to check gun buyers’ background carried an air of inevitability about it. “There is a great deal of interest in Congress in having something positive to vote for,” NRA lobbyist Jim Baker bemoaned. The NRA needed a plan to mortally wound whatever background check bill eventually got across the finish line.
In September 1988, they got one. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., introduced an amendment as a substitute to the Brady Bill in the House of Representatives. McCollum’s substitute tasked the U.S. attorney general with studying the feasibility of creating a point-of-sale “instant check” hotline for licensed dealers to call to screen handgun purchasers. A buyer’s name and social security number would be checked against a list/database of all felons and fugitives in the United States in a matter of minutes -- theoretically -- to determine if the sale could go through.
To the layman, the idea might have seemed feasible, but the NRA knew it would never work as promised. Very few states had computerized felony records in 1988. Mental health records were all on paper. When McCollum’s legislative director, Don Morrissey, was asked point-blank if his boss’s amendment was designed to torpedo the Brady Bill, his response was, “I wouldn’t quibble with that assessment. I think the Brady Bill is silly. It won’t work.”
Nonetheless, the NRA’s bait-and-switch ploy worked. The House passed McCollum’s substitute and voted the tougher Brady Bill down. A mandate to study an instant-check study then became law as part of an omnibus crime bill shortly thereafter.
In November 1989, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh submitted DOJ’s findings on the viability of an instant check system to Congress. The study’s assessment was blunt: “A comprehensive, accurate system for identifying felons at the point of sale cannot be fully accomplished in the near term.” The same day the study was released, Jim Brady told a Senate subcommittee, “I had no choice to be here today because too many members of Congress have been gutless on this issue.”
An unexpected twist, however, changed Brady’s fortunes. On March 28, 1991, former president and conservative icon Ronald Reagan announced his support for the Brady Bill during a speech at George Washington University Medical Center. “You do know that I’m a member of the National Rifle Association,” Reagan told those in attendance. “But I want you to know something else, and I am going to say it in clear, unmistakable language: I support the Brady Bill and I urge the Congress to enact it without further delay.”
The following day, Reagan published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Why I’m for the Brady Bill.” Referring to John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, he wrote, “This nightmare might never have happened if legislation that is before Congress now — the Brady bill — had been law back in 1981.”
The NRA still had its poison pill. On May 8, 1991, West Virginia Rep. Harley Staggers introduced an amendment to the Brady Bill which called for the immediate implementation of a nationwide “instant” criminal background check hotline. The amendment gave the Department of Justice (DOJ) just six months to put up the hotline — despite the agency’s assessment less than two years earlier that such a project could not be accomplished in the near term. An ensuing congressional study was even more pessimistic, estimating it would take five to 10 years.
The Staggers Amendment was defeated, and House Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., forged a compromise on background checks that could pass both the House and Senate. The resulting legislation reduced the waiting period for handgun purchases from seven to five days, and called for the waiting period to be scrapped altogether once the instant check system was launched.
The NRA opposed even this modest plan. Meanwhile, HCI’s lone colleague in the gun control movement, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (later to become the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence), was losing patience with this sausage-making process (at one point the Brady Bill was known as the Dole-Metzenbaum-Mitchell-Domenici-Kohl-Thurmand-Gore Modification of the Mitchell-Kohl-Gore-Metzenbaum Provision). "The Brady Bill is a nice, innocuous piece of legislation,” NCBH founder Mike Beard told author Osha Gray Davidson. “To us, it's a minor step forward."
The Mitchell/Dole compromise passed both the House and Senate, but the omnibus crime bill it was attached to died in the Senate after President George H.W. Bush threatened a veto. The NRA had survived to fight one more round.
In November 1993, the Brady Bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in a form similar to the Mitchell/Dole compromise. The FBI was tasked with setting up the NICS database to screen handgun buyers and long gun buyers (a win for gun control advocates) by November 1998. Gun dealers were authorized to proceed with sales if the FBI did not respond to a NICS query within 72 hours. Congress authorized $200 million to help states computerize their criminal records.
The NRA had pulled off a significant victory: Gun control advocates had originally hoped for a seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases during which time state and local law enforcement professionals would do real legwork to investigate the criminal and mental health background of buyers. But once NICS launched in a few short years, they’d be left with a single ping to a federal computer database; a background “investigation” with little or no human interaction that would be completed in about 90 seconds in most cases.
The NRA took to the courts to have the Brady Law (and their own instant check system) struck down. In 1994 and 1995, the organization funded lawsuits in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming, using radical sheriffs like Richard Mack and Jay Printz as plaintiffs. The matter was eventually settled in the Supreme Court in 1997 in the case of Printz v. United States. In a 5-4 majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia (who would later disrupt longstanding Second Amendment jurisprudence in D.C. v. Heller), the Court refused to toss out the Brady Law, but agreed with the NRA on an important point: The federal government could not mandate that state and local law enforcement officials conduct background investigations on gun buyers during the Brady Law’s five-day waiting period because it violated the 10th Amendment. State and local officials could voluntarily conduct such investigations, however.
When the National Instant Criminal Background Check System was officially launched in November 1998, the database was missing millions of disqualifying records that the 50 states — bolstered by the ruling in Printz v. United States — had yet to submit to the FBI. The problem was so profound that today, 20 years later, gun control organizations are still lobbying for legislation to incentivize states (and even federal agencies) to get criminal, mental health and domestic violence records into NICS.
The NRA was certainly exaggerating in its assessment of the Brady Bill as “total, strict gun control.” But the gun control movement also exaggerated. The background check system was full of loopholes, projecting a dangerously misleading sense of potency.
*
The gun control movement’s obsession with expanding the NICS system crystallized after the mass shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. The two shooters obtained their firearms through unregulated private sellers because they were too young to pass the background check required by licensed gun dealers. Most Americans learned for the first time that individuals could legally sell firearms in off-the-books transactions.
The private sales loophole stemmed from the 1968 Gun Control Act, which allowed individuals not “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms to sell guns privately without conducting background checks on buyers or maintaining any records of sale. What did “engaged in the business” mean? The Gun Control Act was silent on this question.
Members of Congress felt intense pressure to respond to the Columbine shooting and nearly moved legislation to regulate private sales at gun shows to President Clinton’s desk for his signature. In August 1999, however, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch was able to kill the legislation in conference committee at the last minute to the delight of NRA lobbyist James Baker, who remarked “nothing is better than anything.”
Since Columbine, there have been other examples of high-profile shooters who obtained their firearms through private sales, but they are few and far between. This is because many individuals with a history of violence are able to pass instant checks and legally purchase firearms. They don’t need to exploit the private sales loophole.
Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz is just one recent example. The roll call of killers who have defeated the instant check system is almost without end: James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho, Omar Mateen, Aaron Alexis, Elliot Rodger, Wade Michael Page, Ian Stawicki, Steven Kazmierczak. All of them were approved by NICS despite displaying multiple red flags for unstable, violent behavior that were picked up by family, friends, classmates, law enforcement or the military. There should be ample doubt about the viability of instant screening.
Advocacy for expanded or universal background checks is not without merit, however. Our instant check system might be premised on completing sales as quickly as possible, but there’s no denying it has saved many lives. To date, NICS has stopped more than 1.5 million prohibited purchasers from buying guns through federally licensed dealers. This figure does not include denials by more than a dozen “point of contact” states that process their own background checks (and typically search additional state criminal databases). The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says the total number of denied, prohibited purchasers exceeds 3 million. Some level of screening on a gun sale is obviously better than no screening at all. But why is the gun control movement so adamant on keeping an instant check system designed by the NRA in perpetuity when safer alternatives are available?
And why do we seem wed to prohibited categories for gun buyers that were drawn up a half-century ago, when the United States government described mentally ill Americans as “mental defectives”?
Breaking our obsession with NICS and stopping all violent individuals from buying guns requires fresh ideas. Here are three:
1) Institute a national licensing and registration system. President Johnson wasn’t tilting at windmills in 1968. Virtually every other democracy has a longstanding, national licensing process for gun owners and a registration requirement for their firearms. These systems are the primary reason why other democracies have dramatically lower rates of gun death (and overall homicide) than the United States.
The licensing process involves a waiting period and a background investigation by law enforcement, which is not limited to computer database queries (e.g., interviews with friends/family/co-workers, requests for letters from physicians, safety training requirements, etc). The registration process means gun owners are 100 percent responsible for their weapons. They have to report lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement promptly and are unable to sell or transfer a registered firearm to another party without verifying the buyer’s background and changing “title” (registration) on the weapon.
The Printz v. United States ruling wouldn’t be an impediment to such a system because it would be run by the federal government rather than state and local officials (although licensing/registration would certainly benefit from cooperation between the three parties).
2) Redraw the prohibited categories for gun buyers. Although New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg was able to enact an amendment into law in 1996 that added individuals under active restraining orders and those convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence to the list of prohibited purchasers in the Gun Control Act, there are still many categories of people at high risk for violent behavior who can legally buy guns today. This includes violent misdemeanor offenders, abusive dating partners, stalkers, and domestic abusers under temporary restraining orders. Redrawing the prohibited categories for gun buyers would allow us to use the best research available today to determine who is more likely to be violent in the future.
This wouldn’t necessarily mean just adding new categories to the prohibited list. It could also involve allowing some people who are currently prohibited because of disability to buy and own firearms again. For example, an individual who was involuntarily committed years ago, but who has improved with regular treatment and is now mentally healthy.
The process of redefining prohibited purchasers is already underway in piecemeal form. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Rep. Dan Donovan, R-N.Y., Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and other members of Congress have introduced legislation that would prohibit the following parties from buying/owning firearms: those under temporary restraining orders, individuals convicted of hate crimes, non-married partners under restraining orders and stalkers with misdemeanor convictions.
3) Reinstate a federal waiting period for gun sales. This could be a waiting period of seven days, like the original Brady Law, or some other duration. Because a federal mandate would be blocked by the Prinz v. United States ruling, local and state law enforcement officials would be incentivized to conduct background investigations on gun buyers (for the first time since 1994-1998) via a carrot-and-stick approach using federal grants. Gun dealers would be required to get a yes-or-no answer from state and local law enforcement before selling a firearm.
