Worst non-pology ever. The only positive thing I can find in the awful details they’re providing and comments they’re making is how they will be useful in getting more people motivated to push for change.
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what now!?
is this typical? ( i almost said normal, and it’s definitely not that. ) do schools really have their own chiefs of police?
looking around, it appears the answer is at least sometimes yes. i always assumed school “resource” officers were part of the normal department, but it looks like they can have their own entire bureaucracy
no wonder actual teaching is so underfunded 
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Miami-Dade has their own dedicated school police force:
https://mdspolice.com/
sorry. page doesn’t onebox.
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insanity. do they have their own fire department too? it makes no sense.
oh wait, i found their history page.
https://mdspolice.com/about/history-police-chiefs/
In 1957, the Dade County Education Commission acknowledged “security” as an integral component of District operations and approved the position of Security Assistant… In 1966, the job responsibility of the SA was changed to keep pace with the demanding and dynamic social changes of the mid 1960’s [and] the School Board authorized the Security Services Department… [ later renamed to mdsp ]
if that’s not code, i don’t know what is. ( and i didn’t put security in quotes, that’s on them )
here’s an ummm completely unrelated timeline:
In a suit against the Dade County School Board, black students were finally admitted into the school in 1959, bringing many changes to the once white-only school. In the fall, fewer than a dozen white students were enrolled and by Christmas, it was an all-black school.
There were hundreds, if not thousands of student shuffles between 1955 and 1960. Dade County School officially did not officially declare the area’s schools desegregated until 1963.
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No. With only one door in and out of a school, everyone will perish anyway, so they can save the salary.
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With the school-to-prison pipeline in states like Texas and Florida, someone has to be in charge. Someone has to make sure the school district keeps up the conviction quotas or the private prison industry gets cranky.
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so i was listening to this podcast recently:
which coincidentally ( or not ) came out the day before this ( they both mention the rap song ):
and one of the things the guest stated was that there aren’t as many private prisons as people tend to think.
instead, one of the big motivations for prisons – private or otherwise – is redirecting tax dollars and votes from cities to rural areas. towns that lost factories got jobs and dollars from prisons. and once they have one, it’s really not something they want to give up.
the votes thing seems especially evil. you can’t vote in prison but the census counts you as living in the prison’s district so the (usually white) locals get outsized power in the state legislature, and the states get a nudge for the electoral college.
it’s like the 5/5ths compromise or something. 
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Yes! This is one of the amazingly evil sides to what amounts to another form of Republican vote fixing that I wish Dems would get on the stick about.
Publicize it, shout about it, and DO SOMETHING about it when you have political power!
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100% this.
the democrats really don’t like airing the dirty laundry. and they need to.
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May 28, 2022 (Saturday)
It’s been a long, hard week. Going to call an early night.
Before I do, though… Thank you all for being here. I have heard people this week despair of this country, but I look around at you all and I have faith.
And so… I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo, “Good Morning,” by Buddy Poland.]
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May 29, 2022 (Sunday)
While there is a lot going on in the country and the world today, it seems as important as ever to honor Memorial Day, the day we have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.
For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant. I have written about him before, but this time, there is a new ending.
When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.
Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.
When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed “Wray’s Ragged Irregulars” after their commander Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.
It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943, it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomb squadrons.
Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.
I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau’s children weren’t there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.
Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.
I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.
And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.
I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.
But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.
So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.
May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.
[Photo by Carole Green.]
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May 30, 2022 (Monday)
Outrage continues over the Uvalde massacre of last Tuesday, May 24, in which 21 people were killed and 17 wounded. The assault on this elementary school stands out for many reasons: the youth of the victims, the apparent mishandling of the situation by law enforcement officers, and the heroism of the parents, for example. After all, there have been at least 14 mass shootings in the U.S. since the Uvalde murders, killing at least 10 people and wounding another 61, and they have gotten much less attention.
But the response to the Uvalde massacre reminds me of the response to the murder of George Floyd under the knee of then-officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, almost exactly two years before the crisis at Uvalde.
Caught on video by then-17-year-old Darnella Frazier, Mr. Floyd’s murder represented more than the killing of one man: it illustrated the abuse of power by the government.
After almost four years of an administration in which the president and his advisors had openly uprooted governmental guardrails and claimed the right to impose their will on the country unchecked, the message that the government was abusing its power was one that lots of Americans were ready to hear. That new awareness included those who might not have paid particular attention to the longstanding abuse of power by police officers toward Black people, or to the dramatic militarization of our police forces since the government began transferring unneeded or outdated military equipment from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to police departments. Mr. Floyd’s murder seemed to personify that societal anger.
The fury of the response to the Uvalde murders, after many years in which many in the country seemed to move on from dramatic mass murders seems to me a reflection not only of the unspeakable carnage in this country, but also of the political corruption that permits it to take place.
