Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

March 17, 2022 (Thursday)

While Russia’s war on Ukraine continues in all its blistering horror, there are glimmerings that suggest Russia’s position in its assault on Ukraine is weakening. A senior U.S. defense official today told reporters that while there is significant fighting going on, the only major military news is that Russia has now launched more than 1000 missiles at Ukraine. Ukraine’s allies are working on supplying Ukraine with long-range air defense systems. The Pentagon also believes the airspace over Ukraine continues to be contested, and tentatively assesses that the morale of Russian soldiers is flagging.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned again today that Russia appears to be considering using chemical weapons and trying to blame the ensuing destruction on Ukraine. Yesterday, President Joe Biden called Putin a war criminal.

Today China, which was allied with Russia when the war began and initially refused to condemn the assault, today declined to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution with Russia at the United Nations. At the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China joined Russia in vetoing resolutions. Then China abstained. Now it is refusing even to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution.

While Chinese state media continues to indicate friendship for Russia, today it showed a video illustrating the story that Russian troops killed people standing in line for bread in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine.

A German newspaper today reported that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was on a flight on its way to Beijing, but the plane turned around during the flight and returned to Moscow. President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping are scheduled to talk tomorrow for the first time since November after U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi for seven hours in Rome on Monday.

China has not abandoned support for Russia, but it does appear to be rethinking its position as the world condemns the invasion and has acted in concert to isolate Russia effectively from the global economy. Today Russia did in fact make a $117 million interest payment on its debt, avoiding—for now—a default on its debt. For all Putin’s talk of not needing the international financial system, in the end, he chose to honor the debt, and in dollars rather than in the badly devalued rubles he had threatened.

Pieces continue to move elsewhere in the world, too. Uzbekistan today became the first Central Asian country to openly support the territorial integrity of Ukraine and condemn Russia’s “military actions and aggression.” The Council of Europe, a human rights organization founded in 1949 and consisting of more than 45 member states, yesterday expelled Russia.

It appears that Putin is reacting to the crisis he has launched by turning on some of his key advisors, including military chief General Roman Gavrilov. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul reacted to this news: “Putin looks like a panicked leader these days, hardly the smart, strong, savvy leader that others assumed he was.”

Today, the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force, known as REPO, issued a joint statement committing to “prioritizing our resources and working together to take all available legal steps to find, restrain, freeze, seize, and, where appropriate, confiscate or forfeit the assets of those individuals and entities that have been sanctioned in connection with Russia’s premeditated, unjust, and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the continuing aggression of the Russian regime.”

REPO includes Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.

While a crackdown on illicit money should squeeze oligarchs, it also has the potential to alter our domestic politics. Recent reports show that politics in the U.K. has been awash in Russian money, and it seems likely that such cash has influenced the U.S. as well. This crackdown, along with new regulations about transparency in shell companies, might affect campaign finance.

The Freedom to Vote Act rejected by the Senate this year would have addressed this issue more effectively; it required any person or entity donating more than $10,000 to a campaign be identified. It would also have protected against the voter suppression laws passed last year in 19 Republican-dominated states, which the Texas primary revealed to be as discriminatory as opponents feared: about 13% of mail-in ballots, 23,000 of them, were rejected in a state that in the past rejected about 1%. Officials in counties that lean Democratic rejected mail-in ballots at a higher rate than officials in counties that lean Republican: 15.1% to 9.1%.

Today, the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, permitting the administration to raise tariffs against them. The measure passed by a vote of 424 to 8. The eight votes against the measure came from Republican members Andy Biggs (AZ), Dan Bishop (NC), Lauren Boebert (CO), Matt Gaetz (FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Glenn Grothman (WI), Thomas Massie (KY), and Chip Roy (TX), all staunch Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, the support of certain U.S. lawmakers for Russia in this crisis has been a boon to the Russian president. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is openly pushing Russian talking points, claiming that NATO is supporting Nazis in Ukraine. Russian state TV is replaying Representative Madison Cawthorn’s (R-NC) remarks calling President Zelensky a “thug.”

Today’s other big news came from The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell: the report alleging that Trump lost the 2020 election because of Dominion Voting Systems—a report that Trump used to justify his attempt to overturn the election, including a plan to assume emergency powers—was not written by a volunteer lawyer after the election, as previously understood. In fact, it was written by a senior White House aide, Joanna Miller, who worked for key Trump advisor Peter Navarro. Navarro incorporated the Miller report into one of his own, which he and aides had begun to write two weeks before the election even happened.

That is, it was the White House itself that invented the “report” that the election was stolen, even before the election took place, and then used that report to justify the Big Lie that 19 state legislatures have relied on to restrict voting.

Ukraine’s people are trying to save their democracy from a criminal assault by an autocrat who has perverted his own country’s government, concentrating the nation’s wealth and power in the hands of his cronies, and silencing those who want a say in their government.

That fight is not limited to Ukraine.

[gatto]

@milliefink

That is, it was the White House itself that invented the “report” that the election was stolen, even before the election took place

wow. and i wonder: does that mean they expected to lose? or, maybe trump knows he never wins without cheating so it’s just his standard practice?

[TornPaperNapkin]

I think it means they expected to install a lifetime dictator via a coup regardless of how people voted.

[DukeTrout]

[gatto]

@TornPaperNapkin

they expected to install a lifetime dictator

yeah, good point.

i sometimes think about the fact the only reason he’s still alive is the treatment he got at walter reed. being president literally saved that very unhealthy man’s life. and cost so many others

[milliefink]

March 18, 2022 (Friday)

This morning, President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping spoke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, speaking personally for the first time since last November. In early February, before the invasion, Xi and Russian president Vladimir Putin met and issued a 5000-word statement pledging limitless “friendship.” But it is not clear Xi expected either the invasion or how badly it would go for Russia, as Ukraine has held its own against a military eight times its size and as countries across the globe have isolated Russia.

