Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

April 5, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, former president Barack Obama returned to the White House at President Joe Biden’s invitation to talk about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare. He noted there have been changes in the White House since he left in 2017. For one thing, “[t]here’s a cat running around,” he joked, "which I guarantee you [his family’s dogs] Bo and Sunny would have been very unhappy about.”

Obama signed the ACA into law in 2010. Today, 31 million Americans have healthcare coverage thanks to it. They can’t be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. The ACA has lowered prescription drug costs for 12 million seniors, and it has enabled young people to stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26. It’s eliminated lifetime limits on benefits.

Republicans have loathed the ACA since Obama signed it into law in 2010. This is a modern-day stance, by the way: it was actually Republican president Theodore Roosevelt who first proposed universal healthcare at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Republican president Dwight Eisenhower who first tried to muscle such a program into being with the help of the new department created under him: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which in 1979 became the Department of Health and Human Services. Its declared mission was “improving the health, safety, and well-being of America.” In contrast to their forebears, today’s Republicans do not believe the government has such a role to play.

Last month, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the Republicans’ goal is to obstruct Biden and the Democrats until they retake power, and then immediately make good on old promises like repealing the ACA. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has proposed sunsetting all laws after five years and then passing the popular ones again. Since Republicans kill all social welfare bills with the filibuster, it’s not hard to imagine that Scott has the Affordable Care Act in his sights.

Enrollment in healthcare coverage under the ACA is at a record high since Biden took office, since he helped to push enrollment by opening special enrollment periods and dramatically increasing outreach. The law is popular: a poll last month by healthcare analysts Kaiser showed that 55% of Americans like it while 42% do not.

Today, Biden signed an executive order to increase outreach and coverage still further, and to urge Congress to deal with the “family glitch” in the law that determines eligibility for subsidies based on whether the primary enrollee can afford coverage for herself, rather than for her family. Fixing this glitch would lower costs for about 1 million Americans and open up coverage for another 200,000.

Before the signing, Obama, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris used the ACA to talk about the difference between the two parties.

Harris noted that “the ACA is the most consequential healthcare legislation passed in generations in our country” and that it was more than just a law, it was “a statement of purpose; a statement about the nation we must be, where all people—no matter who they are, where they live, or how much they earn—can access the healthcare they need, no matter the cost.”

She called on Congress to pass legislation that would let Medicare directly negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies (as every other developed country does). With 60 million people enrolled in Medicare, the program would have significant bargaining power to negotiate prices.

The vice president also called on the 12 states refusing to expand Medicaid to do so, enrolling the 4 million people who are now excluded. Acknowledging those people determined to take away abortion rights, she noted that women without medical care during pregnancy are significantly more likely to die than those who do have it.

Obama then explained why the Democrats worked so hard to begin the process of getting healthcare coverage for Americans. “[W]e’re not supposed to do this just to occupy a seat or to hang on to power,” he said. “We’re supposed to do this because it’s making a difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.”

The ACA shows, he said, that “if you are driven by the core idea that, together, we can improve the lives of this generation and the next, and if you’re persistent—if you stay with it and are willing to work through the obstacles and the criticism and continually improve where you fall short, you can make America better—you can have an impact on millions of lives.”

Then Biden took the podium before signing the executive order, adding that passing the ACA was about dignity. It was about the “countless Americans lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering, ‘My God—my God, what if I get really sick? What am I going to do? What is my family going to do? Will I lose the house?’ Discussions we had in my house with my dad when he lost his health insurance—’Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to take care of my family?’”

He warned that the Republicans want to get rid of the law. “[P]ay very close attention, folks,” he said. “If Republicans have their way, it means 100 million Americans with pre-existing conditions can once again be denied healthcare coverage by their insurance companies. That’s what the law was before Obamacare. In addition, tens of millions of Americans could lose their coverage, including young people who will no longer be able to stay on their parents’ insurance policy to age 26. Premiums are going to go through the roof.”

“Instead of destroying the Affordable Care Act,” he said, “let’s keep building on it.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to double down on the culture wars that whip up their base. By a vote of 70 to 14, the Oklahoma legislature has just passed a Republican bill making it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion unless the patient’s life is in danger. Violating the law carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. There was little discussion of the measure, since lawmakers unexpectedly added it to the agenda Monday night.

Abortion is a constitutional right, defined by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It is also popular in the U.S., with about 60% of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade and about 75% believing that abortion access should be between a woman and her doctor. Only 20% say that access should be regulated by law.

Those culture wars are pushing today’s right wing toward authoritarianism as they seek to enforce their views on the rest of the country.

Today, as we learned of more atrocities by Russian troops in Ukraine, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution that called on the U.S. government to uphold the founding democratic principles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): “individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.” Since those values “face external threats from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China and internal threats from proponents of illiberalism,” and since NATO countries have called for a recommitment to the founding values of the alliance, the resolution supports the establishment of a Center for Democratic Resilience within NATO headquarters. The resolution reaffirmed the House’s “unequivocal support” for NATO.

The resolution was introduced by Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who sits on both the Foreign Affairs and Government Oversight Committees, and had 35 other cosponsors from both parties. The vote in favor was bipartisan, with 219 Democrats and 142 Republicans voting yes. After all, what’s there to oppose in a nod to democratic values and diplomacy, when Ukraine is locked in a deadly battle to defend itself against an invasion and brutal occupation by Russian forces directed by authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin?

Sixty-three Republicans—those who tend to support former president Trump—voted against the resolution.

[milliefink]

Heather Cox Richardson writes ‘Letters from an American’ to empower,...

[hecep]

@milliefink

Those culture wars are pushing today’s right wing toward authoritarianism as they seek to enforce their views on the rest of the country.

Today, as we learned of more atrocities by Russian troops in Ukraine, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution that called on the U.S. government to uphold the founding democratic principles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): “individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.”

We’re getting near to where we’ll need NATO’s help in regaining a true, working, unfettered democracy here in the US.