There is nothing inevitable about either the instant check system or our outdated, prohibited categories for gun buyers. If we want to have a system that consistently stops individuals with a history of violence from legally buying guns in the United States of America, we can — like every other free society.
Gun control advocates hope to expand the background-check system.
But it’s a fake solution crafted by the NRA
By Ladd Everitt
Since America’s instant check system for gun buyers went online in November 1998, the gun control movement and its allies in Congress have made the expansion of the system their primary focus. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was designed to be fast and easy. Licensed dealers call in a prospective gun buyer’s information to an FBI call center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where checkers run the name through three separate computer databases of past criminal offenders and those adjudicated for mental illness. The process takes only a few minutes.
But the efficiency comes with a price. NICS has failed spectacularly in one high-profile shooting after another, allowing individuals with a history of violence and/or severe mental illness to legally purchase weapons later used in a slaughter.
By ignoring this problem with NICS, gun control advocates seem to be forgetting the history of the Brady Bill and the method by which computer background checks came into being. The NRA, not the gun control movement, was the creator of the FBI call-in system. The system was designed to fail from the start.
The deliberate mediocrity of our background checks has its roots in an era when stopping violent gun buyers was a hopeless exercise.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Persuader, lobbied hard for the Gun Control Act of 1968, which he said should prevent “hardened criminals, or alcoholics, or drug addicts or mentally unstable” citizens from buying guns. But Congress sent him a weak bill, which he reluctantly signed on Oct. 22, 1968, with an accompanying statement:
“This bill — as big as this bill is — still falls short, because we just could not get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I asked for the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those who carry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country — more firearms than families. If guns are to be kept out of the hands of the criminal, out of the hands of the insane, and out of the hands of the irresponsible, then we just must have licensing. If the criminal with a gun is to be tracked down quickly, then we must have registration in this country. The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year. But the key to effective crime control remains, in my judgment, effective gun control. And those of us who are really concerned about crime just must — somehow, someday — make our voices felt. We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves — the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted … We have made much progress — but not nearly enough.”
When Americans bought guns, they filled out a form with questions about their criminal and mental health history. The problem was that no one was tasked by the Gun Control Act with checking buyers’ answers for validity. Forget about licensing and registration. America’s strategy to keep dangerous people from getting guns was an honor system, and Johnson knew it.
Thirteen years later, on March 30, 1981, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan, Press Secretary Jim Brady, and two law enforcement officers outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Reagan was hospitalized and nearly died. Brady was catastrophically injured and disabled for the rest of his life. The officers recovered.
Hinckley, a severely mentally ill college dropout, purchased his handgun from a Dallas pawnshop for $47.95. Americans were outraged that a man this deranged could legally arm himself without having any type of background check. Within weeks, legislation had been introduced in Congress to create a federal waiting period for handgun buyers while their criminal and mental health background would be checked by law enforcement.
The effort didn’t find traction, however, until Jim Brady and his wife Sarah began working with Handgun Control, Inc. in 1985 (HCI later became the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence). Two years later, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, dubbed the “Brady Bill,” was introduced in Congress for the first time by Rep. Ed Feighan, D-Ohio. The bill proposed creating a waiting period of seven business days for gun purchases, during which time state and local law enforcement (the people who know their communities the best) would conduct background investigations to determine if buyers were prohibited purchasers. This thorough look into a gun buyer’s criminal and mental health background would include contacts with courts, psychiatric institutions, character witnesses, physicians and other law enforcement agencies.
The NRA opposed the Brady Bill outright, claiming it would “impose total, strict gun control on all America.” The bill, however, was overwhelmingly popular with the public and supported by a large coalition of police groups, the powerful Law Enforcement Steering Committee headed by Baltimore police chief Neil Behan.
Author Osha Gray Davidson writes that on one occasion, 120 uniformed officers walked through the U.S. Capitol building handing out buttons that read “Cops Know Seven Days Can Save a Life.” The push to check gun buyers’ background carried an air of inevitability about it. “There is a great deal of interest in Congress in having something positive to vote for,” NRA lobbyist Jim Baker bemoaned. The NRA needed a plan to mortally wound whatever background check bill eventually got across the finish line.
In September 1988, they got one. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., introduced an amendment as a substitute to the Brady Bill in the House of Representatives. McCollum’s substitute tasked the U.S. attorney general with studying the feasibility of creating a point-of-sale “instant check” hotline for licensed dealers to call to screen handgun purchasers. A buyer’s name and social security number would be checked against a list/database of all felons and fugitives in the United States in a matter of minutes -- theoretically -- to determine if the sale could go through.
To the layman, the idea might have seemed feasible, but the NRA knew it would never work as promised. Very few states had computerized felony records in 1988. Mental health records were all on paper. When McCollum’s legislative director, Don Morrissey, was asked point-blank if his boss’s amendment was designed to torpedo the Brady Bill, his response was, “I wouldn’t quibble with that assessment. I think the Brady Bill is silly. It won’t work.”
Nonetheless, the NRA’s bait-and-switch ploy worked. The House passed McCollum’s substitute and voted the tougher Brady Bill down. A mandate to study an instant-check study then became law as part of an omnibus crime bill shortly thereafter.
In November 1989, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh submitted DOJ’s findings on the viability of an instant check system to Congress. The study’s assessment was blunt: “A comprehensive, accurate system for identifying felons at the point of sale cannot be fully accomplished in the near term.” The same day the study was released, Jim Brady told a Senate subcommittee, “I had no choice to be here today because too many members of Congress have been gutless on this issue.”
An unexpected twist, however, changed Brady’s fortunes. On March 28, 1991, former president and conservative icon Ronald Reagan announced his support for the Brady Bill during a speech at George Washington University Medical Center. “You do know that I’m a member of the National Rifle Association,” Reagan told those in attendance. “But I want you to know something else, and I am going to say it in clear, unmistakable language: I support the Brady Bill and I urge the Congress to enact it without further delay.”
The following day, Reagan published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Why I’m for the Brady Bill.” Referring to John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, he wrote, “This nightmare might never have happened if legislation that is before Congress now — the Brady bill — had been law back in 1981.”
The NRA still had its poison pill. On May 8, 1991, West Virginia Rep. Harley Staggers introduced an amendment to the Brady Bill which called for the immediate implementation of a nationwide “instant” criminal background check hotline. The amendment gave the Department of Justice (DOJ) just six months to put up the hotline — despite the agency’s assessment less than two years earlier that such a project could not be accomplished in the near term. An ensuing congressional study was even more pessimistic, estimating it would take five to 10 years.
The Staggers Amendment was defeated, and House Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., forged a compromise on background checks that could pass both the House and Senate. The resulting legislation reduced the waiting period for handgun purchases from seven to five days, and called for the waiting period to be scrapped altogether once the instant check system was launched.
The NRA opposed even this modest plan. Meanwhile, HCI’s lone colleague in the gun control movement, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (later to become the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence), was losing patience with this sausage-making process (at one point the Brady Bill was known as the Dole-Metzenbaum-Mitchell-Domenici-Kohl-Thurmand-Gore Modification of the Mitchell-Kohl-Gore-Metzenbaum Provision). "The Brady Bill is a nice, innocuous piece of legislation,” NCBH founder Mike Beard told author Osha Gray Davidson. “To us, it's a minor step forward."
The Mitchell/Dole compromise passed both the House and Senate, but the omnibus crime bill it was attached to died in the Senate after President George H.W. Bush threatened a veto. The NRA had survived to fight one more round.
In November 1993, the Brady Bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in a form similar to the Mitchell/Dole compromise. The FBI was tasked with setting up the NICS database to screen handgun buyers and long gun buyers (a win for gun control advocates) by November 1998. Gun dealers were authorized to proceed with sales if the FBI did not respond to a NICS query within 72 hours. Congress authorized $200 million to help states computerize their criminal records.
The NRA had pulled off a significant victory: Gun control advocates had originally hoped for a seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases during which time state and local law enforcement professionals would do real legwork to investigate the criminal and mental health background of buyers. But once NICS launched in a few short years, they’d be left with a single ping to a federal computer database; a background “investigation” with little or no human interaction that would be completed in about 90 seconds in most cases.
The NRA took to the courts to have the Brady Law (and their own instant check system) struck down. In 1994 and 1995, the organization funded lawsuits in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming, using radical sheriffs like Richard Mack and Jay Printz as plaintiffs. The matter was eventually settled in the Supreme Court in 1997 in the case of Printz v. United States. In a 5-4 majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia (who would later disrupt longstanding Second Amendment jurisprudence in D.C. v. Heller), the Court refused to toss out the Brady Law, but agreed with the NRA on an important point: The federal government could not mandate that state and local law enforcement officials conduct background investigations on gun buyers during the Brady Law’s five-day waiting period because it violated the 10th Amendment. State and local officials could voluntarily conduct such investigations, however.
When the National Instant Criminal Background Check System was officially launched in November 1998, the database was missing millions of disqualifying records that the 50 states — bolstered by the ruling in Printz v. United States — had yet to submit to the FBI. The problem was so profound that today, 20 years later, gun control organizations are still lobbying for legislation to incentivize states (and even federal agencies) to get criminal, mental health and domestic violence records into NICS.
The NRA was certainly exaggerating in its assessment of the Brady Bill as “total, strict gun control.” But the gun control movement also exaggerated. The background check system was full of loopholes, projecting a dangerously misleading sense of potency.
*
The gun control movement’s obsession with expanding the NICS system crystallized after the mass shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. The two shooters obtained their firearms through unregulated private sellers because they were too young to pass the background check required by licensed gun dealers. Most Americans learned for the first time that individuals could legally sell firearms in off-the-books transactions.
The private sales loophole stemmed from the 1968 Gun Control Act, which allowed individuals not “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms to sell guns privately without conducting background checks on buyers or maintaining any records of sale. What did “engaged in the business” mean? The Gun Control Act was silent on this question.
Members of Congress felt intense pressure to respond to the Columbine shooting and nearly moved legislation to regulate private sales at gun shows to President Clinton’s desk for his signature. In August 1999, however, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch was able to kill the legislation in conference committee at the last minute to the delight of NRA lobbyist James Baker, who remarked “nothing is better than anything.”