The White House readout of the call indicated that Biden explained the position of the U.S., and “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians.” Xi called for a diplomatic solution and Biden agreed, but it is clear the two leaders mean very different things from that understanding: Xi blames the U.S. for supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons; the U.S. hopes for help putting pressure on Putin.

It does not appear that Xi indicated what China intended to do, and later in the day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it is a “concern” that China might provide military or financial support to Russia. Still, Xi is facing a historic election in October, and there is little indication that tying China to Russia right now would help his political position. Certainly, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who has relied on Russian support, appears now to be rethinking that reliance and is reaching out to rebuild former alliances. He has just visited the United Arab Emirates for the first time since 2011, when the Syrian war broke out.

Today’s update from the Pentagon did not suggest that Russia is winning its war of aggression. It began: “This is Day 23 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russians remain largely stalled across the country.”

Russia’s ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina warned that Russia could treat that Balkan country the same way it is treating Ukraine if Bosnia and Herzegovina decides to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The immediacy of the hot war in Ukraine has driven some important issues out of the news.

First, the war has affected not only Ukraine’s people and infrastructure, but also its ability to produce wheat, corn, and sunflower oil. Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s second biggest exporter of grains and biggest exporter of sunflower oil. It provided over half of the corn imports to the European Union, about a fifth of its soft wheat, and almost a quarter of its vegetable oil. (Soft wheat has less protein—gluten—than hard wheat, corn feeds Europe’s animals, and sunflower oil is in processed foods, including baby food, where it is hard to replace.)

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged farmers to plant as much as they possibly can, but Russians are moving into valuable farming land and killing farmers. Supply chains for fertilizer and animal feed are breaking down, causing prices to skyrocket just at planting season; roads and bridges are bombed out; and ships cannot leave ports in the Black Sea, meaning they cannot transport crops. Food prices in Europe are almost certainly going to spike this year.

More immediately, millions of the world’s poorest people, who are dependent on Ukrainian grains, are going to suffer. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey all depend on wheat from Ukraine. A disruption in grain supplies will send those countries into the market, driving up prices globally, especially as countries with their own grain slap controls on grain exports to make sure their people have enough. That will hurt the world’s least food-secure countries, like Bangladesh and Yemen. The U.N. World Food Programme has predicted 2022 will be “a year of catastrophic hunger.”

Second, here in the U.S., Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, announced on February 25, has been proceeding as Jackson meets with senators who will cast votes on her confirmation. The American Bar Association today rated Jackson, a 51-year-old graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School with an impressive career history including service as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, “well qualified” to serve on the court. This is its highest rating.

Republicans are opposing Jackson on the grounds that she has been easy on sex offenders who hurt children. This is easy to debunk—in fact, Jackson’s sentences were consistent with those of other judges—but it is enormously telling, since calling opponents sex predators is a common theme in today’s global right-wing movement as oligarchs or autocrats try to solidify their power by mobilizing an angry voter base.

In 2013, Putin shored up his waning popularity by passing legislation that banned allowing children to see “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” launching an attack on LGBTQ Russians. He said that Russia would defend “traditional” values against an assault of “genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance" that he said "equals good and evil.” He equated modern liberal democracies, with their defense of the rights of all, with pedophilia.

American evangelicals embraced that connection. Franklin Graham wrote: “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues…. [H]e has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.” Since then, those opposed to modern liberal democracy have doubled down on the idea that they are opposing pedophilia, circulating stories about an underage sex ring in a Washington D.C., pizza parlor, for example.

That smear of liberal democracy with the stain of pedophilia covers over the destruction of democracy and covers up the concentration of power into the hands of a favored few. While Republicans are hinting that the well-respected Judge Jackson is soft on sex criminals, they are working to gather power into their own hands.

The third story that has flown under the radar is that the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Florida senator Rick Scott, has provided a blueprint for what the Republicans will do if they get a majority in the next election. In “An 11-point plan to rescue America,” produced by the group responsible for electing Republican senators, Scott promised that the Republicans “will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs.” The plan continues: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family.”

The plan promises that children will say the Pledge of Allegiance and “learn that America is a great country,” they will not learn critical race theory, and discussion of race will be banned from American society. The country will build former president Trump’s border wall and name it after him.

To protect the family, the Republican plan calls for destroying the business regulation, social safety net, federal promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights that Americans have embraced since the 1930s and handing power over to the wealthy. It promises to “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop socialism,” by which Republicans mean not international socialism in which the government owns the means of production—factories—for that is not on the table in the U.S. Instead, they mean a system in which voters can create a government that regulates business and uses tax dollars to provide services for all Americans.

Republicans, the plan says, will dramatically increase taxes on Americans earning less than $100,000, raising $1 trillion over ten years, although since they will also cut the Internal Revenue Service by 50%, the government might be hard pressed to collect those taxes. Since “government should not be doing anything that the private sector can do better and cheaper,” they will make sure all laws expire after five years, ending them with the idea that Congress will simply repass good laws. They would end Social Security (which, by the way, protects children as well as the elderly and disabled), Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. They will sell off all “non-essential” government assets, buildings, and land (are national parks essential?) and cut funding to states “other than disaster relief.”

This plan is “easily the most radical document put forward by a member of the leadership of a major political party in modern times,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote.

“Americans deserve to know what we will do,” Scott said in his introduction to the plan.

Indeed, we do.

[gatto]

@milliefink

The nuclear family is crucial to civilization

@milliefink

as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs.

greetings, programs!

it is God’s design for humanity… to say otherwise is to deny science.

ummm… i think i see a flaw in his reasoning here

( eta: a link to the mentioned op-ed )

[milliefink]

March 19, 2022 (Saturday)

Buddy is watching a classic movie involving old Boston and gangsters (with very long hair and lovely cars– I’m guessing the 1970s?) and I was intending to write a philosophical letter tonight about presidential patterns during inflection moments.