[milliefink]

April 6, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, all but two of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution finding Trump aides Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among the early “no” votes was Representative Greg Pence (R-IN), whose brother, Vice President Mike Pence, was in danger from the mob on January 6 after then-president Trump blamed him for his refusal to overturn the election. The two who voted in favor were committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) and committee member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

The Republicans explicitly backed former president Trump and insisted that the investigation of the January 6 insurrection was simply a way to try to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 and to distract from scandals potentially involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter (who holds no government office).

The Democrats, in turn, warned that Trump’s attack on our democracy must not go unchallenged. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the Republicans a party “drenched in Putin propaganda” and noted that it had turned even on Cheney, who used to rank third in the leadership of House Republicans, “[b]ecause if you don’t go along with Donald Trump…a cult…they will attack you.”

An important current feeding the Republicans’ embrace of Trump is that the Republican leadership is wedded to an ideology that sees the most important American principle as a specific form of individual economic “freedom,” not democracy.

After World War II, Americans of both parties began to defend the concept of democracy, in which every person was equal before the law. That meant civil rights for Black and Brown Americans, as well as for women. But it also meant that the government tried to keep the economic playing field level enough that everyone had an equal shot at rising to prosperity.

Beginning with the New Deal in the 1930s and reaching into the 1970s, the government regulated business and protected workers and consumers. Those opposed to such a government insisted that such protections hurt their freedom to arrange their businesses as they saw fit. Second to their hatred of regulations was their dislike of the taxes that funded the government bureaucrats who inspected their factories, as well as underpinning social welfare programs. But it was the promise to cut taxes for working Americans that enabled them to take the White House in 1980.

The idea that America meant freedom for individuals to act as they wished took over the Republican Party after the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Beginning in 1981, the party focused on tax cuts to put more money in the hands of the wealthy, who would, they insisted, use it to expand the economy. Using the government to defend the “demand side,” by protecting equality, would destroy the ability of business leaders to arrange the economy in the most productive way possible. It was, Republicans said, “socialism.” And so, Republicans focused on cutting regulations and slashing taxes.

Rather than revise their ideology when their “supply side” economics concentrated wealth upward rather than promoting widespread prosperity, the Republicans doubled down on it, promoting deregulation and tax cuts above all else. They have now, in the second generation since Reagan, become convinced that their version of “freedom” is the fundamental principle on which the United States stands and that any challenge to it will destroy the country.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida in late February, the attendees had little to say about authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, which had happened days before. But they had plenty to say about Democrats.

On February 26, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) gave a speech in which he said “We survived the war of 1812, Civil War, World War I and World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War,” but “[t]oday, we face the greatest danger we have ever faced: The militant left-wing in our country has become the enemy within.” He claimed: “The woke Left now controls the Democrat Party. The entire federal government, the news media, academia, big tech, Hollywood, most corporate boardrooms, and now even some of our top military leaders… They want to end the American experiment. They want to replace freedom with control.”

This is completely wrong historically, of course. But the rising extremism of the Republican leadership suggests that it is concerned that American voters, including Republican voters, are turning against the ideology of “freedom” that focuses on concentrating wealth on the supply side of the economic equation and would like to see the government try to restore some semblance of equality. This would mean higher taxes on the wealthy.

A YouGov poll released April 1 shows that 60% of Americans think that billionaires don’t pay the full amount of taxes they owe. Among poorer voters, only 16% thought billionaires were playing fair, while a whopping 63% thought they were not, and 20% were not sure. Two thirds of Americans think that households should pay at least 20% of their income over $100 million in taxes. In not a single demographic category did that number fall under 50%, and the only category for which it was 50% was Republicans.

More broadly, Americans have called for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations now for years. In 2018, two thirds of Americans said they were dissatisfied with “the way income and wealth are distributed in the U.S.”; in 2017, 78% said that what bothers them about the U.S. tax system is that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share, and 80% said what bothers them is that corporations don’t pay their fair share.

Biden’s proposed $5.8-trillion 2023 budget, released at the end of March, proposes tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations. It would end Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the wealthy early. That cut sliced the top marginal income tax rate from 39.6 to 37% until December 31, 2025. It would also tax the interest on stocks and bonds, which currently is not taxed until those assets are sold, which means that their owners can accumulate large sums of money without ever being taxed on it, while wage workers pay full freight on their income. Biden wants to make American households worth more than $100 million pay a tax rate of at least 20% on their real income as well as on the gains on their unsold stocks and bonds.

The administration also wants to get rid of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden’s proposal would raise the corporate tax rate from the Trump low of 21% up to 28%.

The White House says these taxes would raise $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and it wants to use that money to fund public housing, science, police departments, climate change adjustments, education, pandemic preparedness, and, in this precarious time for democracy, increases to the military. While Trump’s tax cuts drove the national debt up to an astounding $23.2 trillion by the end of 2019 (up from $19.9 trillion when he took office), Biden promises to use money from his proposed tax increases to pay down the deficit.

Biden’s plans signal an end to the era of “freedom” in American politics and a return to a focus on equality and democracy. In this, they, hark back to the principles of the original Republican Party. During the Civil War, when faced with a mounting debt in their fight to protect the government, the Republicans invented the U.S. income tax in order, as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) said, to make sure that tax burdens would “be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them.” Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) agreed, saying: “It would be manifestly unjust to allow the large money operators and wealthy merchants, whose incomes might reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, to escape from their due proportion of the burden.”

Meanwhile, Senator Rick Scott’s “11-Point Plan to Rescue America” promises to put income taxes on the 50% of Americans who currently don’t make enough to be taxed. It’s part of his plan to “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism.”

It’s no wonder the Republicans are trying to keep the national focus on Trump and the culture wars.

[milliefink]

April 7, 2022 (Thursday)

Today, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to become Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s nominee by a vote of 53 to 47, with three Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in favor of confirmation. The three Republicans voting yes were Senators Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mitt Romney (R-UT).

Jackson’s elevation will not change the legal philosophy of the court. She will replace Justice Stephen Breyer, who was one of the three justices still on the court who do not adhere to the concept of “originalism,” which argues that the court must largely defer to state power rather than use the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights within the states. Six of the current nine justices, including the three appointed by former president Donald Trump, favor originalism.