Since Columbine, there have been other examples of high-profile shooters who obtained their firearms through private sales, but they are few and far between. This is because many individuals with a history of violence are able to pass instant checks and legally purchase firearms. They don’t need to exploit the private sales loophole.
Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz is just one recent example. The roll call of killers who have defeated the instant check system is almost without end: James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Seung-Hui Cho, Omar Mateen, Aaron Alexis, Elliot Rodger, Wade Michael Page, Ian Stawicki, Steven Kazmierczak. All of them were approved by NICS despite displaying multiple red flags for unstable, violent behavior that were picked up by family, friends, classmates, law enforcement or the military. There should be ample doubt about the viability of instant screening.
Advocacy for expanded or universal background checks is not without merit, however. Our instant check system might be premised on completing sales as quickly as possible, but there’s no denying it has saved many lives. To date, NICS has stopped more than 1.5 million prohibited purchasers from buying guns through federally licensed dealers. This figure does not include denials by more than a dozen “point of contact” states that process their own background checks (and typically search additional state criminal databases). The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says the total number of denied, prohibited purchasers exceeds 3 million. Some level of screening on a gun sale is obviously better than no screening at all. But why is the gun control movement so adamant on keeping an instant check system designed by the NRA in perpetuity when safer alternatives are available?
And why do we seem wed to prohibited categories for gun buyers that were drawn up a half-century ago, when the United States government described mentally ill Americans as “mental defectives”?
Breaking our obsession with NICS and stopping all violent individuals from buying guns requires fresh ideas. Here are three:
1) Institute a national licensing and registration system. President Johnson wasn’t tilting at windmills in 1968. Virtually every other democracy has a longstanding, national licensing process for gun owners and a registration requirement for their firearms. These systems are the primary reason why other democracies have dramatically lower rates of gun death (and overall homicide) than the United States.
The licensing process involves a waiting period and a background investigation by law enforcement, which is not limited to computer database queries (e.g., interviews with friends/family/co-workers, requests for letters from physicians, safety training requirements, etc). The registration process means gun owners are 100 percent responsible for their weapons. They have to report lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement promptly and are unable to sell or transfer a registered firearm to another party without verifying the buyer’s background and changing “title” (registration) on the weapon.
The Printz v. United States ruling wouldn’t be an impediment to such a system because it would be run by the federal government rather than state and local officials (although licensing/registration would certainly benefit from cooperation between the three parties).
2) Redraw the prohibited categories for gun buyers. Although New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg was able to enact an amendment into law in 1996 that added individuals under active restraining orders and those convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence to the list of prohibited purchasers in the Gun Control Act, there are still many categories of people at high risk for violent behavior who can legally buy guns today. This includes violent misdemeanor offenders, abusive dating partners, stalkers, and domestic abusers under temporary restraining orders. Redrawing the prohibited categories for gun buyers would allow us to use the best research available today to determine who is more likely to be violent in the future.
This wouldn’t necessarily mean just adding new categories to the prohibited list. It could also involve allowing some people who are currently prohibited because of disability to buy and own firearms again. For example, an individual who was involuntarily committed years ago, but who has improved with regular treatment and is now mentally healthy.
The process of redefining prohibited purchasers is already underway in piecemeal form. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Rep. Dan Donovan, R-N.Y., Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and other members of Congress have introduced legislation that would prohibit the following parties from buying/owning firearms: those under temporary restraining orders, individuals convicted of hate crimes, non-married partners under restraining orders and stalkers with misdemeanor convictions.
3) Reinstate a federal waiting period for gun sales. This could be a waiting period of seven days, like the original Brady Law, or some other duration. Because a federal mandate would be blocked by the Prinz v. United States ruling, local and state law enforcement officials would be incentivized to conduct background investigations on gun buyers (for the first time since 1994-1998) via a carrot-and-stick approach using federal grants. Gun dealers would be required to get a yes-or-no answer from state and local law enforcement before selling a firearm.
There is nothing inevitable about either the instant check system or our outdated, prohibited categories for gun buyers. If we want to have a system that consistently stops individuals with a history of violence from legally buying guns in the United States of America, we can — like every other free society.
I’VE COVERED GUN VIOLENCE FOR YEARS. THE SOLUTIONS AREN’T A BIG MYSTERY.
America can prevent shootings. But it has to come to grips with the problem.
By German Lopez
It’s going to happen again. There will be another mass shooting in America.
It’s tragic to even write those words, but this is the clear pattern I’ve seen since I began covering mass shootings for Vox in 2014: A horrific tragedy happens. There are calls for action. Maybe something gets introduced in Congress. The debate goes back and forth for a bit. Then people move on — usually after less than a week or two. And so there’s eventually another shooting.
As a reporter, I have become eerily attuned to this horrible American ritual. I do the same thing every single time we get news of a mass shooting: verify reports, write a “what we know” article, and then begin to update our old pieces on guns. I do this almost instinctively at this point — and that terrifies me. No one should get used to this.
There are signs that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed at least 17 people and injured at least 14 others, could have a different outcome. There are protests already planned: the National School Walkout, the March for Our Lives, and more to come. Students with highly sympathetic stories are speaking up. The sense of outrage seems to be sustained in the week after the shooting.
“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” Emma Gonzales, a student survivor, said in a speech at a gun control rally that went viral. “They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. … They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”
But I remain skeptical. The federal government did nothing after 6- and 7-year-olds were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children, six adults, and himself in 2012. Since then, there have been more than 1,600 mass shootings, killing more than 1,800 people and wounding more than 6,400. Many of these events led to protests and calls for actions, but Congress refused to budge every time.
As I see it, the core issue is that America as a whole refuses to even admit it has a serious problem with guns and gun violence. And more than that, lawmakers continue acting like the solutions are some sort of mystery, as if there aren’t years of research and experiences in other countries that show restrictions on firearms can save lives.
Consider President Donald Trump’s speech responding to the Florida shooting: His only mention of guns was a vague reference to “gunfire” as he described what happened. He never even brought up gun control or anything related to that debate, instead vaguely promising to work “with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”
This is America’s elected leader — and he essentially, based on his public response, ignored what the real problem is. And although the White House has in recent days come around to bipartisan proposals to very slightly improve background checks and ban bump stocks, the compromises amount to fairly small changes to America’s weak gun laws.
In my coverage of these shootings, I’ve always focused on solutions through studies and policy ideas that would tamp down on the number of shootings. The good news is there are real solutions out there.
But America can’t get to those solutions until it admits it has a gun problem and confronts the reality of what it would mean to seriously address it.
1) America has a unique gun violence problem.
The US is unique in two key — and related — ways when it comes to guns: It has way more gun deaths than other developed nations, and it has far more guns than any other country in the world.
The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
Mass shootings actually make up a small fraction of America’s gun deaths, constituting less than 2 percent of such deaths in 2013. But America does see a lot of these horrific events: According to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”
The US also has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.
These two facts — on gun deaths and firearm ownership — are related. The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
“Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
This chart, from researcher Josh Tewksbury, shows the correlation between the number of guns and gun deaths among wealthier nations:
Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
2) The problem is guns, not mental illness.
Supporters of gun rights look at America’s high levels of gun violence and argue that guns are not the problem. They point to other issues, from violence in video games and movies to the breakdown of the traditional family.
Most recently, they’ve focused particularly on mental health. This is the only policy issue that Trump mentioned in his speech following the Florida shooting.
But as Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, had mental illnesses. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” he concluded. Other research has backed this up.
The problem, instead, is guns — and America’s abundance of them.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in 1999 found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.
3) The research shows that gun control works The research also suggests that gun control can work. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to firearms can save lives.
Consider Australia’s example.
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history.
Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
Australia’s firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to a review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It’s difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia’s gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: “First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Matthews explained, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant because Australia already had a pretty low number of murders. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”
4) State and local actions are not enough A common counterpoint to the evidence on gun control: If it works so well, why does Chicago have so much gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun policies in the US?
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made this argument after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting: “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there.”
It’s true that Chicago has fairly strict gun laws (although not the strictest). And it’s true that the city has fairly high levels of gun violence (although also not the worst in the US).
This doesn’t, however, expose the failure of gun control altogether, but rather the limit of leaving gun policies to a patchwork of local and state laws. The basic problem: If a city or state passes strict gun control measures, people can simply cross a border to buy guns in a jurisdiction with laxer laws.
Chicago, for example, requires a Firearm Owners Identification card, a background check, a three-day waiting period, and documentation for all firearm sales. But Indiana, across the border, doesn’t require any of this for purchases between two private individuals (including those at gun shows and those who meet through the internet), allowing even someone with a criminal record to buy a firearm without passing a background check or submitting paperwork recording the sale.
So someone from Chicago can drive across the border — to Indiana or to other places with lax gun laws — and buy a gun without any of the big legal hurdles he would face at home. Then that person can resell or give guns to others in Chicago or keep them, leaving no paper trail behind. (This is illegal trafficking under federal law, but Indiana’s lax laws and enforcement — particularly the lack of a paper trail — make it virtually impossible to catch someone until a gun is used in a crime.)
The result: According to a 2014 report from the Chicago Police Department, nearly 60 percent of the guns in crime scenes that were recovered and traced between 2009 and 2013 came from outside the state. About 19 percent came from Indiana — making it the most common state of origin for guns besides Illinois.
This isn’t exclusive to Chicago. A 2016 report from the New York State Office of the Attorney General found that 74 percent of guns used in crimes in New York between 2010 and 2015 came from states with lax gun laws. (The gun trafficking chain from Southern states with weak gun laws to New York is so well-known it even has a name: “the Iron Pipeline.”) And another 2016 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that most of the guns — as much as 70 percent — used in crimes in Mexico, which has strict gun laws, can be traced back to the US, which has generally weaker gun laws.
That doesn’t mean the stricter gun laws in Chicago, New York, or any other jurisdiction have no effect, but it does limit how far these local and state measures can go, since the root of the problem lies in other places’ laws. The only way the pipeline could be stopped would be if all states individually strengthened their gun laws at once — or, more realistically, if the federal government passed a law that enforces stricter rules across the US.
5) America probably needs to go further than anyone wants to admit America’s attention to gun control often focuses on a few specific measures: universal background checks, restrictions on people with mental illnesses buying firearms, and an assault weapons ban, for example. It is rare that American politicians, even on the left, go much further than that. Something like Australia’s law — which amounts to a confiscation program — is never seriously considered.