But about the time I sat down to write, my friend Peter sent me this image, offering me calm “in the midst of the current maelstrom(s),” and it suddenly hit me that I am very tired, and then it hit me that I can’t be the only one who is finding it exhausting to digest all the news these days.

Let’s take the night off, and regroup tomorrow with fresh energy and resolve.

[Photo Indian Morning Snow, by Peter Ralston. It’s from last week’s March snow, and is named for the island at the mouth of the harbor.]

[Mindysan33]

Somehow, humanity got along without the nuclear family for most of our history… funny that…

[chenille]

Yes, but they weren’t truly civilized, which only applies to suburban Whites on old sitcoms.

[LutherBlisset]

@milliefink

Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s second biggest exporter of grains and biggest exporter of sunflower oil. It provided over half of the corn imports to the European Union, about a fifth of its soft wheat, and almost a quarter of its vegetable oil. (Soft wheat has less protein—gluten—than hard wheat, corn feeds Europe’s animals, and sunflower oil is in processed foods, including baby food, where it is hard to replace.)

[…]
More immediately, millions of the world’s poorest people, who are dependent on Ukrainian grains, are going to suffer. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey all depend on wheat from Ukraine. A disruption in grain supplies will send those countries into the market, driving up prices globally, especially as countries with their own grain slap controls on grain exports to make sure their people have enough. That will hurt the world’s least food-secure countries, like Bangladesh and Yemen.

Erm. This is leaving out some very crucial bit of information.

Russia is also one of the world’s largest producers of wheat, maize, and sunflower. Some of the Middle East and North African countries mentioned get the majority of their wheat from Russia, not Ukraine.

The Russian government has build up a soft power supplying crops, especially wheat, at prices and quality which other countries could not match. France, interestingly also among the large export-oriented wheat producers, lost large contracts on the market in North Africa.

I expect the narrative in the countries reliant on Russian exports to be influenced in the direction that NATO is waging an unofficial war against then via proxy of sanctions against Russia. This is going to be really, really difficult to undercut.

Additional information: China reported a very bad harvest, and while China to the best of my knowledge produces mainly for the domestic marked, this is not going to help.

Sidenote: Meanwhile, Germany produces the vast majority of it’s demand of wheat itself, and thus is not one of the big exportere. But shelves for flours are currently empty, like at the beginning of the pandemic. I don’t even.

[milliefink]

March 20, 2022 (Sunday)

Tomorrow, the Senate will begin confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated by President Joe Biden on February 25, 2022, to take a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Jackson is currently a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This small circuit is prominent and prestigious because its location in Washington, D.C., means that it decides cases concerning the U.S. government. It is often seen as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Three current members of the court—Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh—served previously as judges on the D.C. Circuit.

Judge Jackson has a wide range of experience, having both worked in private practice at corporate firms and served as a public defender, during which time she defended detainees at Guantanamo Bay. After earning her degrees from Harvard University and Harvard Law School, where she was a supervising editor on the prestigious Harvard Law Review, she served as a law clerk for three judges, including Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court, whose seat she has been nominated to fill.

Today, reporters are focusing on how she might decide on cases relating to hot-button issues like abortion and gun rights. But what is at stake with our current Supreme Court is far broader than the question of how a justice will vote on any one issue: it is whether the federal government can protect the rights of citizens from state laws taking away those rights.

This question comes from the 1940s. In the wake of World War II, the gap between America’s stated democratic principles and the abusive treatment of racial minorities and women, especially in the southern states, was so glaring that pressure built to reinforce the idea that our laws should apply to everyone equally. Media-grabbing stories, like that of the sheriff who was acquitted by an all-white jury after putting out the eyes of Black veteran Issac Woodard, made the United States look far more like Nazi Germany than Americans liked.

But the laws necessary to protect Black and Brown Americans, including returning veterans, could not pass Congress because of the resistance of segregationist Democrats. So, under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, the Supreme Court began to protect Black Americans from abuse by using the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 as former Confederates in charge of state legislatures passed laws relegating formerly enslaved Americans to a state of second-class citizenship. The amendment addressed that legal establishment of racial hierarchies by stating, “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.” The amendment gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.”

In the 1950s, the Supreme Court based civil rights decisions on the Fourteenth Amendment, and it continued that trajectory in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision protecting the right of married couples to contraception, the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision permitting interracial marriage, and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting a woman’s right to abortion without excessive government regulation all come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

But opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. These opponents began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level.

Those who embraced this literal version of the Constitution called themselves “originalists” or “textualists,” and their intellectual representative was Justice Antonin Scalia, whom President Ronald Reagan appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986. The following year, six Republicans joined Democrats to reject extremist Robert Bork, who had openly called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions.

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

Kennedy’s words then seemed outlandish, but now, thanks to the three Supreme Court appointments by former president Donald Trump, six of the nine members of the court are originalists. They have indicated their willingness to permit state legislatures to act as they wish, overturning constitutional rights like abortion, outlawing “divisive” instruction in our classrooms, and suppressing the vote of minority voters.

Justice Stephen Breyer, under whom Jackson clerked, offered a new intellectual counterpoint to originalism that sought to move beyond the political lines of the post-Reagan era. He explained that we should approach constitutional questions by starting at the beginning: what did the Framers intend for the Constitution to do? Their central goal was not simply to protect liberties like free speech or gun ownership, he argued; their goal was to promote democracy. All court decisions, he said, should take into consideration what conclusion would best promote democracy.