It is likely that Justice Jackson will largely write dissents as her colleagues dismantle the legal frameworks that have shaped modern America. The ones currently on the table are the rights to abortion, marriage across racial lines, birth control, and gay marriage, but it is not only civil rights that are at risk. So are business regulation and protections for workers and consumers, and a decision last night suggests that the current Supreme Court will not defer to states when right-wing principles are at stake.

By a 5 to 4 decision, the court last night limited the power of states to stop big development projects that state officials worry will hurt the state’s environment. It did so under the so-called “shadow docket,” a system, rarely used in the past but now a key part of the court’s decision-making process, in which the court hands down decisions on an emergency basis without briefings or written decisions, so we have no idea on what grounds they are making their ruling. The American Petroleum Institute, the Interstate National Gas Association of America, and the National Hydropower Association all applauded the decision.

Jackson brings to the court a stellar record as well as experience as a public defender. She is the first justice with this experience since Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice, who left the court in 1991. Public defenders are a central part of our legal system, for if indeed everyone is equal before the law, it is crucial for everyone to have legal representation before the court. The Supreme Court itself recognized this principle in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), although two current justices have suggested they would overturn it if given the opportunity.

Jackson’s diverse experience is vital to a Supreme Court that is a historical outlier in its uniformity of professional backgrounds. While she brings experience as a public defender to the court, there is no one on the court who has ever served in elective office. Historically, presidents have always sought to have at least a few justices who understand politics because they have been part of the political system and thus understand that what they are doing in their chamber is very real life to those of us on the outside. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice, was the last justice on the court who had held elected office; she had served in the Arizona state senate. She left the court in 2006.

Justice Jackson, though, brings something brand new and vital to the U.S. Supreme Court. As Justice Marshall broke the Supreme Court’s color barrier, and Justice O’Connor broke the Supreme Court’s gender barrier, she is breaking her own barrier: She is the Supreme Court’s first Black female justice.

Justice Jackson’s perspective on the law and its effect on those of us who live here is crucially important. Also important, though, is that her elevation to the highest court in the land demonstrates the principle, however poorly we might honor it on occasion, that we are all equal before the law.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, presided over the Senate chamber for the momentous vote. Farnoush Amiri and Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press described what came next. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus had come to witness history; Black female lawmakers sat together along the back walls. The visitor galleries filled with young people, including Black women and men. Most of the senators were at their desks, although two Republican senators—Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma—stayed in the cloakroom because they were not wearing ties, as Senate rules require.

Harris instructed the clerk to call the roll.

Voting moved quickly until it became clear that everyone had voted except Rand Paul (R-KY). As the Senate waited for him to show up, Harris gave Senators Rafael Warnock (D-GA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) each a piece of vice-presidential stationery and asked the only two Black Democrats in the Senate to write a letter to a young Black woman to remember this day in history.

Then Paul cast his no vote from the cloakroom and the voting was over.

Jackson had won confirmation to the Supreme Court. When the final tally was announced, the Democrats broke out into applause and cheers. Murkowski joined them, while Romney applauded from across the aisle. Many Republicans had already left the chamber, but those remaining walked out during the applause. Romney remained alone on the Republican side, clapping.

The moment recalled another time of jubilation and hope, when lawmakers used their votes to declare all Americans equal before the law by passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. They ended the system of legal enslavement in the United States, a system that had divided Americans into different castes and given some people the power to rule the rest.

The New York Times recorded the scene when the measure passed in January 1865: “Thereupon rose a general shout of applause. The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with deafening and equally emphatic cheers of the throng in the galleries. The ladies in the dense assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated, intermingled with clapping of hands and exclamations of ‘Hurrah for freedom,’ ‘Glory enough for one day,’ &c. The audience were wildly excited, and the friends of the measure were jubilant. Never was a scene of such a joyous character before witnessed in the House of Representatives….”

Representative George W. Julian (R-IN) later remembered what it had been like to participate in that momentous day in 1865: “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy, while I was inexpressibly thankful for the privilege of recording my name on so glorious a page of the nation’s history.”

After Jackson’s confirmation, Vice President Harris said: “I’m overjoyed, deeply moved…. There’s so much about what’s happening in the world now that is presenting some of the worst of this moment and human behaviors. And then we have a moment like this.”

Judge Jackson will be sworn in to her new role after Justice Breyer resigns in June. Until then, she will continue in her present position as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

[rob_dobbs]

I was fully expecting to read that Confederate-friendly Congressmen walked out during the applause in 1865, and two voted from the cloakroom because they couldn’t be bothered to dress properly. I’ll just assume that happened.

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

Public defenders are a central part of our legal system, for if indeed everyone is equal before the law, it is crucial for everyone to have legal representation before the court.

I would suggest that, if we take this concept to its logical conclusion, that every defendant be represented in court by a public defender, not just indigent defendants. Likewise, I would pull prosecutors from the same pool. That way there isn’t as much of a power imbalance between prosecution and defense, or between wealthy defendants and poor ones (or even between wealthy defendants and the prosecution).

[Kii]

At the very least, the public defender’s offices should be funded at the same level as the DA. For every DA, a corresponding public defender’s office funded at the same level

[gatto]

hard when corporate interests like wells fargo and boa directly pay for their own assistant da’s ( and police officers )

Portland has done almost no oversight of business districts that could...

happens in every city masked through “local” business alliances and chambers of commerce

[Mindysan33]

@DukeTrout

that every defendant be represented in court by a public defender, not just indigent defendants. Likewise, I would pull prosecutors from the same pool

[milliefink]

April 8, 2022 (Friday)

“I have dedicated my career to public service because I love this country and our Constitution and the rights that make us free," Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said today at a White House ceremony celebrating her confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Also today, we learned that Donald Trump, Jr., texted Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on November 5, 2020, two days after the presidential election and two days before the media would call the election for President Elect Joe Biden: "We have operational control Total leverage…. Moral High Ground POTUS must start 2nd term now.”

The text, in the possession of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and reviewed by CNN reporters Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen, and Annie Grayer, suggested that even before the election was called for Biden, Trump’s people knew he would lose. Trump, Jr., offered a number of different ways in which Trump could nonetheless steal the election, most of which later materialized. Trump, Jr. apparently could not see why this would be a problem, since, “we have operational control.” “It’s very simple,” he texted: “We have multiple paths[.] We control them all.”