As Dylan Matthews previously explained, this is a big issue. The US’s gun problem is so dire that it arguably needs solutions that go way further than what we typically see in mainstream proposals — at least, if the US ever hopes to get down to European levels of gun violence.
If the fundamental problem is that America has far too many guns, then policies need to cut the number of guns in circulation right now to seriously reduce the number of gun deaths. Background checks and other restrictions on who can buy a gun can’t achieve that in the short term. What America likely needs, then, is something more like Australia’s mandatory buyback program — essentially, a gun confiscation scheme — paired with a serious ban on specific firearms (including, potentially, all semiautomatic weapons).
But no one in Congress is seriously
But no one in Congress is seriously proposing something that sweeping. The Manchin-Toomey bill, the only gun legislation in Congress after Sandy Hook that came close to becoming law, didn’t even establish universal background checks. Recent proposals have been even milder, taking small steps like banning bump stocks or slightly improving the existing system for background checks.
Part of the holdup is the Second Amendment. While there is reasonable scholarly debate about whether the Second Amendment actually protects all Americans’ individual right to bear arms and prohibits stricter forms of gun control, the reality is the Supreme Court and US lawmakers widely agree that the Second Amendment does put barriers on how far restrictions can go. That would likely rule out anything like the Australian policy response short of a court reinterpretation or a repeal of the Second Amendment, neither of which seems likely.
So the US, for political, cultural, and legal reasons, seems to be unable to take the action that it really needs.
None of that is to say that milder measures are useless. Connecticut’s law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, for example, was followed by a 40 percent drop in gun homicides and a 15 percent reduction in suicides. Similar gains were seen in Missouri. It’s difficult to separate these improvements from long-term trends (since gun homicides have generally been on the decline for decades now), but some of the decreases are likely linked to new restrictions on guns — and that means these measures truly saved lives.
There are also some evidence-based policies that could help outside the realm of gun control, including more stringent regulations and taxes on alcohol, changes in policing, and behavioral intervention programs.
But if America wants to get to the levels of gun deaths that its European peers report, it will likely need to go much, much further on guns in particular.
America can prevent shootings. But it has to come to grips with the problem.
By German Lopez
It’s going to happen again. There will be another mass shooting in America.
It’s tragic to even write those words, but this is the clear pattern I’ve seen since I began covering mass shootings for Vox in 2014: A horrific tragedy happens. There are calls for action. Maybe something gets introduced in Congress. The debate goes back and forth for a bit. Then people move on — usually after less than a week or two. And so there’s eventually another shooting.
As a reporter, I have become eerily attuned to this horrible American ritual. I do the same thing every single time we get news of a mass shooting: verify reports, write a “what we know” article, and then begin to update our old pieces on guns. I do this almost instinctively at this point — and that terrifies me. No one should get used to this.
There are signs that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed at least 17 people and injured at least 14 others, could have a different outcome. There are protests already planned: the National School Walkout, the March for Our Lives, and more to come. Students with highly sympathetic stories are speaking up. The sense of outrage seems to be sustained in the week after the shooting.
“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS,” Emma Gonzales, a student survivor, said in a speech at a gun control rally that went viral. “They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. … They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”
But I remain skeptical. The federal government did nothing after 6- and 7-year-olds were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children, six adults, and himself in 2012. Since then, there have been more than 1,600 mass shootings, killing more than 1,800 people and wounding more than 6,400. Many of these events led to protests and calls for actions, but Congress refused to budge every time.
As I see it, the core issue is that America as a whole refuses to even admit it has a serious problem with guns and gun violence. And more than that, lawmakers continue acting like the solutions are some sort of mystery, as if there aren’t years of research and experiences in other countries that show restrictions on firearms can save lives.
Consider President Donald Trump’s speech responding to the Florida shooting: His only mention of guns was a vague reference to “gunfire” as he described what happened. He never even brought up gun control or anything related to that debate, instead vaguely promising to work “with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”
This is America’s elected leader — and he essentially, based on his public response, ignored what the real problem is. And although the White House has in recent days come around to bipartisan proposals to very slightly improve background checks and ban bump stocks, the compromises amount to fairly small changes to America’s weak gun laws.
In my coverage of these shootings, I’ve always focused on solutions through studies and policy ideas that would tamp down on the number of shootings. The good news is there are real solutions out there.
But America can’t get to those solutions until it admits it has a gun problem and confronts the reality of what it would mean to seriously address it.
1) America has a unique gun violence problem.
The US is unique in two key — and related — ways when it comes to guns: It has way more gun deaths than other developed nations, and it has far more guns than any other country in the world.
The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
Mass shootings actually make up a small fraction of America’s gun deaths, constituting less than 2 percent of such deaths in 2013. But America does see a lot of these horrific events: According to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”
The US also has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.
These two facts — on gun deaths and firearm ownership — are related. The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
“Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
This chart, from researcher Josh Tewksbury, shows the correlation between the number of guns and gun deaths among wealthier nations:
Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
2) The problem is guns, not mental illness.
Supporters of gun rights look at America’s high levels of gun violence and argue that guns are not the problem. They point to other issues, from violence in video games and movies to the breakdown of the traditional family.
Most recently, they’ve focused particularly on mental health. This is the only policy issue that Trump mentioned in his speech following the Florida shooting.
But as Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, had mental illnesses. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” he concluded. Other research has backed this up.
The problem, instead, is guns — and America’s abundance of them.
As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in 1999 found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:
Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”
This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.
3) The research shows that gun control works The research also suggests that gun control can work. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to firearms can save lives.
Consider Australia’s example.
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history.
Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
Australia’s firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to a review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It’s difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia’s gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: “First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Matthews explained, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant because Australia already had a pretty low number of murders. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”
4) State and local actions are not enough A common counterpoint to the evidence on gun control: If it works so well, why does Chicago have so much gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun policies in the US?
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made this argument after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting: “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there.”
It’s true that Chicago has fairly strict gun laws (although not the strictest). And it’s true that the city has fairly high levels of gun violence (although also not the worst in the US).
This doesn’t, however, expose the failure of gun control altogether, but rather the limit of leaving gun policies to a patchwork of local and state laws. The basic problem: If a city or state passes strict gun control measures, people can simply cross a border to buy guns in a jurisdiction with laxer laws.
Chicago, for example, requires a Firearm Owners Identification card, a background check, a three-day waiting period, and documentation for all firearm sales. But Indiana, across the border, doesn’t require any of this for purchases between two private individuals (including those at gun shows and those who meet through the internet), allowing even someone with a criminal record to buy a firearm without passing a background check or submitting paperwork recording the sale.
So someone from Chicago can drive across the border — to Indiana or to other places with lax gun laws — and buy a gun without any of the big legal hurdles he would face at home. Then that person can resell or give guns to others in Chicago or keep them, leaving no paper trail behind. (This is illegal trafficking under federal law, but Indiana’s lax laws and enforcement — particularly the lack of a paper trail — make it virtually impossible to catch someone until a gun is used in a crime.)
The result: According to a 2014 report from the Chicago Police Department, nearly 60 percent of the guns in crime scenes that were recovered and traced between 2009 and 2013 came from outside the state. About 19 percent came from Indiana — making it the most common state of origin for guns besides Illinois.
This isn’t exclusive to Chicago. A 2016 report from the New York State Office of the Attorney General found that 74 percent of guns used in crimes in New York between 2010 and 2015 came from states with lax gun laws. (The gun trafficking chain from Southern states with weak gun laws to New York is so well-known it even has a name: “the Iron Pipeline.”) And another 2016 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that most of the guns — as much as 70 percent — used in crimes in Mexico, which has strict gun laws, can be traced back to the US, which has generally weaker gun laws.
That doesn’t mean the stricter gun laws in Chicago, New York, or any other jurisdiction have no effect, but it does limit how far these local and state measures can go, since the root of the problem lies in other places’ laws. The only way the pipeline could be stopped would be if all states individually strengthened their gun laws at once — or, more realistically, if the federal government passed a law that enforces stricter rules across the US.
5) America probably needs to go further than anyone wants to admit America’s attention to gun control often focuses on a few specific measures: universal background checks, restrictions on people with mental illnesses buying firearms, and an assault weapons ban, for example. It is rare that American politicians, even on the left, go much further than that. Something like Australia’s law — which amounts to a confiscation program — is never seriously considered.
As Dylan Matthews previously explained, this is a big issue. The US’s gun problem is so dire that it arguably needs solutions that go way further than what we typically see in mainstream proposals — at least, if the US ever hopes to get down to European levels of gun violence.
If the fundamental problem is that America has far too many guns, then policies need to cut the number of guns in circulation right now to seriously reduce the number of gun deaths. Background checks and other restrictions on who can buy a gun can’t achieve that in the short term. What America likely needs, then, is something more like Australia’s mandatory buyback program — essentially, a gun confiscation scheme — paired with a serious ban on specific firearms (including, potentially, all semiautomatic weapons).
But no one in Congress is seriously
But no one in Congress is seriously proposing something that sweeping. The Manchin-Toomey bill, the only gun legislation in Congress after Sandy Hook that came close to becoming law, didn’t even establish universal background checks. Recent proposals have been even milder, taking small steps like banning bump stocks or slightly improving the existing system for background checks.
Part of the holdup is the Second Amendment. While there is reasonable scholarly debate about whether the Second Amendment actually protects all Americans’ individual right to bear arms and prohibits stricter forms of gun control, the reality is the Supreme Court and US lawmakers widely agree that the Second Amendment does put barriers on how far restrictions can go. That would likely rule out anything like the Australian policy response short of a court reinterpretation or a repeal of the Second Amendment, neither of which seems likely.
So the US, for political, cultural, and legal reasons, seems to be unable to take the action that it really needs.
None of that is to say that milder measures are useless. Connecticut’s law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, for example, was followed by a 40 percent drop in gun homicides and a 15 percent reduction in suicides. Similar gains were seen in Missouri. It’s difficult to separate these improvements from long-term trends (since gun homicides have generally been on the decline for decades now), but some of the decreases are likely linked to new restrictions on guns — and that means these measures truly saved lives.