The conviction that the point of the Constitution was to promote democracy meant that Breyer thought that the law should change based on what voters wanted, so long as the majority did not abuse the minority. Every decision was complicated, he told an audience in 2005—if the outcome were obvious, the Supreme Court wouldn’t take the case. But at the end of the day, justices should throw their weight behind whichever decision was more likely to promote democracy.

It is notable that in her decisions, Judge Jackson has argued for this approach, repeatedly focusing on democracy and the rules that preserve it. In her 118–page decision in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn (2019) concerning whether Congress could compel members of the executive branch to testify, she famously wrote: “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.” Her conclusion began: “The United States of America has a government of laws and not of men.”

[milliefink]

March 21, 2022 (Monday)

Today is the anniversary of Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech, given in 1861 just after he became the provisional vice president of the Confederacy. All these years later, the themes of that speech are still with us.

Stephens spoke in Savannah, Georgia, to explain the difference between the United States and the fledgling Confederacy. That difference, he said, was slavery. The American Constitution was defective because it based the government on the principle that all men were created equal. Confederate leaders had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error by basing the Confederate government on the idea that some people were better than others.

In contrast to the government the Founding Fathers had created, the Confederacy rested on the “great truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Their determination to promote their new philosophy meant that the southern states insisted on states’ rights. The majority of Americans, speaking through the federal government, insisted on reining enslavement in, restricting it to the southern states where it already existed, while southern enslavers wanted to expand their “peculiar institution” to the nation’s newly acquired western lands. In white southerners’ view, federal oversight was tyranny, and true democracy meant that state legislatures should be able to do as their voters wished.

So long as a majority of voters in the southern states voted for human enslavement, democracy had been served. Those same states, of course, limited voting to a few wealthy white men.

The Republican Party had organized in the mid-1850s to stand against this version of American democracy. Those who joined the new party recognized that if enslavers were able to take control of new western states, they would use their votes in Congress and in the Electoral College to take over the federal government and make slavery national.

The government, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln warned, could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided,” he told an audience in June 1858. “It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”

For his part, Lincoln insisted on basing the nation on the idea that “all men are created equal,” as the Founders stated—however hypocritically—in the Declaration of Independence. I should like to know,” Lincoln said in July 1858, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop…. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it!”

Less than a month after Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the Confederates fired on a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the Civil War began. When it ended, almost exactly four years later, southern state legislatures again tried to circumscribe the lives of the Black Americans who lived within their state lines. The 1865 Black Codes said that Black people couldn’t own firearms, for example, or congregate. They had to treat their white neighbors with deference and were required to sign yearlong work contracts every January or be judged vagrants, punishable by arrest and imprisonment. White employers could get them out of jail by paying their fines, but then they would have to work off their debt.

To make the principle that all men are created equal and entitled to equality before the law a reality, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and sent it off to the states for ratification. The states added it to the Constitution in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that “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’s quite a sentence. It guarantees that no state can discriminate against any of its citizens. And then the amendment goes on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

This is what is at stake today, both in the Senate hearings on the confirmation of the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson, and more generally. Is our democratic system served so long as state legislatures can do what they wish without federal interference? Or should the federal government protect equality among all its citizens?

Ideally, of course, states would write fair laws without federal interference, and to create those circumstances after the Civil War, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, permitting Black men to vote, and then passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote to Black men. When the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1870, the system had been fixed, most American men believed: the right to vote should protect all interests in the states.

Quickly, though, southern states took away the vote of the Black voters they insisted were trying to redistribute wealth from hardworking white taxpayers into public works projects to benefit the states’ poorer inhabitants. With Black voters cut out of the system, state legislatures enacted harshly discriminatory laws, and law enforcement looked the other way when white people violated the rights of Black and Brown citizens.

After World War II, the Supreme Court used the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to overrule state laws that favored certain citizens over others, and Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to give Black and Brown Americans a say in the state governments under which they lived.

Now, the Republicans, at this point to a person, are echoing the pre–Civil War Democrats to say that democracy means that states should be able to do what they wish without interference from the federal government. So, for example, Texas—and now other states—should be able to ban abortion regardless of the fact that abortion is a constitutional right. States should be able to stop public school teachers from covering certain “divisive” topics: Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked an apparently nonplussed Judge Jackson, “Is it your personal hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our legal system?” And states should be able to restrict the vote, much as southern states did after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and as 19 Republican-dominated states have done since the 2020 election.

Members of the new Republican Party in the 1850s recognized that, in that era, the doctrine of states’ rights meant not only the continued enslavement of Black Americans in the South, but also the spread of enslavement across the nation as southern enslavers moved west to create new states that would overawe the free states in Congress and the Electoral College. The spread of their system was exactly what Stephens called for 161 years ago today.

Now, in 2022, as Republican-dominated states lock down into one-party systems, their electoral votes threaten to give them the presidency in 2024 regardless of what a majority of Americans want. At that point, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection before the law will be vitally important, if only the Supreme Court will enforce it.

And that’s a key reason why, 161 years to the day after enslaver Alexander Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the confirmation hearing of a Black woman, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court matters.

[milliefink]

March 22, 2022 (Tuesday)

Right on cue, Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana today told a reporter that states not only should decide the issue of abortion but should also be able to decide the issues of whether interracial marriage should be legal and whether couples should have access to contraception. He told a reporter: “Well, you can list a whole host of issues, when it comes down to whatever they are, I’m going to say that they’re not going to all make you happy within a given state, but we’re better off having states manifest their points of view rather than homogenizing it across the country as Roe v. Wade did.”

After an extraordinary backlash to his statements, Braun walked back what he had said, claiming he had misunderstood the question. “Earlier during a virtual press conference I misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage, let me be clear on that issue—there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities, or individuals,” he said.

But he had stated his position quite clearly, and as he originally stated it, that position was intellectually consistent.