At least some of Trump’s inner circle were clearly conspiring to overturn our democracy. Just who was involved remains unclear to the public, although the January 6 Committee has more information than we do, not least because both Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, her husband, both of whom acted as White House advisors, testified before the committee recently. Trump spoke with the committee virtually on Tuesday, for 8 hours. Kushner testified for several hours on March 31.

Their cooperation stands in stark contrast to the refusal of the rest of Trump’s senior advisors to respond to subpoenas. But on April 6, the January 6 committee received the 101 emails that Trump advisor John Eastman, the author of the Eastman memo laying out an illegal plan for Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump, had refused to hand over but that a federal judge, David Carter, reviewed and ordered released. In his decision, Carter wrote that it is “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”

The committee today secured cooperation from an important witness to the insurrection. Charles Donohoe, the leader of a chapter of the extremist Proud Boys in North Carolina, pleaded guilty this morning to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and to assaulting police officers. He has agreed to testify against his co-defendants.

Hugo Lowell at The Guardian reports today that the January 6 committee is focusing on cooperation between the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers in a plan to stop the certification of Biden’s victory using physical force. The committee has reviewed video from Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker who filmed a meeting between the two groups in a parking garage on January 5. It has focused even more closely, though, on 17 minutes filmed at the attack itself, along with communications between the Proud Boys and rally organizers including Alexander and right-wing media personality Alex Jones.

Quested testified before the January 6 committee on Tuesday. “They’ve done an incredible amount of hard work and have an exceptional grasp,” Quested told Politico’s Kyle Cheney. He called the events of January 6 a “constitutional attack” that was “very serious.”

The committee is digging into how organizers used social media to spread disinformation and plan the January 6 insurrection. Cristiano Lima and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the committee has been talking to experts on social media, disinformation, and online extremism, and has recently hired a new analyst to pull things together. Committee members are also looking into the ways in which key influencers used social media to push their plans.

Right-wing activist Ali Alexander also agreed today to comply with a grand jury subpoena from the Department of Justice, seeking information about the organization of the events surrounding January 6. This indicates that the Justice Department is looking broadly at people close to Trump and that prosecutors believe those people might have committed crimes. In a statement made through a lawyer, Alexander said: “I did nothing wrong, and I am not in possession of evidence that anyone else had plans to commit unlawful acts.”

But in videos posted online and now deleted, Alexander boasted about his work planning the events of January 6. He claimed that he worked with Representatives Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting…so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”

And yet, for all the new information about the January 6 attack on our democracy, Republican lawmakers are focusing elsewhere. Today, in an unprecedented attack by a senator on a newly confirmed Supreme Court justice, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) released a video attacking Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Although Graham voted to confirm Jackson to a Senate-confirmed judgeship just last year, yesterday he voted against her elevation to the Supreme Court. Today he said: “I voted no to Judge Jackson, and now I understand why the radical left wanted her so badly. She’s a judicial activist, she gets the outcome she wants no matter how the law’s written, when it comes to crime, her record is very, very dangerous.”

[milliefink]

April 9, 2022 (Saturday)

On April 9, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant got out of bed with a migraine.

The pain had hit the day before as he rode through the Virginia countryside, where the United States Army had been harrying the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, for days.

Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. After four years of war, the people in the South were starving, and Lee’s army was melting away as men went home to salvage whatever they could of their farm and family. Just that morning, a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant’s mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee continued to insist his men could fight on.

So Grant had gone to bed in a Virginia farmhouse on April 8, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” His remedies didn’t work. In the morning, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.

As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general’s uniform carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the “rough garb” of a private with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general. But the images of the noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, even before he asked how many men needed food. He took Lee’s answer—“about twenty-five thousand"—in stride, telling the general that “he could have… all the provisions wanted.”

Four years before, southerners defending their vision of white supremacy had ridden off to war boasting that they would beat the North’s misguided egalitarian levelers in a single battle. By 1865, Confederates were broken and starving, while the United States of America, backed by a booming industrial economy that rested on ordinary women and men of all backgrounds, could provide rations for twenty-five thousand extra men on a moment’s notice.

The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by people like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier’s uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.

[milliefink]

April 10, 2022 (Sunday)

Buddy and I are visiting the Pacific Northwest for the first time, and he’s been busy with his camera while I’ve been working.

Here is his view of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, Oregon. It’s quite different than our own rocky coast, although the tufted puffins-- which are related to our Atlantic puffins-- had arrived for the season just before we got there.

I’m going to leave you with this image tonight so we can regroup for the coming week, which promises to be a busy one.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

[milliefink]

April 11, 2022 (Monday)

Last week, we lost a crucially important voice in the media when media reporter Eric Boehlert died unexpectedly. In his last column for his publication Press Run, titled “Why is the press rooting against Biden?,” Boehlert wrote that there is such a “glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments” that it seems the press is “determined to keep Biden pinned down.”

Boehlert pointed to the extraordinary poll showing that only 28% of Americans know the country has been gaining jobs in the last year—7 million jobs, in fact—while 37% think the country has lost jobs. Under Biden, the U.S. has added more than 400,000 jobs a month for 11 months, the longest period of job growth since at least 1939. And yet, Boehlert pointed out, on the day the latest job report was released, cable news used the word “inflation” as many times as “jobs.” On Sunday, NBC’s “Meet the Press” ignored the economy and instead featured conversations about two problems for the Democrats in the midterms: immigration and Trump.

It is no secret that we are in a battle between democracy and authoritarianism in America and around the world. It seems to me that the Biden administration is seeking to weaken the ties of misguided voters to authoritarianism by proving that a democratic government can answer the needs of ordinary Americans. The administration appears to be taking the position that focusing on the latest outrage from the right wing locks the country into their view of the world: you are either for Trump or against him. Instead, the administration seems to be trying to demonstrate its own worldview, but with the press glued to Trump and the Republicans, the administration is having a hard time getting traction.

The White House has taken on the idea that the Democrats are unpopular in rural areas. On March 31, the Department of the Interior announced a $420 million investment in clean water in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota. Today, the president announced a $440 million commitment to an “America the Beautiful Challenge” to attract up to $1 billion in private and philanthropic donations to conserve land, water, and wildlife across the country.