There are also some evidence-based policies that could help outside the realm of gun control, including more stringent regulations and taxes on alcohol, changes in policing, and behavioral intervention programs.
But if America wants to get to the levels of gun deaths that its European peers report, it will likely need to go much, much further on guns in particular.
HOW DO LAWS PREVENT MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE FROM BUYING GUNS?
By David Shortell, CNN
Washington (CNN)How could a young man whose lawyers say he has been "experiencing and enduring mental illness his entire life" purchase a semiautomatic rifle?
Perhaps, perfectly legally.
While people who knew Nikolas Cruz describe a complicated picture of the 19-year-old behind Wednesday's school shooting, questions of mental health and gun laws are beginning to occupy the top tiers of American government.
According to a US official briefed on the investigation, Cruz used an AR-15 style weapon that he had bought legally after passing a background check to kill 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
"As you know, mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies," House Speaker Paul Ryan said at a news conference Thursday reacting to the shooting. "We have a system to prevent people who aren't supposed to get guns from getting guns, and if there are gaps there then we need to look at those gaps."
Here's how that system works, and how it could apply to the Parkland, Florida, shooter.
How is a person with mental illness blocked from buying a gun?
Under federal law, a person can be tallied in a database and barred from purchasing or possessing a firearm due to a mental illness under two conditions: if he is involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, or if a court or government body declares him mentally incompetent.
When is someone considered committed?
In many states, including Florida, law enforcement can take an individual to a mental hospital against his or her will for an initial evaluation. If after 72 hours the doctors observing the individual want to continue that treatment, then they can petition a court for permission, even against the patient's wishes.
That -- a court order allowing a person's continued involuntary institutionalization -- is one thing that should stop an individual from purchasing a firearm.
If the person was taken in for mental treatment involuntarily but was not requested to be held past 72 hours, he is not blocked from buying a gun.
In Florida, if the court chose to commit even an underage individual, he would fail a background check on that basis.
What does it mean to be adjudicated as mentally incompetent?
The other way to wind up in the database that could cause an individual to fail a background check for mental illness is if a court or government body were to rule that due to his mental health, a person is a danger to himself or others or is unable to manage his own affairs.
The issue commonly arises when a court or government agency is appointing a conservator or a guardian for an adult because of mental impairment.
How does the background check system work?
When either of those two things happens in Florida, the court or government body that made the decision on the individual's mental health is required to report that record to a state law enforcement agency or the FBI.
The records would be in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a confidential database that houses the names and birth years of individuals ineligible to buy firearms.
A licensed gun dealer is required under federal law to run potential buyers through the criminal background check system. The process usually takes around 90 seconds, and, if all the records are in the right place, would prevent a purchaser who was previously involuntarily committed or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from getting the gun.
But federal law doesn't require states to make these mental health records part of background check system, and many fail to voluntarily report the records.
And licensed gun shops aren't the only places to buy a firearm.
"You could buy guns from someone from an online classified ad, people at a yard sale or on the street corner selling guns, or people who are at a gun show but not a retail dealer," all without having to pass a background check, according to Ari Freilich, a legal expert with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that promotes gun control.
How has Trump interacted with the issue?
In a speech to the nation Thursday morning, President Donald Trump promised to "tackle the difficult issue of mental health." But so far, his administration has only loosened federal gun laws related to the issue.
Early into his first year in the White House, Trump signed a measure that got rid of a regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people who were either receiving full disability benefits because of mental illness and couldn't work or people who were unable to manage their own Social Security benefits and needed the help of third parties.
Using the Congressional Review Act, Republican majorities in the House and Senate voted to revoke the rule that former President Barack Obama issued as part of a series of efforts to curb gun violence after similar measures failed to pass through Congress.
Trump signed the bill in private, without his typical public signing ceremony meant to draw attention and fanfare.
He also rolled back an attempt by the Obama administration to clarify and broaden the statutory definitions of the terms that disable individuals who had been committed to mental institutions or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from buying guns.
The measure, proposed by Obama in 2014, had been making its way through the rule-making process but was stymied after the election by the new Trump administration, according to federal documents shared with CNN by the advocacy group Democracy Forward.
By David Shortell, CNN
Washington (CNN)How could a young man whose lawyers say he has been "experiencing and enduring mental illness his entire life" purchase a semiautomatic rifle?
Perhaps, perfectly legally.
While people who knew Nikolas Cruz describe a complicated picture of the 19-year-old behind Wednesday's school shooting, questions of mental health and gun laws are beginning to occupy the top tiers of American government.
According to a US official briefed on the investigation, Cruz used an AR-15 style weapon that he had bought legally after passing a background check to kill 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
"As you know, mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies," House Speaker Paul Ryan said at a news conference Thursday reacting to the shooting. "We have a system to prevent people who aren't supposed to get guns from getting guns, and if there are gaps there then we need to look at those gaps."
Here's how that system works, and how it could apply to the Parkland, Florida, shooter.
How is a person with mental illness blocked from buying a gun?
Under federal law, a person can be tallied in a database and barred from purchasing or possessing a firearm due to a mental illness under two conditions: if he is involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, or if a court or government body declares him mentally incompetent.
When is someone considered committed?
In many states, including Florida, law enforcement can take an individual to a mental hospital against his or her will for an initial evaluation. If after 72 hours the doctors observing the individual want to continue that treatment, then they can petition a court for permission, even against the patient's wishes.
That -- a court order allowing a person's continued involuntary institutionalization -- is one thing that should stop an individual from purchasing a firearm.
If the person was taken in for mental treatment involuntarily but was not requested to be held past 72 hours, he is not blocked from buying a gun.
In Florida, if the court chose to commit even an underage individual, he would fail a background check on that basis.
What does it mean to be adjudicated as mentally incompetent?
The other way to wind up in the database that could cause an individual to fail a background check for mental illness is if a court or government body were to rule that due to his mental health, a person is a danger to himself or others or is unable to manage his own affairs.
The issue commonly arises when a court or government agency is appointing a conservator or a guardian for an adult because of mental impairment.
How does the background check system work?
When either of those two things happens in Florida, the court or government body that made the decision on the individual's mental health is required to report that record to a state law enforcement agency or the FBI.
The records would be in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a confidential database that houses the names and birth years of individuals ineligible to buy firearms.
A licensed gun dealer is required under federal law to run potential buyers through the criminal background check system. The process usually takes around 90 seconds, and, if all the records are in the right place, would prevent a purchaser who was previously involuntarily committed or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from getting the gun.
But federal law doesn't require states to make these mental health records part of background check system, and many fail to voluntarily report the records.
And licensed gun shops aren't the only places to buy a firearm.
"You could buy guns from someone from an online classified ad, people at a yard sale or on the street corner selling guns, or people who are at a gun show but not a retail dealer," all without having to pass a background check, according to Ari Freilich, a legal expert with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that promotes gun control.
How has Trump interacted with the issue?
In a speech to the nation Thursday morning, President Donald Trump promised to "tackle the difficult issue of mental health." But so far, his administration has only loosened federal gun laws related to the issue.
Early into his first year in the White House, Trump signed a measure that got rid of a regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people who were either receiving full disability benefits because of mental illness and couldn't work or people who were unable to manage their own Social Security benefits and needed the help of third parties.
Using the Congressional Review Act, Republican majorities in the House and Senate voted to revoke the rule that former President Barack Obama issued as part of a series of efforts to curb gun violence after similar measures failed to pass through Congress.
Trump signed the bill in private, without his typical public signing ceremony meant to draw attention and fanfare.
He also rolled back an attempt by the Obama administration to clarify and broaden the statutory definitions of the terms that disable individuals who had been committed to mental institutions or adjudicated as mentally incompetent from buying guns.
The measure, proposed by Obama in 2014, had been making its way through the rule-making process but was stymied after the election by the new Trump administration, according to federal documents shared with CNN by the advocacy group Democracy Forward.
AMERICA'S GUN PROBLEM, EXPLAINED
The public and research support gun control. Here's how it could help — and why it doesn't pass.
By German Lopez
On Sunday night, it happened again: a mass shooting in America. A shooter opened fire at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, reportedly killing and injuring multiple people.
The shooting has already led to discussions about gun control. Americans have heard these types of calls before: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence sparks up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
It has become an American routine for the aftermath of a gun violence to play out this way.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America's gun problem is completely unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
The public and research support gun control. Here's how it could help — and why it doesn't pass.
By German Lopez
On Sunday night, it happened again: a mass shooting in America. A shooter opened fire at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, reportedly killing and injuring multiple people.
The shooting has already led to discussions about gun control. Americans have heard these types of calls before: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence sparks up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
It has become an American routine for the aftermath of a gun violence to play out this way.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America's gun problem is completely unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
To understand why that is, there's another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
These three basic facts demonstrate America's unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:
2) More guns mean more gun deaths. Period.
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear. No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.
This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:
And it's clear when you look at the data across developed nations, as this other chart from researcher Josh Tewksbury shows:
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America's unusual gun violence: mental illness, for example. Jonathan Metzl, a mental health expert at Vanderbilt University, told me that this is just not the case. People with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And while it's true that an extraordinary amount of mass shooters (up to 60 percent) have some kind of psychiatric or psychological symptoms, Metzl points out that other factors are much better predictors of gun violence in general: alcohol and drug misuse, poverty, history of violence, and, yes, access to guns.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from the shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
"Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide," David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center's director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
Experts widely believe this is the consequence of America's relaxed laws and culture surrounding guns: Making more guns more accessible means more guns, and more guns mean more deaths. Researchers have found this is true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police. To deal with those problems, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.
The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
Guns are not the only factor that contribute to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins wrote in a breakthrough analysis in 1999. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."
But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America's high gun ownership rates, there hasn't been significant legislation to help solve the problem.
3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn't translate into laws
If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support background checks, bans on assault-style weapons, bans on high-capacity ammunition clips, bans on online sales of ammunition, and a federal database to track gun sales.
So why don't these measures ever get turned into law? That's because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.
This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have 85 percent support, according to Pew): They're able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.
This kind of problem isn't unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don't like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a "government takeover of health care" and "death panels." Since most Americans don't have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.
Of course, it's also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they're backed by a very powerful political lobby.
4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful
The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.
The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."
A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and '70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government's seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.