After World War II, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights in the states, imposing the government’s interest in protecting equality to overrule discriminatory legislation by the states.

Now, Republicans want to return power to the states, where those who are allowed to vote can impose discriminatory laws on minorities.

Senator Braun is correct: it is not possible to overrule the Supreme Court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights on just one issue. If you are going to say that the states should be able to do as they wish without the federal government protecting civil rights on, say, the issue of abortion, you must entertain the principle that the entire body of decisions in which the federal government protects civil rights, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending segregation in the public schools, is illegitimate.

And that is off-the-charts huge.

It is, quite literally, the same argument that gave us the claimed right of states to enslave people within their borders before the Civil War, even as a majority of Americans objected to that system. More recently, it is the argument that made birth control illegal in many states, a restriction that endangered women’s lives and hampered their ability to participate in the workforce as unplanned pregnancies enabled employers to discriminate against them. It is the argument that prohibits abortion and gay marriage; in many states, laws with those restrictions are still on the books and will take effect just as soon as the Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges are overturned.

Braun’s willingness to abandon the right of Americans to marry across racial lines was pointed, since Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearing for her elevation to the Supreme Court is currently underway in the Senate, is Black and her husband is non-Black. The world Braun described would permit states to declare their 26-year marriage illegal, as it would have been in many states before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision declared that states could not prohibit interracial marriages. This would also be a problem for sitting justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni.

But it is not just Braun talking about rolling back civil rights. This week, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has challenged the Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing contraception, and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has questioned Obergefell.

Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. In 2012—the most recent poll I can find—89% of Americans thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. And even the right to abortion, that issue that has burned in American politics since 1972 when President Richard Nixon began to use it to attract Democratic Catholics to the Republican ticket, remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.

A full decade ago, in April 2012, respected scholars Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, crunched the numbers and concluded: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream,” they wrote, “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

And yet, in the last decade, the party has moved even further to the right. Now it is not only calling for an end to the civil rights protections that undergird modern America, but also lining up behind a leader who tried to overthrow our democracy. A column by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post yesterday was titled: “Fringe Republicans are not the problem. It’s the party’s mainstream.”

Rubin points out that Republicans refused to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol, refused to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (which as recently as 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support), and refused to impeach Trump for an attempt to overthrow our democracy. The party brought us to the brink of defaulting on the debt, and it tolerates white nationalists in its ranks.

At the state level, prominent Republicans spread covid disinformation, suppress voting, and harass LGBTQ young people. To end abortion, certain Republican-dominated states are offering bounties to anyone reporting women seeking abortions beyond six weeks in a pregnancy. Worse, Rubin notes, “a law in Idaho would force rape victims to endure nine months of pregnancy—while allowing their rapists to collect a bounty for turning them in if they seek an abortion.”

The confirmation hearings this week for the elevation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court have illustrated that Republican lawmakers are far more interested in creating sound bites for right-wing media and reelection campaigns than in governing. Led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Republicans have tried to label Judge Jackson as soft on child pornographers, a smear that has been thoroughly discredited by, among others, the conservative National Review, which called it “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” Their attacks, though, will play well to their base on social media.

Similarly, Cruz made a big play of accusing Jackson of pushing Critical Race Theory in a private school on whose board she sits. “Do you agree…that babies are racist?” he asked, sitting in front of a poster with blown-up images from a book by African American studies scholar Ibram X. Kendi that the school has in its library.

On Twitter, the Republican National Committee cut right to the chase, showing a picture of Judge Jackson under her initials, which were crossed out and replaced with “CRT.”

[docosc]

Loving, Obergefell, Brown, Roe and any other cases based on the 14th are dead in the bullseye for the fascists in DC. They need to be able to fully dehumanize and other all non-cis, het, white, wealthy males in order to maintain their very small minority rule. If this doesn’t terrify you, I question your humanity. I am a cis, het, white, (fairly) wealthy male, and it terrifies my because I know it’s impact on people I love and care for. The problem for lots of these folks is they cannot imagine valuing someone who is not in that demographic as anything other than property. They do not want to return to the 1950’s and Happy Days, they want to return to the 1850’s and Roots. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is not paying attention.

[Kii]

@milliefink

Do you agree…that babies are racist?” [Cruz] asked, sitting in front of a poster with blown-up images from a book by African American studies scholar Ibram X. Kendi

That isn’t what that book says! I am so fucking tired of these books, and CRT, being used as boogymen. Anyone who uses these tactics is a racist. They may not believe what they are saying, they may be pandering for votes, but their actions are racist. They are racist.
Why is this awful person my senator?!

Hahaha. I just went to rage-buy a few copies of that book to give to some babies I know and it’s the #1 kids book on Amazon

[milliefink]

March 23, 2022 (Wednesday)

“O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”

Langston Hughes wrote these words in a poem published in 1936. He wrote as the Dust Bowl baked in the heat, Louisiana senator Huey Long died by gunfire, the Supreme Court invalidated much of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a serial killer terrorized Cleveland, workers finished Hoover Dam, the Depression dragged on, and Black and Brown Americans fell even farther behind their white neighbors.

Today, at the Senate confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) recited some of Hughes’s poem, and the choppy era in which we are living made Hughes’s words apt.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is four weeks old. The State Department announced today that “the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine” and that the government is committed to bringing the perpetrators to account. President Joe Biden today flew to Brussels, where he will meet tomorrow with leaders of the 29 other NATO nations to discuss the conflict. Biden is expected to unveil a plan to replace the Russian oil and gas cut off by sanctions with supplies from the U.S., helping Europe to avoid a crisis even as the U.S. imposes still harsher sanctions on Russia. The meeting is also expected to discuss contingency plans in case Russian president Vladimir Putin deploys chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

At home, former president Trump is in the news.