It also released today a 17-page bipartisan “playbook” to help rural communities identify more than 100 programs designed to fund rural infrastructure. It explains how to apply for funds to expand rural broadband, clean up pollution, improve transportation, fix rural bridges and roads, ensure clean water and sanitation, prepare for disasters including climate change, upgrade the electrical grid, and so on. These are critical needs that local communities, which cannot afford lobbyists, might need help navigating.

The administration is also sending officials into rural communities to make sure that billions of federal dollars and the resources they command reach across the country. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Infrastructure Coordinator Mitch Landrieu will all be on the road.

Also today, the administration took steps to address medical billing practices and medical debt. It will collect information on how more than 2000 providers handle patients, and will weigh that information into grant-making decisions as well as sharing potential violations with law enforcement. The newly rebuilt Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gutted by the former president, will investigate and hold accountable debt collectors that violate patients’ rights. The administration is also eliminating medical debt as a factor for underwriting in federal loan programs.

Last week, Biden extended the moratorium on most federal student loan programs through the end of August—sooner than most Democrats wanted—and expunged the defaults of roughly 8 million federal student loan borrowers, permitting them to resume payments in good standing.

Finally, today, Biden nominated Steve Dettelbach, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, to direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). The bureau has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2015 because gun-rights groups oppose those nominated to the position. The Senate has confirmed only one director in the past 16 years. Dettelbach is Biden’s second nominee; the Senate scuttled the first, a former ATF agent who called for gun regulations.

The administration today announced a Justice Department rule that manufacturers of gun kits, which enable people to build weapons at home, will be considered gun manufacturers and must be licensed, the gun parts must have serial numbers, and buyers must have background checks. So-called ghost guns, assembled at home and unmarked and untraceable, are increasingly widespread. From 2016 to 2020, law enforcement recovered nearly 24,000 ghost guns at crime scenes.

Polls widely show that more than 80% of Americans support background checks for gun buyers. Nonetheless, Gun Owners of America vowed to fight the rule.

Biden’s worldview in which the government works for ordinary people contrasts with what we are learning about the worldview of the former administration under Trump, where a lack of oversight meant that money went to grifters and well-connected people.

There have been plenty of stories about the misuse of funds under the Trump administration, including the story on March 28 by Ken Dilanian and Laura Strickler of NBC that prosecutors are calling the distribution of funds under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), designed to keep businesses afloat during the pandemic, “the largest fraud in U.S. history.” As much as 10% of the relief money—$80 billion—was stolen in 2020, as money went out the door without verification checks (the Biden administration has since imposed verification rules). Swindlers also stole $90 billion to $400 billion from the Covid unemployment relief program, and another $80 billion from a different Covid relief program.

We have also learned that the State Department can’t account for the foreign gifts Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and other administration officials received in office because the officials did not submit an accounting, as is required by law.

But those stories pale in comparison to the news broken last night by ​​David D. Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly of the New York Times: six months after Trump left office, an investment fund controlled by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), invested $2 billion with Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite the fact that the fund advisors found Kushner’s new company “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” At the same time, they also invested about $1 billion in another new firm run by Trump’s former treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Kushner has little experience in private equity, and his firm consists primarily of that Saudi money; no American institutions have invested with him. The Saudi investment will net Kushner’s firm about $25 million a year in asset management fees, and the investors required him to hire qualified investment professionals to manage the money.

It certainly looks as if Kushner is being rewarded for his work on behalf of the kingdom, and perhaps in anticipation of influence in the future. Kushner defended MBS after news broke that the crown prince had approved the killing and dismemberment of U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Kushner helped to broker $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, even as Congress was outraged by MBS’s war in Yemen. Most concerning, though, is that Kushner had access to the most sensitive materials in our government. Career officials denied Kushner’s security clearance out of concern about his foreign connections, but Trump overruled them.

We also know that classified material labeled “Top Secret” was in the 15 boxes of documents belonging to the National Archives and Records Administration that Trump took to his home at Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating.

[milliefink]

April 12, 2022 (Tuesday)

On April 12, 1945, a visibly exhausted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt jerked in his chair while having his portrait painted in Warm Springs, Georgia. FDR put his hand up, said “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” and lost consciousness. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage within hours.

When FDR entered the White House in 1933, he undertook to rebuild the nation after Republicans had run it into the ground.

Believing that businessmen were the engine that drove the economy and that any government regulations or taxes that hampered them would hurt growth, Republicans under presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover had slashed taxes and regulations. The superheated economy boomed, but real wages stagnated, and the profits from dramatically improved production all went to the top 1% of the economy.

When spokespeople tried to point out that the new economy shut farmers, immigrants, and minorities out, Republicans accused those groups of falling behind because they were lazy. But then, in October 1929, the stock market crashed and the Roaring Twenties stopped dead. People lost their jobs, their homes, and their hope.

In the presidential election of 1932, desperate voters threw the Republicans out of office and put in Democrats, led by former New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR recognized that the economic crisis created by unfettered capitalism threatened to end democracy forever as starving Americans turned either to communism or to fascism, as Europeans were doing.

FDR understood that to preserve democracy and the economic system on which it rested, the government must regulate business, protect workers, and provide a basic social safety net. His “New Deal for the American people” did exactly that, and it helped Americans weather the Depression until the extraordinary deficit spending of WWII ended it altogether.

Ordinary Americans celebrated a government that worked for everyone, rather than just the rich. And on April 13, they mourned the man who had piloted the country through that transition.

[Image from the FDR Memorial, Washington, D.C.]

[milliefink]

April 13, 2022 (Wednesday)

“Democrats need to make more noise,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. “We have to scream from the rooftops, because this is a battle for the free world now.”

Sargent interviewed Schatz after the senator called out Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) on the floor of the Senate on April 7 for the profound disconnect between the Republican senator’s speeches and his actions. Hawley has placed a hold on President Joe Biden’s uncontroversial nominee for an assistant secretary of defense, saying that Biden’s support for Ukraine was “wavering” and that he wasn’t doing enough.