This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or even a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
So any time there's an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.
As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA's support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.
Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has. Some of the groups — such as StopTheNRA.com, in part funded by Democratic donor Ken Lerer — didn't even last a few years.
Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her 20 years covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.
But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, "The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their 'control' position?" Probably not, Norquist suggested, "but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this."
What's behind that passion? Goss, who's also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it's a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable.
There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. "There's a lot more going on than Congress," Goss said. "In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser."
But state laws aren't enough. Since people can simply cross state lines to purchase guns, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name "the Iron Pipeline." But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.
Yet the NRA's influence and its army of supporters push many of America's legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.
5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semi-automatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.
Australian lawmakers responded with new legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
The result: Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."
6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence
Depending on which definition of mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.
Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under the broadest definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed about 500 Americans in 2013. That represents just a fraction of total gun homicides: more than 11,200 that year. And firearm suicides killed even more: nearly 21,200 Americans.
Preventing suicides isn't something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries' experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it's hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
But it seems that we as a nation just aren't willing to look, or else don't sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,300 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from the shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.
"Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide," David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center's director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.
Experts widely believe this is the consequence of America's relaxed laws and culture surrounding guns: Making more guns more accessible means more guns, and more guns mean more deaths. Researchers have found this is true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police. To deal with those problems, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.
The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.
Guns are not the only factor that contribute to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.
"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins wrote in a breakthrough analysis in 1999. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."
But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America's high gun ownership rates, there hasn't been significant legislation to help solve the problem.
3) Americans tend to support measures to restrict guns, but that doesn't translate into laws
If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support background checks, bans on assault-style weapons, bans on high-capacity ammunition clips, bans on online sales of ammunition, and a federal database to track gun sales.
So why don't these measures ever get turned into law? That's because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.
This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have 85 percent support, according to Pew): They're able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.
This kind of problem isn't unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don't like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a "government takeover of health care" and "death panels." Since most Americans don't have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.
Of course, it's also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they're backed by a very powerful political lobby.
4) The gun lobby as we know it is relatively recent but enormously powerful
The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.
The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, "I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."
A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and '70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government's seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.
This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or even a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
So any time there's an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.
As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA's support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.
Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has. Some of the groups — such as StopTheNRA.com, in part funded by Democratic donor Ken Lerer — didn't even last a few years.
Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her 20 years covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.
But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, "The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their 'control' position?" Probably not, Norquist suggested, "but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this."
What's behind that passion? Goss, who's also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it's a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable.
There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. "There's a lot more going on than Congress," Goss said. "In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser."
But state laws aren't enough. Since people can simply cross state lines to purchase guns, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name "the Iron Pipeline." But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.
Yet the NRA's influence and its army of supporters push many of America's legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.
5) Other developed countries have had huge successes with gun control
In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semi-automatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia's history.
Australian lawmakers responded with new legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a gun buyback program, in which it purchased firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)
The result: Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.
It's difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program. Australia's gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: "First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."
One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn't statistically significant. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.
One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: "While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres."
6) Although they get a lot of focus, mass shootings are a small portion of all gun violence
Depending on which definition of mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.
Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under the broadest definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed about 500 Americans in 2013. That represents just a fraction of total gun homicides: more than 11,200 that year. And firearm suicides killed even more: nearly 21,200 Americans.
Preventing suicides isn't something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries' experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it's hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
But it seems that we as a nation just aren't willing to look, or else don't sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,300 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.
IT’S TIME TO BAN CONGRESSIONAL GERRYMANDERING
The electing of congressional representatives is far from fair and square
By Jamie Margolin
In today’s (supposedly) free American democracy, you probably think that “we the people” choose our congressional representatives, right?
Well, you’d be wrong. You don’t choose your congressional representatives ― your representatives choose you.
In the United States, we vote for our congressmen and women to serve in the house of representatives by districts. The number of districts each state gets is determined by the population of the state. California for example would get more representatives than Delaware because it has a higher population. Seems fair, right? Well, the electing of congressional representatives is actually far from fair and square. And it’s because how these districts are drawn. Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor. This redrawing of districts to pre-determine elections before a single vote has been cast is called Gerrymandering. It is how the party in power picks its voters, instead of the voters choosing their representatives. It’s how the majority party can keep a power-grab on congressional seats, even if most of the population votes for the other party. And drawing districts to a party’s advantage is completely legal. Congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy.
Gerrymandering takes power away from the voters. It makes it so the voters don’t really pick their representatives, but vice versa. Even if the voters overwhelmingly pick one party, with gerrymandering, the other party can still get in power. That is not democracy at all. Gerrymandering is how the Democrats won a majority of over 1 million more congressional votes than Republicans, in a recent election, but they still lost 33 congressional seats to the GOP. Gerrymandering is completely undemocratic. How can we call a system that completely bypasses the wishes of the voters, a democracy? A democracy is supposed to be a system where the citizens have power through their votes, and where leaders are selected solely by the people. Gerrymandering turns what democracy is supposed to be on its head. It takes power away from the voters and puts it into the hands of the powerful. It also corrodes the integrity of a democracy and paves the way for a very unpopular Congress and equally unpopular laws.
Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor.
Gerrymandering leaves the voters dissatisfied and discouraged with their Congress, and American democracy as a whole. Because gerrymandering takes away power from voters, it leaves voters feeling disempowered, to the point where they don’t want to vote or engage in civic action anymore. And because it’s the powerful choosing their constituents, and not vice versa, often, constituents are not happy with who their representatives are. On average, between 10 and 15 percent of Americans approve of Congress – and polls also found that there is more public support for traffic jams and lice than Congress. When asked to choose which they preferred, 67% of people surveyed picked head lice over Congress. And yet, in the 2016 election, only eight congressional representatives were defeated when they ran for re-election.
As for the way gerrymandering disempowers, in 2010, many Tea Party activists wanted to have their voices heard. But they then realized that their own representatives were either Democrats in blue districts or Republicans in red districts. Those representatives would not listen to the Tea Party activists because the gerrymandered electoral map meant that they didn’t need to. Congress is extremely unpopular, thanks to gerrymandering, but because of gerrymandering, voters can’t choose new representatives. It’s a vicious cycle. Gerrymandering also leaves voters feeling powerless, because why bother lobbying or voting when the result is already predetermined? Congressional gerrymandering makes it so that Congress is unpopular, and voters feel powerless, but some people have argued that gerrymandering is a good thing.
Some people (usually the party that is in power and is using gerrymandering to its advantage) say that gerrymandering is fine, because both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander, so the playing field is equal. Because both sides are allowed to gerrymander, and are guilty of it, pro-gerrymandering people say that the system is fair and that there is no reason to ban gerrymandering. But actually, the playing field is not equal at all. Republicans have an overwhelming control of the Senate and Congress, with 247 seats in The House and 54 in the Senate, not because they win the most votes, but because they have gerrymandered the majority of the United States, which allows them to hold onto their power. But even if the tides turn and Democrats gain back power and gerrymander Republicans out of office, it’s still not fair. Gerrymandering is just undemocratic. In the long run, it ends up hurting both sides and our entire democracy. Polls confirm that an overwhelming majority of Americans of all sides of the political spectrum, oppose gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows for the country to be even more consumed by partisan fighting, and it is eating away at our democracy.
Because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy, congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States. It takes power away from the voters, makes congress unpopular, discourages voters from participating in their democracy, and even though a certain political party is benefiting from it at the moment, in the long run, gerrymandering ends up hurting everyone. Gerrymandering is essentially why American democracy is broken. Lynn Westmoreland, the Republican redistricting vice chair in the House, says that gerrymandering is “the nastiest form of politics that there is.” The longer we let our congressional districts be decided by partisans, either Democrat or Republican, the closer we are to the death of American democracy.
The electing of congressional representatives is far from fair and square
By Jamie Margolin
In today’s (supposedly) free American democracy, you probably think that “we the people” choose our congressional representatives, right?
Well, you’d be wrong. You don’t choose your congressional representatives ― your representatives choose you.
In the United States, we vote for our congressmen and women to serve in the house of representatives by districts. The number of districts each state gets is determined by the population of the state. California for example would get more representatives than Delaware because it has a higher population. Seems fair, right? Well, the electing of congressional representatives is actually far from fair and square. And it’s because how these districts are drawn. Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor. This redrawing of districts to pre-determine elections before a single vote has been cast is called Gerrymandering. It is how the party in power picks its voters, instead of the voters choosing their representatives. It’s how the majority party can keep a power-grab on congressional seats, even if most of the population votes for the other party. And drawing districts to a party’s advantage is completely legal. Congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy.
Gerrymandering takes power away from the voters. It makes it so the voters don’t really pick their representatives, but vice versa. Even if the voters overwhelmingly pick one party, with gerrymandering, the other party can still get in power. That is not democracy at all. Gerrymandering is how the Democrats won a majority of over 1 million more congressional votes than Republicans, in a recent election, but they still lost 33 congressional seats to the GOP. Gerrymandering is completely undemocratic. How can we call a system that completely bypasses the wishes of the voters, a democracy? A democracy is supposed to be a system where the citizens have power through their votes, and where leaders are selected solely by the people. Gerrymandering turns what democracy is supposed to be on its head. It takes power away from the voters and puts it into the hands of the powerful. It also corrodes the integrity of a democracy and paves the way for a very unpopular Congress and equally unpopular laws.
Whichever party is in power can re-draw the congressional districts to their advantage, so they can swing elections in their favor.
Gerrymandering leaves the voters dissatisfied and discouraged with their Congress, and American democracy as a whole. Because gerrymandering takes away power from voters, it leaves voters feeling disempowered, to the point where they don’t want to vote or engage in civic action anymore. And because it’s the powerful choosing their constituents, and not vice versa, often, constituents are not happy with who their representatives are. On average, between 10 and 15 percent of Americans approve of Congress – and polls also found that there is more public support for traffic jams and lice than Congress. When asked to choose which they preferred, 67% of people surveyed picked head lice over Congress. And yet, in the 2016 election, only eight congressional representatives were defeated when they ran for re-election.