The New York Times today published the resignation letter of former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who quit his job after the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, stopped the process of seeking an indictment against the former president. In his letter, Pomerantz wrote, “I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes—he did.”

Pomerantz suggested that Bragg stopped the forward motion of the case out of concern about “the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed.” Pomerantz countered that “a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice.”

Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been under investigation in North Carolina for claiming a false residence for purposes of voting, a deception that might constitute voter fraud. News broke today that his wife, Debra Meadows, filled out two official forms claiming the couple lives in a trailer in rural North Carolina, although they actually live in a condo in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. One of the forms she signed reads: “Fraudulently or falsely completing this form” is a Class I felony.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a convicted felon, was taken off a plane in Miami because his passport had been revoked. The plane was headed for Dubai.

Today, Trump withdrew his endorsement of Alabama Representative Mo Brooks, such a staunch supporter he spoke at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse, for suggesting that the party needs to move on past the rehashing of the 2020 election. Brooks has been trailing in the polls.

After Trump’s announcement, Brooks said that Trump had “asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency,” all of which would have been an illegal attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the election. Brooks said Trump was pushing this plan as late as September 2021.

Today, at the third day of the Senate confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Trump Republicans turned in a performance for right-wing media, expressing outrage over their manufactured concern that certain of Judge Jackson’s sentences for child pornography were too short and that she is a secret warrior for Critical Race Theory in the schools.

This is such a transparent reach for base votes that will score an interview on right-wing media that immediately after Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke about Critical Race Theory, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) said, “I think we should recognize that the jackassery we often see around here is partly because of people mugging for short-term camera opportunities.” Sasse’s point was borne out when a camera then apparently caught Cruz checking Twitter for his own name.

Certain Republican senators badgered and bullied Jackson, who could not fight back without endangering her chances of confirmation. It was an abusive dynamic that spoke ill of the process and of the senators themselves: the abusive Republicans, but also the many Democrats who, as legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick pointed out, did little to remind viewers that the Republicans have stacked the court with extremists who are poised to take away our fundamental rights, and instead just let the Republicans beat up on Jackson.

Tonight Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) illustrated the profound difference between Jackson, who demonstrated a profound understanding of our founding documents and our legal system, and those browbeating her when she tweeted: “The Constitution grants us rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—not abortions.”

It is, of course, not the U.S. Constitution but the Declaration of Independence that declares: “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It goes on to say “[t]hat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”

Senator Booker, though, pushed back against the Republicans as Jackson could not. In an impassioned speech, quoting Langston Hughes’s vow that “America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath—America will be!” Booker said “There is a love in this country that is extraordinary.”

He spoke of Jackson’s parents and how they “didn’t stop loving this country even though this country didn’t love them back.” Jackson has talked of how the life of civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley inspired her; Booker said: “Did she become bitter” when no one would hire her after law school? “Did she try to create a revolution? No, she used the very Constitution of this nation. She loved it so much she wanted America to be America….”

“That is the story of how you got to this desk,” he told Jackson. “You and I and everyone here: generations of folk who came here and said, ‘America, I’m Irish. You may say no Irish or dogs need apply, but I’m going to show this country that I can be free here. I can make this country love me as much as I love it.’ Chinese Americans forced into mere slave labor building our railroads connecting our country saw the ugliest of America, but they were going to build their home here and say, ‘America, you may not love me yet, but I’m going to make this nation live up to its promise and hope.’ LGBTQ Americans from Stonewall women to Seneca…. All of these people loved America.”

“And so you faced insults here that were shocking to me—well, actually not shocking. But you are here because of that kind of love.”

Finally, today brought the passing of Madeleine K. Albright, whose parents were Czech refugees from the Nazis and the Communists, at 84. Albright served the United States as a diplomat and then as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, the first woman to serve in that role. Her most recent op-ed, published by the New York Times just a month ago, illustrated just how deeply she still engaged with the nation’s interests. She warned that invading Ukraine “would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.”

Her extraordinary career was a fitting backdrop today to Booker’s illumination of Judge Jackson. “The act of striving,” Albright once said, “is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”

[milliefink]

March 24, 2022 (Thursday)

“We are very pleased, dear President, dear Joe, to welcome you again in Brussels,” European Council president Charles Michel of Belgium told President Joe Biden today. “Your presence here and your participation in this European Council meeting is a very strong signal.”

The European Council is made up of the heads of states of the European Union states, along with the President of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. “Our unity is rock solid, and we are very, very pleased to coordinate, to cooperate with you. These are difficult times, challenging times, and we need to take the right and the intelligent decisions for the future and for the security, for the stability,” Michel said.

“And thank you for this excellent cooperation and coordination,” he concluded.

Michel was referring to the joint statement made today by Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, of Germany, condemning Russia’s “unjustified and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine,” which is now four weeks old. They declared that “we are united in our resolve to defend our shared values, including democracy, respect for human rights, global peace and stability, and the rules-based international order.”

They announced more sanctions—the U.S. announced sanctions on more than 400 additional individuals and entities today—as well as $1 billion in humanitarian aid from the U.S. for Ukraine in addition to the more than $2 billion in military equipment the U.S. has pledged. They announced cooperation to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas, a focus on food security to prevent food shortages as Russian and Ukrainian grain production slows, and additional cybersecurity. To help resettlement, the U.S. has agreed to take up to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing their homes.

They also announced joint efforts to strengthen democracies in and around Ukraine. The U.S. will launch the European Democratic Resilience Initiative (EDRI) to provide at least $320 million in new funding to “support media freedom and counter disinformation, benefit the safety and security of activists and vulnerable groups, strengthen institutions and the region’s rule of law, and help ensure accountability for human rights abuses and violations of international law.” The European Commission will “reallocate funds from EU programmes to support civil society organizations, human rights defenders, journalists, and pro-democracy activists in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova,” in addition to providing emergency grants to save civic activism and open media in Ukraine. The statement also demanded accountability for any war crimes Russians commit in Ukraine.