Of course, the Biden administration has been central to world efforts to support Ukraine in its attempt to hold off Russia’s invasion. Just today, Biden announced an additional $800 million in weapons, ammunition, and other security assistance to Ukraine. In contrast, Hawley voted to acquit former president Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress when he withheld $391 million of congressionally approved aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to cook up a story about Hunter Biden.

Hawley’s bad-faith argument goes beyond misleading statements about aid to Ukraine. Hawley has vowed that he will use his senatorial prerogative to hold up “every single civilian nominee” for the Defense Department unless Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin resigns. He has vowed the same for the State Department, demanding the resignation of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Hawley says his demands are because of the withdrawal from Afghanistan; he also said that Biden should resign. This is a highly unusual interference of the legislative branch of government with the executive branch. It also means that key positions in the departments responsible for managing our national security are not being filled, since Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer must use up valuable floor time to get nominations around Hawley’s holds.

In February, for example, Hawley blocked the confirmation of the uncontroversial head of the Pentagon’s international security team, Celeste Wallander, a Russia expert and staunch advocate for fighting Russian aggression, even while Russian troops were massing on the Ukraine border. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) noted in frustration: “He’s complaining about the problems we have in Russia and Ukraine and he’s making it worse because he’s not willing to allow those nominees who can help with that problem to go forward.” (The Senate eventually voted 83–13 to confirm Wallander.)

Hawley is not the only Republican to be complaining about the administration even as he gums up the works.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has ordered Texas state troops to inspect all commercial trucks coming from Mexico after the federal government has already inspected them. Normally, Mexican authorities inspect a commercial driver’s paperwork and then officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection thoroughly inspect the vehicle on the U.S. side of the international bridge, using dogs, X-ray machines, and personal inspections. At large crossings, officials from the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Transportation will make sure that products and trucks meet U.S. standards. Sometimes after that, the state will spot-check a few trucks for roadworthiness. Never before has Texas inspected the contents of each commercial vehicle.

Abbott instituted the new rule after the Biden administration announced it would end the pandemic emergency health order known as Title 42. This is a public health authority used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protect against the spread of disease. It was put in place by the Trump administration in March 2020. Title 42 allows the U.S. government to turn migrants from war-torn countries away at the border rather than permitting them to seek asylum as international law requires.

Abbott said the new rule would enable troopers to search for drugs and smuggled immigrants, which he claims the administration is not doing. But journalists Mitchell Ferman, Uriel J. García, and Ivan Pierre Aguirre of the Texas Tribune report that officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety do not appear to be examining the trucks and have not announced any captured drugs or undocumented immigrants.

Wait times at border crossings have jumped from minutes to many hours, with Mexican truckers so frustrated they blocked the roads from the southern side, as well. Truckers report being stuck in their trucks for as much as 30 hours without food or water. About $440 billion worth of goods cross our southern border annually, and Abbot’s stunt has shut down as much as 60% of that trade. The shutdown will hammer those businesses that depend on Mexican products. It will also create higher prices and shortages across the entire country, especially as perishable foods rot in transit.

On Twitter, Democratic candidate for Texas governor Beto O’Rourke showed a long line of trucks behind him in Laredo and said: “What you see behind me is inflation.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a statement today saying: “Governor Abbott’s unnecessary and redundant inspections of trucks transiting ports of entry between Texas and Mexico are causing significant disruptions to the food and automobile supply chains, delaying manufacturing, impacting jobs, and raising prices for families in Texas and across the country. Local businesses and trade associations are calling on Governor Abbott to reverse this decision…. Abbott’s actions are impacting people’s jobs, and the livelihoods of hardworking American families.”

Tonight, Abbott backed down on his rule, and normal traffic seems to be resuming over one of the key bridges between Mexico and the U.S., but his stunt indicates that Republicans plan to use inflation and immigration as key issues to turn out their base for the 2022 midterm elections. Today, pro-Trump Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who replaced Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) as the House Republican Conference Chair, the third-highest Republican in the House, tweeted: “We must SECURE our southern border.”

Abbott has also ordered the Texas National Guard to the U.S. border with Mexico to conduct “migration drills” in preparation for an influx of migrants. But Abbott’s use of the 10,000 National Guard personnel last fall for a border operation to prevent an influx of migrants seemed to be a political stunt: it led to complaints from National Guard personnel of lack of planning, lack of pay, lack of housing, and lack of reason to be there.

Abbott has deployed troops in the past while he was under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the February 2021 winter storm that left millions of Texans without heat or electricity for days and killed 246. This deflection seemed to be at work last February, too, when Abbott issued a letter saying that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services should investigate any instances of care for transgender children as child abuse. That letter appeared just as it came to light that Abbott was behind the extraordinarily high electricity prices in the 2021 storm. Although Abbott’s office had said he was not involved in the decision to charge maximum electricity prices, in February, Bill Magness, the former CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas that runs the state’s electrical grid, said Abbott had personally ordered him to keep prices at their maximum: $9,000 per megawatt hour.

And so Abbott grabbed headlines with a bill attacking transgender children.

Today, Abbott sent a bus of migrants seeking asylum to Washington, D.C., where they were set down right outside the offices of the Fox News Channel, which filmed them disembarking. These migrants have been processed by federal authorities and are awaiting decisions from federal judges about whether they will be allowed to remain in the U.S. “I think it’s pretty clear this is a publicity stunt,” Psaki said.

And finally, tonight, under the category of bad-faith arguments, it is clear that the current Supreme Court has run amok. Republicans attack “activist judges” who want to protect civil rights in the states by using the Fourteenth Amendment’s rule that the states cannot deprive a citizen of the equal protection of the laws. But Republican justices are making up their own law outside the normal boundaries of the court.

On April 6, five Supreme Court justices agreed to reinstate a Trump-era rule that limits the ability of states to block projects that pollute their rivers and streams. The court did so under the so-called “shadow docket,” a form of decision previously used to address emergencies, in which the court makes a decision without arguments or written explanations. Last week, Chief Justice John Roberts indicated just how far off the rails the current Supreme Court has slid when he joined the dissent against the majority’s decision out of concern for the use of this shadow docket as a way to hand down unbriefed and unexplained decisions.

Hawley is not the only Republican these days operating in bad faith.