As for the way gerrymandering disempowers, in 2010, many Tea Party activists wanted to have their voices heard. But they then realized that their own representatives were either Democrats in blue districts or Republicans in red districts. Those representatives would not listen to the Tea Party activists because the gerrymandered electoral map meant that they didn’t need to. Congress is extremely unpopular, thanks to gerrymandering, but because of gerrymandering, voters can’t choose new representatives. It’s a vicious cycle. Gerrymandering also leaves voters feeling powerless, because why bother lobbying or voting when the result is already predetermined? Congressional gerrymandering makes it so that Congress is unpopular, and voters feel powerless, but some people have argued that gerrymandering is a good thing.
Some people (usually the party that is in power and is using gerrymandering to its advantage) say that gerrymandering is fine, because both Democrats and Republicans gerrymander, so the playing field is equal. Because both sides are allowed to gerrymander, and are guilty of it, pro-gerrymandering people say that the system is fair and that there is no reason to ban gerrymandering. But actually, the playing field is not equal at all. Republicans have an overwhelming control of the Senate and Congress, with 247 seats in The House and 54 in the Senate, not because they win the most votes, but because they have gerrymandered the majority of the United States, which allows them to hold onto their power. But even if the tides turn and Democrats gain back power and gerrymander Republicans out of office, it’s still not fair. Gerrymandering is just undemocratic. In the long run, it ends up hurting both sides and our entire democracy. Polls confirm that an overwhelming majority of Americans of all sides of the political spectrum, oppose gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows for the country to be even more consumed by partisan fighting, and it is eating away at our democracy.
Because it goes against the American principles of a free democracy, congressional Gerrymandering should be banned in the United States. It takes power away from the voters, makes congress unpopular, discourages voters from participating in their democracy, and even though a certain political party is benefiting from it at the moment, in the long run, gerrymandering ends up hurting everyone. Gerrymandering is essentially why American democracy is broken. Lynn Westmoreland, the Republican redistricting vice chair in the House, says that gerrymandering is “the nastiest form of politics that there is.” The longer we let our congressional districts be decided by partisans, either Democrat or Republican, the closer we are to the death of American democracy.
TOP 10 REASONS SCHOOL CHOICE IS NO CHOICE By Steven Singer
On the surface of it, school choice sounds like a great idea.
Parents will get to shop for schools and pick the one that best suits their children.
Oh! Look, Honey! This one has an exceptional music program! That one excels in math and science! The drama program at this one is first in the state!
But that’s not at all what school choice actually is.
In reality, it’s just a scam to make private schools cheaper for rich people, further erode the public school system and allow for-profit corporations to gobble up education dollars meant to help children succeed.
Here’s why:
1) Voucher programs almost never provide students with full tuition.
Voucher programs are all the rage especially among conservatives. Legislation has been proposed throughout the country taking a portion of tax dollars that would normally go to a public school and allowing parents to put it toward tuition at a private or parochial school. However, the cost of going to these schools is much higher than going to public schools. So even with your tax dollars in hand, you don’t have the money to go to these schools. For the majority of impoverished students attending public schools, vouchers don’t help. Parents still have to find more money somewhere to make this happen. Poor folks just can’t afford it. But rich folks can so let’s reduce their bill!? They thank you for letting them buy another Ferrari with money that should have gone to give poor and middle class kids get an education.
2) Charter and voucher schools don’t have to accept everyone
When you choose to go to one of these schools, they don’t have to choose to accept you. In fact, the choice is really all up to them. Does your child make good grades? Is he or she well-behaved, in the special education program, learning disabled, etc.? If they don’t like your answers, they won’t accept you. They have all the power. It has nothing to do with providing a good education for your child. It’s all about whether your child will make them look good. By contrast, public schools take everyone and often achieve amazing results with the resources they have.
3) Charter Schools are notorious for kicking out hard to teach students
Charter schools like to tout how well they help kids learn. But they also like to brag that they accept diverse students. So they end up accepting lots of children with special needs at the beginning of the year and then giving them the boot before standardized test season. That way, these students’ low scores won’t count against the charter school’s record. They can keep bragging about their high test scores without actually having to expend all the time and energy of actually teaching difficult students. Only public schools take everyone and give everyone their all.
4) Voucher and charter schools actually give parents less choice than traditional public schools
Public schools are governed by different rules than charter and voucher schools. Most public schools are run by a school board made up of duly-elected members from the community. The school board is accountable to that community. Residents have the right to be present at votes and debates, have a right to access public documents about how tax money is being spent, etc. None of this is true at most charter or voucher schools. They are run by executive boards or committees that are not accountable to parents. If you don’t like what your public school is doing, you can organize, vote for new leadership or even take a leadership role, yourself. If you don’t like what your charter or voucher school is doing, your only choice is to withdraw your child. See ya.
5) Charter Schools do no better and often much worse than traditional public schools
Pundits and profiteers love to spout euphoric about how well charter schools teach kids. But there is zero evidence behind it. That is nothing but a marketing ploy. It’s like when you’re in a bad neighborhood and walk past a dive that claims to have the best cup of coffee in the city. Yuck. Surely, some charter schools do exceptionally well. However, most charters and almost all cyber charters do worse than their public school counterparts. Fact.
6) Charters and voucher schools increase segregation
Since the 1950s and ’60s, we used to understand there was no such thing as separate but equal education. Before then we had Cadillac schools for white kids and broken down schools for black kids. The Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional. But today we have Cadillac schools for rich and middle class kids (most of whom are white) and broken down schools for the poor (most of whom are black or brown.) After making tremendous strides to integrate schools and provide an excellent education for everyone, our public schools have been resegregated. Charter and voucher schools only make this problem worse. They either aid in white flight or leach away minority students. This just makes it easier to give some kids a leg up while keeping others down.
7) Charter and voucher schools take away funding at traditional public schools
It costs almost the same amount of money to run a school building of a given size regardless of the number of kids in it. When students leave the public schools for charter or voucher schools, the public school loses valuable resources. It now has less revenue but the same overhead. So even if you found an excellent charter or voucher school to send your child, you would be hurting the chances of every other student in the public school of having their own excellent education. This is what happens when you make schools compete for resources. Someone ends up losing out on an education.
8) Properly funding parallel school systems would be incredibly wasteful and expensive
We could fix this problem by providing adequate funding for all levels of the school system – traditional public schools, charters, voucher schools, etc. However, this would be exorbitantly expensive. We don’t adequately fund our schools now. Adding additional layers like this would mean increasing national spending exponentially – maybe by three or four times the current level. And much of that money would go to waste. Why have three fully stocked school buildings in one community when one fully stocked building would do the job? I don’t imagine residents would relish the tax hike this would require.
9) School choice takes away attention from the real problems in our public schools – poverty and funding equity
We have real problems. More than half of public school students live below the poverty line. They are already several grade levels behind their non-impoverished peers before they even enter kindergarten. They need help – tutoring, counseling, wraparound services, nutrition, etc. The predicament is even more complicated by the way we fund our schools. Throughout the country, poor districts get less money than wealthy or middle class ones. The students who go to these schools are systematically being cheated out of resources and opportunities. And instead of helping them, we’re playing a shell game with charter and voucher schools. The problem isn’t that parents don’t have several excellent choices. If they’re poor, they often don’t have one.
10) School choice is not supported by a grass roots movement. It is supported by billionaires.
The proponents of school choice will tell you that they are only doing the will of the people. This is what parents want, they say. Baloney. While there are individuals who support school choice, the overwhelming majority of money behind this movement comes from conservative billionaires actively trying to dismantle the public education system. They want to steal the public system and replace it with a private one. They don’t care about your child. They just want to steal the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we pay to educate our children. This is not philanthropy. It is a business transaction meant to screw you and your child out of your rights.
If we really want to ensure every child in this country gets an excellent education, the answer isn’t school choice. Instead, we need to commit to supporting our public school system. We all need to be in this together. Yes, our schools should look at the needs of each child and tailor education to fit appropriately. But that shouldn’t be done in parallel school systems. It should be done under the same umbrella. That way, you can’t defund and defraud one without hurting all. It can’t just be about your child. It has to be about all children.
That’s the only choice worth making.
On the surface of it, school choice sounds like a great idea.
Parents will get to shop for schools and pick the one that best suits their children.
Oh! Look, Honey! This one has an exceptional music program! That one excels in math and science! The drama program at this one is first in the state!
But that’s not at all what school choice actually is.
In reality, it’s just a scam to make private schools cheaper for rich people, further erode the public school system and allow for-profit corporations to gobble up education dollars meant to help children succeed.
Here’s why:
1) Voucher programs almost never provide students with full tuition.
Voucher programs are all the rage especially among conservatives. Legislation has been proposed throughout the country taking a portion of tax dollars that would normally go to a public school and allowing parents to put it toward tuition at a private or parochial school. However, the cost of going to these schools is much higher than going to public schools. So even with your tax dollars in hand, you don’t have the money to go to these schools. For the majority of impoverished students attending public schools, vouchers don’t help. Parents still have to find more money somewhere to make this happen. Poor folks just can’t afford it. But rich folks can so let’s reduce their bill!? They thank you for letting them buy another Ferrari with money that should have gone to give poor and middle class kids get an education.
2) Charter and voucher schools don’t have to accept everyone
When you choose to go to one of these schools, they don’t have to choose to accept you. In fact, the choice is really all up to them. Does your child make good grades? Is he or she well-behaved, in the special education program, learning disabled, etc.? If they don’t like your answers, they won’t accept you. They have all the power. It has nothing to do with providing a good education for your child. It’s all about whether your child will make them look good. By contrast, public schools take everyone and often achieve amazing results with the resources they have.
3) Charter Schools are notorious for kicking out hard to teach students
Charter schools like to tout how well they help kids learn. But they also like to brag that they accept diverse students. So they end up accepting lots of children with special needs at the beginning of the year and then giving them the boot before standardized test season. That way, these students’ low scores won’t count against the charter school’s record. They can keep bragging about their high test scores without actually having to expend all the time and energy of actually teaching difficult students. Only public schools take everyone and give everyone their all.
4) Voucher and charter schools actually give parents less choice than traditional public schools
Public schools are governed by different rules than charter and voucher schools. Most public schools are run by a school board made up of duly-elected members from the community. The school board is accountable to that community. Residents have the right to be present at votes and debates, have a right to access public documents about how tax money is being spent, etc. None of this is true at most charter or voucher schools. They are run by executive boards or committees that are not accountable to parents. If you don’t like what your public school is doing, you can organize, vote for new leadership or even take a leadership role, yourself. If you don’t like what your charter or voucher school is doing, your only choice is to withdraw your child. See ya.