That the modern-day Republican Party has managed repeatedly to stop the commonsense gun regulations that the vast majority of us want, even when their stubbornness means our children die at school, seems finally to have sparked a reaction against the party’s skewing of the political system across the board.
Texas governor Greg Abbott boasted last year of signing at least 7 new laws to make it easier to get guns, including a law allowing people to carry handguns without permits. When Abbott visited Uvalde on Sunday, people booed him. Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, both Republicans, pulled out of personal appearances at the National Rifle Association conference meeting in Houston on Friday.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) seems to fear the power of this fury. He told CNN on Thursday that he has encouraged Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) to meet with Democrats to try to hash out a bipartisan solution in response to the Uvalde school shooting. If I had to guess, I’d say McConnell is simply trying to buy time until the furor calms a bit, just as he did with Trump’s second impeachment. As Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer detailed on Saturday in the Washington Post, McConnell “has spent his career working to delay, obstruct or prevent most major firearms restrictions from being approved by Congress.” His approach has consistently been to suggest vague support for a solution, then to undercut any action. And Cornyn boasts an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, suggesting his enthusiasm for gun safety reform might be well under control.
But regardless of what happens with gun safety regulation in the next few weeks, Americans unhappy with Republican manipulation of our political system are unlikely to be reassured. On June 9, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will begin six televised hearings to explain to the American people what happened on and around that day.
That story is unlikely to reflect well on Republican leadership, who are trying to discredit the committee itself by claiming it is illegitimate. Their wiggling doesn’t look great for those who are supposed to be responsible for writing our laws.
The story is that the House tried to set up a bipartisan commission, and Senate Republicans used the filibuster to kill it (almost exactly a year ago today, actually). Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used precisely the same model Republicans had used to set up their 2014 Benghazi probe. Pelosi had the power to name the chair and 13 members, five of them in consultation with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). McCarthy’s picks included Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jim Banks (R-IN), both of whom were closely linked to Trump and had already expressed opposition to the committee. When Pelosi refused to add Jordan and Banks to the roster, McCarthy withdrew all the Republicans he had chosen. Pelosi then added Republicans Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), and kept the committee at 9 people.
When asked to cooperate with the committee or respond to subpoenas, Republicans have since tried to argue that it is illegitimate. But early this month, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly—appointed by former president Trump—dismissed all those claims.
That decision came in a case about a committee subpoena for the Republican National Committee’s email marketing data from Salesforce, Inc., the company that handled fundraising emails in the weeks after Trump lost the election. The committee asked for the emails in February, wanting to determine to what degree they asked for donations by claiming that the election results were fraudulent. It could have seen who coordinated the emails, how many people opened the emails that spread false information, and whether any of those folks were eventually among those who stormed the Capitol. The RNC sued Salesforce, its own email vendor, in March to stop the production of those documents. Yesterday, though, the committee said that the case has been held up so long that it recognizes it no longer has time to analyze the information before the hearings, even if it were to get that data.
There are other subpoenas also being stonewalled. The committee subpoenaed Representatives McCarthy, Jordan, Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Scott Perry (R-PA), and Mo Brooks (R-AL) earlier this month. Their responses are coming in now, and they indicate that these members of Congress continue to reject the legitimacy of the committee.
On Wednesday, May 25, Biggs’s lawyers said his subpoena had not been properly served, the committee is not valid, and anything Biggs did is protected because it was part of his legislative duties. Jordan told the committee the same day that he would not comply with a subpoena until it told him all the evidence—documents, videos, or anything else—it has about him beforehand.
On Friday, McCarthy’s lawyer sent an 11-page letter to the committee denying its legitimacy and attacking the ability of Congress to investigate a potential crime because its mandate is only to make laws. And on Sunday, Brooks claimed to Fox News Sunday guest host Sandra Smith that he had not been served with a subpoena, and he said he wanted to talk with his subpoenaed colleagues before responding.
Meanwhile, Perry has simply said the whole committee effort is a charade, but on Thursday, May 26, he was in the news when someone told Politico reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney what Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked under then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, had told the committee. Hutchinson apparently testified that Meadows burned papers in his office following a meeting there with Perry after Election Day 2020.
The New York Times had previously reported that Meadows had burned papers in his office fireplace.
If Americans are concerned that the Republicans have gamed the system, the January 6 committee hearings seem unlikely to provide much reassurance.
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May 31, 2022 (Tuesday)
The story presented by the police about the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was that a teacher propped open the door the murderer used to enter the building. In fact, the teacher had propped the door open but slammed it shut and called the police because the shooter was firing a weapon outside. The door did not lock as it should have.
Today, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief in charge during the massacre, was sworn in as a Uvalde city council member. The Uvalde mayor said in a statement: “Out of respect for the families who buried their children today, and who are planning to bury their children in the next few days, no ceremony was held.”