[milliefink]

April 14, 2022 (Thursday)

Today’s stories illuminate the increasingly dangerous international struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

On the world stage, that struggle is most visible these days in the invasion of democratic Ukraine by the authoritarian president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Putin apparently believed his invasion would be a cakewalk, but we are now in day 51 of Putin’s brutal attack, and while Ukraine is badly battered, it is holding strong.

Yesterday, Ukrainian Neptune missiles sank Russia’s flagship cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea. The humiliation of losing a flagship to Ukraine prompted Russian state propaganda first to claim that the ship sank from an accident and then to insist that their real enemy in the war was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an organization Russian leaders consider significant enough to struggle with, unlike “weak” Ukraine.

A study out today from political scientists Ryan Grauer and Dominic Tierney reveals why democracies have an advantage over authoritarians in war. The sharing of power across officials in the legislature, judiciary, and executive branches means there is more open debate, reducing the chance of unpopular wars and, by extension, bad decisions. Observers of Russia, for example, blame the loss of the Moskva, as well as the miscalculation of Ukraine’s ability to fight, on a refusal to take accounts of Ukraine’s abilities seriously.

Grauer and Tierney also note that the ability of people in a democracy to protest means leaders cannot fight unpopular wars and stay in power, and that democratic countries do not tend to go to war with other democracies. Grauer and Tierney argue that the need to gain public support for wars makes it hard for democratic leaders to fight other democracies toward which their people might have good feelings, or that can put up strong resistance.

That speaks to the ability of democracies to work together, and Grauer and Tierney’s study helps to explain why Russia’s war of choice against a democratic neighbor has strengthened the alliances of those countries committed to national self-determination. Finland and Sweden, which have not previously expressed an interest in joining NATO, are now so seriously considering it that today a Russian spokesperson warned that if they did so, Russia would move nuclear weapons closer to Europe. Finnish former prime minister Alexander Stubb said his country was already “well prepared” for any Russian actions.

Yesterday, in a speech at the Atlantic Council, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen noted the multilateral cooperation that has enabled countries across the world to isolate Russia economically. Countries have joined together, she said, not to advance any one country’s foreign policy objectives, but “in support of our principles—our opposition to aggression, to widespread violence against civilians, and in alignment with our commitment to a rules-based global order that protects peace and prosperity.”

"Going forward,” the treasury secretary said, “it will be increasingly difficult to separate economic issues from broader considerations of national interest, including national security.” She warned China that it runs the risk of being shut out of this system if it refuses to stand against Russia’s invasion.

Yellen promised that countries would work together to address the food shortages the war would bring to developing nations, and called for allied nations to expand their economic alliances for the twenty-first century.

She called for limiting supply chains to “countries we know we can count on” and for developing trade and data exchanges with those same countries in such a way as to protect American workers. She called for building on last year’s global minimum tax deal to enable governments to tax corporations without encouraging them to move to cheaper countries, for more financial flexibility to combat financial crises, and for more investment in the developing world. She urged a global transition to cleaner energy and the strengthening of our global health systems to combat future pandemics.

“Some may say that now is not the right time to think big,” Yellen said, but she noted that Treasury officials began crafting proposals for a new postwar international financial structure in 1941, even before the U.S. entered World War II. In 1944, with the war still raging, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “It is fitting that even while the war for liberation is at its peak, [we] should gather to take counsel with one another respecting the shape of the future which we are to win.” Just like then, Yellen said, “we ought not wait for a new normal. We should begin to shape a better future today.”

Democracies are at risk from authoritarianism today in large part because centralizing power in a few wealthy people permits those people to continue to pocket disproportionate shares of the national wealth.

A study released yesterday by ProPublica of leaked tax documents from the Internal Revenue Service revealed how our current laws permit the very wealthy to sidestep taxes and amass greater and greater wealth. According to Forbes, the wealth of the richest 25 Americans rose more than $400 billion from 2014 to 2018, giving them a combined wealth of $1.1 trillion. It would take the wealth of 14.3 million ordinary American wage earners to get to that number. During those years, those 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes, a true tax rate of 3.4%.

Those with virtually unlimited money can buy the tools to spread propaganda in favor of their position. That concern is behind the fight over “free speech” that right-wing leaders have launched against social media platforms that have excluded their lies and calls for violence.

It is also behind the outcry today over the proposal of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, allegedly the richest man in the world, to buy Twitter for a cash offer of $43 billion in a hostile takeover of the popular platform. (According to ProPublica, Musk paid no income tax in 2018.) Musk says he wants to own the platform himself to make it more “broadly inclusive,” because he believes that inclusion is “extremely important to the future of civilization…. I don’t care about the economics at all.”

Musk’s call for “free speech” is perceived to be a sign that he would reopen the platform to former president Donald Trump and others currently banned from it because of their lies about the January 6 insurrection. Right-wing politicians lauded the potential purchase, while journalists, who use the platform intensively to keep track of breaking stories, mulled whether they could stay if it becomes a haven for the right wing.

That right wing appears to be dominating the United States these days as the Republican Party has traded power for defense of democracy. Yesterday, CNN reported that a new book about the last days of the Trump presidency says that then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) indulged Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in order to get Trump’s help in the Georgia runoff election for the Senate so that the Republicans could stay in power there.

The Big Lie that Trump had really won the election has now become a litmus test for party members, as he is tightening his grip on the Republican Party. Today, in a clear indication that party leaders intend to hold the door open for a 2024 presidential run for Trump or someone like him, the Republican National Committee voted unanimously to withdraw from debates sponsored by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates. Trump repeatedly insisted the 2020 presidential debates, even the one hosted by Fox News Channel journalist Chris Wallace, were biased against him.

Trump hates debates not least because his knowledge of political topics is weak; in an interview on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show last night, Trump appeared not to understand the difference between NATO—a defensive alliance of 30 member states including the Baltic states and the U.S.—and the European Union, a political and economic union of 27 member states primarily located in Europe. In a discussion about NATO, he claimed to have asked then-German chancellor Angela Merkel: “How many Chevrolets are you selling this month in Munich or Berlin?”

He added: “she looked at me and [said,] ‘Well, probably none.’”