5) Charter Schools do no better and often much worse than traditional public schools
Pundits and profiteers love to spout euphoric about how well charter schools teach kids. But there is zero evidence behind it. That is nothing but a marketing ploy. It’s like when you’re in a bad neighborhood and walk past a dive that claims to have the best cup of coffee in the city. Yuck. Surely, some charter schools do exceptionally well. However, most charters and almost all cyber charters do worse than their public school counterparts. Fact.
6) Charters and voucher schools increase segregation
Since the 1950s and ’60s, we used to understand there was no such thing as separate but equal education. Before then we had Cadillac schools for white kids and broken down schools for black kids. The Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional. But today we have Cadillac schools for rich and middle class kids (most of whom are white) and broken down schools for the poor (most of whom are black or brown.) After making tremendous strides to integrate schools and provide an excellent education for everyone, our public schools have been resegregated. Charter and voucher schools only make this problem worse. They either aid in white flight or leach away minority students. This just makes it easier to give some kids a leg up while keeping others down.
7) Charter and voucher schools take away funding at traditional public schools
It costs almost the same amount of money to run a school building of a given size regardless of the number of kids in it. When students leave the public schools for charter or voucher schools, the public school loses valuable resources. It now has less revenue but the same overhead. So even if you found an excellent charter or voucher school to send your child, you would be hurting the chances of every other student in the public school of having their own excellent education. This is what happens when you make schools compete for resources. Someone ends up losing out on an education.
8) Properly funding parallel school systems would be incredibly wasteful and expensive
We could fix this problem by providing adequate funding for all levels of the school system – traditional public schools, charters, voucher schools, etc. However, this would be exorbitantly expensive. We don’t adequately fund our schools now. Adding additional layers like this would mean increasing national spending exponentially – maybe by three or four times the current level. And much of that money would go to waste. Why have three fully stocked school buildings in one community when one fully stocked building would do the job? I don’t imagine residents would relish the tax hike this would require.
9) School choice takes away attention from the real problems in our public schools – poverty and funding equity
We have real problems. More than half of public school students live below the poverty line. They are already several grade levels behind their non-impoverished peers before they even enter kindergarten. They need help – tutoring, counseling, wraparound services, nutrition, etc. The predicament is even more complicated by the way we fund our schools. Throughout the country, poor districts get less money than wealthy or middle class ones. The students who go to these schools are systematically being cheated out of resources and opportunities. And instead of helping them, we’re playing a shell game with charter and voucher schools. The problem isn’t that parents don’t have several excellent choices. If they’re poor, they often don’t have one.
10) School choice is not supported by a grass roots movement. It is supported by billionaires.
The proponents of school choice will tell you that they are only doing the will of the people. This is what parents want, they say. Baloney. While there are individuals who support school choice, the overwhelming majority of money behind this movement comes from conservative billionaires actively trying to dismantle the public education system. They want to steal the public system and replace it with a private one. They don’t care about your child. They just want to steal the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we pay to educate our children. This is not philanthropy. It is a business transaction meant to screw you and your child out of your rights.
If we really want to ensure every child in this country gets an excellent education, the answer isn’t school choice. Instead, we need to commit to supporting our public school system. We all need to be in this together. Yes, our schools should look at the needs of each child and tailor education to fit appropriately. But that shouldn’t be done in parallel school systems. It should be done under the same umbrella. That way, you can’t defund and defraud one without hurting all. It can’t just be about your child. It has to be about all children.
That’s the only choice worth making.
EPA CHANGES ITS STAND ON FRACKING, SAYING IT CAN HARM DRINKING WATER IN ‘SOME CIRCUMSTANCES’ By Chelsea Harvey
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that hydraulic fracturing does have the potential to affect drinking water resources in the U.S. The report represents a shift in the agency’s previous conclusions, published in a draft report in 2015, which suggested low impacts from fracking.
The final report, released Tuesday, relies on a review of more than 1,200 previously cited scientific sources, as well as new research conducted for the report and an independent peer review by the EPA’s science advisory board. The report finds a range of possible impacts from fracking, from temporary changes in water quality to the complete contamination of drinking water wells.
Drinking water can be affected at any stage of the fracking process, the report notes, from acquiring the water that will be used to injecting it into production wells and disposing of the wastewater afterward. Impacts are generally seen at sites close to production wells.
“The value of high-quality science has never been more important in helping to guide decisions around our nation’s fragile water resources,” said Thomas Burke, EPA’s science adviser and deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Research and Development, in a statement. “EPA’s assessment provides the scientific foundation for local decision-makers, industry, and communities that are looking to protect public health and drinking water resources and make more informed decisions about hydraulic fracturing activities.”
In 2015, a draft report found that fracking has caused isolated instances in which drinking water was affected, but did not bring about “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. At the time, Burke added that “the number of documented impacts to drinking water resources is relatively low when compared to the number of fractured wells.”
The 2015 draft was met with criticism from environmental groups. And earlier this year, the EPA’s science advisory panel issued a critique challenging the report’s conclusions.
The final report includes a slightly stronger set of conclusions. It claims that fracking activities “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances,” and notes that certain activities or conditions may make these impacts more severe. These include withdrawing water for fracking when water resources are already limited; injecting fluids directly into groundwater resources, or injecting them into wells that allow them to leak into the groundwater; failing to adequately treat wastewater before disposing of it, and dumping wastewater into unlined pits, where it can leak out.
However, the report also notes that “significant data gaps and uncertainties in the available data prevented us from calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts on drinking water resources from activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle.” And it adds that these uncertainties prevented the report from including “a full characterization of the severity of impacts.”
In other words, the report still can’t make a detailed assessment of how often any given activity results harms water quality, or how serious the effects are on a broad scale. It also refrains from making direct policy recommendations from its scientific conclusions.
The report has already met with criticism from the oil and gas industry.
“It is beyond absurd for the administration to reverse course on its way out the door,” said Erik Milito, director of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. “The agency has walked away from nearly a thousand sources of information from published papers, technical reports and peer reviewed scientific reports demonstrating that industry practices, industry trends, and regulatory programs protect water resources at every step of the hydraulic fracturing process.”
He added that the API “look[s] forward to working with the new administration in order to instill fact-based science back into the public policy process.”
While it’s unclear for now how the new report might influence public policy in the future, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to scale back regulations that would hinder the expansion of oil and natural gas development. And his nominee to head the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has fought against increased regulations on the oil and gas industry, notably joining a group of other state attorneys general suing the EPA over its proposal to curtail the methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
But the new report has been praised by environmental groups that have long argued that fracking presents a threat to the nation’s drinking water.
“The EPA has confirmed what we’ve known all along: fracking can and does contaminate drinking water,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, in a statement. “We are pleased that the agency has acted on the recommendations of its Science Advisory Board and chosen be frank about the inherent harms and hazards of fracking.”
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that hydraulic fracturing does have the potential to affect drinking water resources in the U.S. The report represents a shift in the agency’s previous conclusions, published in a draft report in 2015, which suggested low impacts from fracking.
The final report, released Tuesday, relies on a review of more than 1,200 previously cited scientific sources, as well as new research conducted for the report and an independent peer review by the EPA’s science advisory board. The report finds a range of possible impacts from fracking, from temporary changes in water quality to the complete contamination of drinking water wells.
Drinking water can be affected at any stage of the fracking process, the report notes, from acquiring the water that will be used to injecting it into production wells and disposing of the wastewater afterward. Impacts are generally seen at sites close to production wells.
“The value of high-quality science has never been more important in helping to guide decisions around our nation’s fragile water resources,” said Thomas Burke, EPA’s science adviser and deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Research and Development, in a statement. “EPA’s assessment provides the scientific foundation for local decision-makers, industry, and communities that are looking to protect public health and drinking water resources and make more informed decisions about hydraulic fracturing activities.”
In 2015, a draft report found that fracking has caused isolated instances in which drinking water was affected, but did not bring about “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. At the time, Burke added that “the number of documented impacts to drinking water resources is relatively low when compared to the number of fractured wells.”
The 2015 draft was met with criticism from environmental groups. And earlier this year, the EPA’s science advisory panel issued a critique challenging the report’s conclusions.
The final report includes a slightly stronger set of conclusions. It claims that fracking activities “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances,” and notes that certain activities or conditions may make these impacts more severe. These include withdrawing water for fracking when water resources are already limited; injecting fluids directly into groundwater resources, or injecting them into wells that allow them to leak into the groundwater; failing to adequately treat wastewater before disposing of it, and dumping wastewater into unlined pits, where it can leak out.
However, the report also notes that “significant data gaps and uncertainties in the available data prevented us from calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts on drinking water resources from activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle.” And it adds that these uncertainties prevented the report from including “a full characterization of the severity of impacts.”
In other words, the report still can’t make a detailed assessment of how often any given activity results harms water quality, or how serious the effects are on a broad scale. It also refrains from making direct policy recommendations from its scientific conclusions.
The report has already met with criticism from the oil and gas industry.
“It is beyond absurd for the administration to reverse course on its way out the door,” said Erik Milito, director of upstream and industry operations for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. “The agency has walked away from nearly a thousand sources of information from published papers, technical reports and peer reviewed scientific reports demonstrating that industry practices, industry trends, and regulatory programs protect water resources at every step of the hydraulic fracturing process.”
He added that the API “look[s] forward to working with the new administration in order to instill fact-based science back into the public policy process.”
While it’s unclear for now how the new report might influence public policy in the future, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to scale back regulations that would hinder the expansion of oil and natural gas development. And his nominee to head the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has fought against increased regulations on the oil and gas industry, notably joining a group of other state attorneys general suing the EPA over its proposal to curtail the methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
But the new report has been praised by environmental groups that have long argued that fracking presents a threat to the nation’s drinking water.
“The EPA has confirmed what we’ve known all along: fracking can and does contaminate drinking water,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, in a statement. “We are pleased that the agency has acted on the recommendations of its Science Advisory Board and chosen be frank about the inherent harms and hazards of fracking.”