Biden responded to Michel by reiterating that “from the very beginning, I was of the view: The single most important thing that we have to do in the West is be united.” Russian president Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming objective, Biden said, “is to demonstrate that democracies cannot function in the 21st century—because things are moving so rapidly, they require consensus, and it’s too difficult to get consensus—and autocracies are going to rule.” Putin has tried for years to break up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so he could face 30 individual countries rather than one united front. The single most important thing we can do is to be united.

That impressive unity abroad has not translated to the United States.

Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson continues to promote pro-Russian, anti-Biden propaganda. Today the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Biden’s son Hunter’s foundation had financed biological labs in Ukraine (which earlier propaganda said were developing biological weapons); less than 12 hours later, Carlson made the same claim.

More explosively, tonight Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Robert Costa of CBS broke the story that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, a right-wing activist who goes by the name Ginni, exchanged at least 29 texts with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows about the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, 21 from her, 8 from Meadows.

The messages were among the 2320 messages Meadows provided to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol; the aides and committee members to whom Woodward and Costa spoke indicated their belief that there were more messages between Ms. Thomas and Meadows than just the 29.

The messages show that Ms. Thomas bought into the conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, including the extreme theories pushed by QAnon. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she urged Meadows on November 10, after the results were in. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” (Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes, and by a vote of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.) On November 24, Meadows wrote, “This is a fight of good versus evil…. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues….”

In January 2022, Ms. Thomas’s husband, Justice Thomas, was the only member of the Supreme Court to vote against permitting the January 6 committee to see a different cache of documents concerning the fight to overturn the election. Trump had claimed executive privilege over documents stored as part of the presidential records archive at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); by a vote of 8 to 1, the Supreme Court agreed that the committee’s subpoena must be enforced.

Considering that his wife might have communications in that NARA cache, it was likely a conflict of interest for him to participate in that decision.

Neither Thomas responded to requests for comment. The Supreme Court announced Sunday that Justice Thomas, 73, had been hospitalized with an infection that is not Covid-19 and that he was expected to be released Monday or Tuesday. Thomas was not in court Wednesday, and the court has provided no further updates.

That Thomas is now at the center of this scandal suggests another dimension to the extraordinarily vicious attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at this week’s Senate hearing for confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The former president himself is also trying to keep his name in the news and his base angry. Today his lawyers filed a federal lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, Christopher Steele (who produced the Steele Dossier suggesting that Trump had concerning ties with Russia), and so on—a laundry list of 47 people and companies he claims were part of a conspiracy against him after the 2016 election—claiming that “Clinton and her cohorts orchestrated an unthinkable plot…. Acting in concert, the[y]… maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.” Their actions were “so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.”

It is a mess, full of debunked claims, misspellings, and outright lies; Aaron Blake of the Washington Post called it a press release. It is impossible to imagine Trump intends to continue the case until it gets to discovery, when the defendants’ lawyers could request his testimony under oath. The complaint asks for a trial, and it appears to be designed to rile up his base with familiar stories—possibly for 2024, as Blake suggests, but, if history is any guide, primarily to encourage donations.

[milliefink]

March 25, 2022 (Friday)

In confirmation hearings this week for her elevation to a Supreme Court seat, the highly qualified and well-respected Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson endured vicious attacks from Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who vow to reject her confirmation despite the fact that her record is stronger than those of recent Republican nominees and that 58% of Americans want her to be confirmed. (In contrast, only 42% of Americans wanted Justice Amy Coney Barrett confirmed.)

Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) explained: "Judge Jackson has impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law,” but she “refused to embrace” the judicial philosophy of originalism, which would unravel the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights, as well as most of the other civil rights protected since the 1950s.

Indeed, the hearings inspired Republicans to challenge many of the civil rights decisions that most Americans believe are settled law, that is, something so deeply woven into our legal system that it is no longer reasonably open to argument. The rights Republicans challenged this week included the right to use birth control, access abortion, marry across racial lines, and marry a same-sex partner.

These rights, which previous Supreme Courts said are guaranteed by our Constitution, are enormously popular. Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. Eighty-nine percent of Americans in 2012 thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. Even the right to abortion remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.

So how do today’s Republicans square overturning these established rights with the fact that we live in a democracy, in which the majority should rule, so long as it does not crush a minority?

A 2019 speech by then–attorney general William Barr at the University of Notre Dame offers an explanation.

In that speech, Barr presented a profound rewriting of the meaning of American democracy. He argued that by “self-government,” the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And, since people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.

Barr quoted the leading author of the Constitution, James Madison, to prove his argument. “In the words of Madison,” he said, “‘We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…’.”

This has been a popular quotation on the political and religious right since the 1950s, and Barr used it to lament how the modern, secular world has removed moral restraints, making Americans unable to tell right from wrong and, in turn, creating “immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.” “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’” he said, “have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.” The law, Barr said, “is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values” through judicial interpretation, and he called for saving America by centering religion.

Madison never actually said the quotation on which Barr based his argument. It’s a fake version of what Madison did say in Federalist #39, in 1788, which was something entirely different. In Federalist #39, Madison explained how the new government, the one under which we still live, worked.

Answering the question of whether the new government the Framers had just proposed would enable people to vote for their representatives, he said yes. “No other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” Madison said nothing about personal morality when he talked about self-government, though. Instead, he focused on the mechanics of the new national government, explaining that such a government “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.”

He went on to say (and the capitalization is his, not mine): “It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an [small] proportion [of people], or a favored class of it….”