In the same interview, Trump refused to condemn Putin and appeared to blame NATO for the invasion.

[milliefink]

@milliefink

That right wing appears to be dominating the United States these days as the Republican Party has traded power for defense of democracy.

An odd statement at a time when the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives are all controlled by Democrats, no?

[PsiPhiGrrrl]

@milliefink

An odd statement

Not really, considering the judiciary, governors, state legislatures, corporations, and control over/ownership of media outlets. They are affecting millions of people in negative ways without complete control of the federal government. So we can imagine the national hellscape that awaits if we don’t get toxic members of the GOP out of office.

[milliefink]

April 15, 2022 (Friday)

Early in the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. The night before, he and his wife had gone to see a play—a comedy. One of the last men to talk to him before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The bullet that killed Lincoln had been delivered by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor poisoned by the belief that Lincoln’s use of the federal government to end human enslavement as a central part of the nation’s economy was tyranny.

Since the 1830s, southern Democratic leaders had gotten around the sticky problem of the Declaration of Independence, with its insistence that “all men are created equal,” by insisting that democracy simply meant that men could elect their leaders at the state level. If voters chose to do unpopular things—like take Indigenous lands, enslave their Black neighbors, or impose taxes on Mexicans and Chinese and not on white men—that was their prerogative. Even if the vast majority of the U.S. population opposed those state laws, there was nothing the federal government could do to change them.

The only thing the national government could do was to protect property, and that power was expansive: in 1859, enslavers would demand that the government take the extraordinary step of enforcing enslavement in the western territories. But, they insisted, the government had no power to do anything else. It could do nothing that the Framers had not enumerated in the Constitution, even if the vast majority of Americans wanted it to establish colleges for poor men, for example, or lay a road across the Cumberland Gap for western migrants, or dredge the harbors where trading schooners kept commerce flowing.

To men like Lincoln, the men who organized the Republican Party, this simply made no sense. By its very nature, such an argument concentrated such wealth and power in a few men that the Republicans talked constantly of “oligarchy.”

The point of a democratic government, they believed, was to answer the will of the majority of voters in the whole country. During the Civil War, the Republicans used the government to provide homesteads for settlers, create public colleges, distribute seeds (no small thing in an era when seeds were handed down in families and poor men often had no access to such legacies), charter a national railroad, invent national taxation, and—finally—end systemic human enslavement.

This system was wildly popular, but those determined to retain control of their states insisted it was tyranny. No longer able to manipulate the political system in their favor, they turned to violence. “Sic semper tyrannis!”-- thus always to tyrants-- Booth yelled from the stage at Ford’s Theater, after pulling the trigger.

The old Democratic argument for state’s rights has reemerged in the present-day Republican Party, and it has taken on many of the same contours as it had in the 1850s. Adherents are operating in a false reality, believing that their vision of the nation is the only correct one, and that they must impose their will on the rest of us, no matter what we want. As Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted on October 8, 2020, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospe[r]ity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

That fear of democracy has brought us to the edge of losing our government. In an exclusive story today by Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen, and Jamie Gangel, CNN published 100 text messages between Senator Lee, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, and Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The messages were obtained by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

They show elected members of our government eager to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election in which a national majority of 7 million people had chosen Democrat Joe Biden as president. On November 7, acting on the false narrative the Trump administration had established months before that the election would be marked by fraud, Lee was one of a number of right-wing lawmakers and leaders who offered to Trump their “unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections.” On November 9, Lee told Meadows he was working to bring senators around to the idea of challenging the election. Roy wrote that they needed evidence of fraud: “We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend."

Gradually, though, Lee and Roy became concerned that the administration was long on accusations and short on evidence. On November 19, Trump’s public legal team—Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis—gave a press conference that was full of wild accusations, all of which were false, that might well have been designed simply to whip up Trump’s base for later attacks on the counting of electoral votes. (Trump’s team lost more than 60 lawsuits over the election, and when Dominion Voting Systems sued Powell for $1.3 billion over her accusations that their software flipped votes, her legal team argued that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact.”)

In the wake of the conference, Lee worried that “the potential defamation liability for the president is significant here. For the campaign and the president personally. Unless Powell can back up everything she said, which I kind of doubt she can.” He believed the press conference was damaging enough that the president “should probably disassociate himself and refute any claims that can’t be substantiated.” On November 22, he begged Meadows: “Please tell me what I should be saying.” Roy wrote: “If we don’t get logic and reason in this before 11/30—the GOP conference will bolt (all except the most hard core Trump guys).”

Lee and Roy then turned to lawyer John Eastman’s plan to have states appoint “alternative slates of electors” in place of the legitimate, certified ones. By January 3, Lee specified that those new slates must be named “pursuant to state law,” and started calling state legislators.

In the end, Lee and Roy came to see that the fight to keep Trump in power was unconstitutional. On December 31, Roy wrote: “The President should call everyone off. It’s the only path. If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by Congress every 4 years…we have destroyed the electoral college… Respectfully.” On January 1, he added: “If POTUS allows this to occur…we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic….”

On January 4, Roy had abandoned the attack on the federal government, but other Republicans persisted. Roy texted: “I am truly sorry I am in a different spot then you and our brothers re: Wednesday. But I will defend all.” On January 6, during the riot, he texted: “This is a sh*tshow…. Fix this now.”

“We are,” Meadows texted. Later that night, 8 senators and 139 representatives nonetheless voted to challenge certified state electoral votes electing Biden.

Since January 6, the Republican Party has shifted its focus to the states to undermine the federal government. Nineteen states have changed their election laws to enable Republicans to win their states regardless of the will of the voters, sending Republican electors to put a Republican president in place. Encouraged by the Supreme Court’s “originalist” majority, which denies the ability of the federal government to protect civil rights in the states, Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas have all overridden the constitutional right to abortion, and Republican lawmakers have indicated they are gunning for birth control and interracial marriage as well. Dramatically, in the last week. Texas governor Greg Abbott has effectively shut down international trade across the U.S.-Mexico border, explicitly asserting state power over national power and thus driving prices up all across the country.

One hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, stood heartbroken by the bedside of the man who had asserted the power of the federal government over the states and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”