In his 2019 speech, Barr also expressed concern that people in the United States misunderstood the First Amendment to the Constitution, which expressly forbids the government from establishing a national religion or stopping anyone from worshiping a deity—or not—however they choose. In Barr’s hands, the First Amendment “reflects the Framers’ belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government.” To support that argument, he cites a few lines from Madison’s 1785 pamphlet objecting to religious assessments that talk about how Madison defined religion.

In reality, that pamphlet was Madison’s passionate stand against any sort of religious establishment by the government. He explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of religion attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Madison warned specifically that they could control the press, abolish trial by jury, take over the executive and judicial powers, take away the right to vote, and set themselves up in power forever.

Madison was on to something when he warned that there was a connection between establishing a religion and destroying American democracy. At the same time Republican lawmakers are now talking about rolling back popular civil rights in order to serve Christianity, they are also taking away the right to vote and appear to be looking to set a minority into power over the majority.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, on November 24, 2020, in a text about overthrowing the will of the voters after Joe Biden had won the presidential election by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 votes in the Electoral College. Referring to Jesus Christ, Meadows continued: “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues….”

[milliefink]

March 26, 2022 (Saturday)

Today, President Joe Biden ended four days in Europe with a landmark speech. After meeting with world leaders in Brussels, he traveled to Poland, where he visited American troops stationed there, met with humanitarian workers and refugees, talked with Polish president Andrzej Duda, and, finally, addressed an assembled crowd.

Biden spoke at the historic Royal Castle in the Polish capital of Warsaw, a building that was destroyed by the Nazis after the failed Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Polish resistance tried to throw off German occupation. The Polish government rebuilt the castle in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is now a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, considered to be of “outstanding value to humanity.”

There, Biden began with the words of the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, after his election in October 1978: “Be not afraid.” Biden explained that those words were “a message about the power—the power of faith, the power of resilience, and the power of the people.”

Biden briefly retraced Poland’s struggle and ultimate victory against Soviet repression and tied that story to the history of the United States by nodding to former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who passed away this week, and who had, he said, “fought her whole life for essential democratic principles.”

With this backdrop, Biden warned that we are again “in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Ukraine is at the frontlines of that battle.

“[T]heir brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people: the rule of law; free and fair elections; the freedom to speak, to write, and to assemble; the freedom to worship as one chooses; freedom of the press.”

“These principles are essential in a free society,” he said to applause. “But they have always…been under siege.” He noted that “[o]ver the last 30 years, the forces of autocracy have revived all across the globe,” showing “contempt for the rule of law, contempt for democratic freedom, contempt for the truth itself.” He called for democratic countries to work to stop autocracy.

Biden reiterated that Russia’s war on Ukraine is a war of choice that had “no justification or provocation. It was, he said, an example of using “brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control.” That is, he said, “nothing less than a direct challenge to the rule-based international order established since the end of World War Two,” and it threatens to throw Europe back into the old world of wars that the international rule-based order ended.

Biden outlined how the West has come together to try to stop Putin’s aggression. It has sanctioned oligarchs, lawmakers, and businesses to hurt the Russian economy. It has blocked Russia’s Central Bank from the global financial systems, even as more than 400 private companies have stopped doing business in Russia.

These economic sanctions, he said, “are a new kind of economic statecraft with the power to inflict damage that rivals military might,” and they are weakening Russia’s power to make war and to “project power.”

At the same time, the West has supported Ukraine “with incredible levels of military, economic, and humanitarian assistance,” that the Ukrainian people have used “to devastating effect.”

Biden reiterated that U.S. troops are in Europe not to fight Russia, but to defend our North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. “Don’t even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory,” he warned. NATO nations will defend “each and every inch of NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.”

He called on all the world’s democracies to help the Ukrainian refugees, and pledged that the U.S. would do its part.

The war has already been a strategic failure for Russia, he said. “The democracies of the world are revitalized with purpose and unity found in months that we’d once taken years to accomplish.” And people are fleeing Russia as President Vladimir Putin cracks down on protesters and shuts down the media.

Biden reassured the Russian people that they are not our enemies, noting that they, too, have reason to hate the war. Just days ago they were “a 21st century nation with hopes and dreams that people all over the world have for themselves and their family,” and now “Vladimir Putin’s aggression has cut you, the Russian people, off from the rest of the world, and it’s taking Russia back to the 19th century.” “This war is not worthy of you, the Russian people,” he said, and reminded them that “Putin can and must end this war.”

Turning to Europe, Biden said that turning to clean and renewable energy is a matter of economic and national security, as well as vital for the planet. He urged democracies to fight the corruption that has fueled Putin’s power. And finally, he said that the world’s democracies must maintain “absolute unity.”

“It’s not enough to speak with rhetorical flourish, of ennobling words of democracy, of freedom, equality, and liberty,” he said. “All of us…must do the hard work of democracy each and every day. My country as well.” His message “for all freedom-loving nations,” he said, is that “we must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul.” In the end, though, “the darkness that drives autocracy is ultimately no match for the flame of liberty that lights the souls of free people everywhere.” “We will have a different future—a brighter future rooted in democracy and principle, hope and light, of decency and dignity, of freedom and possibilities.”

“For God’s sake,” he said, “this man cannot remain in power.”

That last line seemed a logical conclusion to the argument Biden has been making about the struggle between democracy and autocracy, rallying democratic countries to stay unified against Putin as his troops smash Ukraine. But it prompted a flurry of media stories saying Biden had made a gaffe, changing his long-standing insistence that the U.S. is not engaging in regime change but rather is trying to defend Ukraine’s right to exist independently of Russia. A White House official clarified that “[t]he president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region…. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger of the New York Times noted that, however Biden meant the line, it underscored the difficulty of holding allies together against Putin while also avoiding an escalation of the war.

After the speech, the White House dropped on social media a cut of its section addressed to the Russian people… with Russian subtitles.