News reports today said that the Uvalde police stopped cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety investigation after TxDPS director Colonel Steven McCraw on Friday told reporters that the police made “the wrong decision” and had not acted in accord with protocol, suggesting they had already come to a conclusion, but TxDPS later said that it was only Arredondo who was not responding to their requests. The Department of Justice is also reviewing the police response to the mass shooting.
After six hours of deliberation, a federal jury today acquitted Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman of making a false statement to the FBI. This is the outcome of the Trump administration’s attempt to discredit the investigation into the ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
In May 2019, then–attorney general William Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation to see if it was “lawful and appropriate.” This was a pretty transparent attempt to salt the media with stories about how Trump was being persecuted by Democrats and how the connections between his campaign and Russian operatives were, as he said, a “hoax.”
Using “investigations” to sway public opinion has been a Republican tactic since House Speaker Newt Gingrich ran investigations about “voter fraud” in the 1990s. Those investigations never turned up any evidence, but the constant news coverage convinced many voters that voter fraud was a huge problem. Ditto with Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails. Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say he was investigating Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.
Durham’s investigation seemed to be in this vein. Although a Department of Justice inspector concluded that the investigation had been begun properly and the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed that conclusion, in summer 2020, Barr publicly disagreed, saying that the Russia probe was “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and that Durham’s job was not to “prepare a report” but to establish criminal violations that would lead to prosecutions. Trump supporters expected that Durham’s report would help Trump in 2020, and although DOJ policy is to avoid roiling the country in the 60 days before an election, Barr said that he would feel free within that period to release the results of Durham’s investigation.
In September 2020, then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that he had seen “additional” documents from Durham’s investigation that spell “trouble” for former FBI officials who began the inquiry into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. “Additional documents that I’ve been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act and I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously,” Meadows said.
That month, a top aide to Durham resigned from the investigation, allegedly out of concerns about political pressure. A Republican congressional aide told Axios: “This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn’t happen before the election.”
But it was not until September 2021, days before the statute of limitations ran out, that Durham announced a grand jury indictment of Michael Sussman, a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign, for lying to the FBI. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the campaign, and he took to the FBI the information that cybersecurity security experts had uncovered a possible computer link between Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank and Trump Tower.
Durham said Sussman had lied to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity experts. In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions. In any case, the DOJ inspector general concluded that the FBI investigation started over something completely different: a boast from a member of the Trump campaign to an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
In a court filing in February 2022, Durham chummed the waters by vaguely suggesting that one of the cybersecurity experts, who was working for the White House as part of a cybersecurity contract, “exploited” his access there to find “derogatory information” about Trump. This was false, and Durham quickly walked it back, but Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Fox News Channel: “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States…. And it goes right to the Clinton campaign,” and the former president claimed that Durham had provided “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.… In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”
And today, a jury found Sussman not guilty. Asked if the prosecution was a good idea, the foreperson of the jury said: “Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted because I think we have better time or resources to use or spend [on] other things that affect the nation as a whole than a possible lie to the FBI. We could spend that time more wisely.”
But the Durham investigation did accomplish what it set out to. It lasted a year longer than the Mueller probe, and in that time, it manufactured an alternative narrative for right-wing media that undermined the reality Mueller’s report set out: that the Trump campaign worked in tandem with Russian operatives.
Today, former president Trump hammered on another myth when he sent to his followers an email linking to an article that claims the Georgia Republican primary was rigged. In that primary, the candidate Trump endorsed lost by a huge margin. Trump appears to believe that neither he nor anyone he endorses can lose an election fair and square, which bodes ill for the 2022 midterms.
But Trump has another reason to push the narrative that Georgia’s elections are suspect. Tomorrow, a special grand jury in Fulton County will begin to hear testimony and examine evidence to determine whether Trump or his team committed crimes when they tried to get Georgia officials to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has already subpoenaed six officials from the Georgia secretary of state’s office, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was the recipient of Trump’s January 2, 2021, phone call demanding that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” to give him victory in Georgia. Raffensperger recorded the call.
After it is done collecting information, the special grand jury will issue a report to Willis recommending whether she should issue criminal indictments.
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June 1, 2022 (Wednesday)
Today, with the radical right the most loyal voting bloc in the party, Republican leaders refuse to call out even the most extreme statements from their followers. But once upon a time, Republican politicians were the champions of reason and compromise. Famously, on June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were running roughshod over American democracy.
Born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, Smith was a teacher and a reporter who got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.
Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husband’s researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948, they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.
When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith’s party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.
Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.
Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”
The anti–New Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and his colleagues cheered him on while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed onto the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.
All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation.
On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.
She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.”
Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”
Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”
“I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”
“I doubt if the Republican Party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”
“I do not want to see the Republican Party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican [P]arty, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican [P]arty and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”
“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”
Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration.
There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.
But she was, of course, right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.
[Photo U.S. Senate Historical Office.]
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She stated the basic principles of “Americanism” were:
The right to criticize;
The right to hold unpopular beliefs;
The right to protest;
The right of independent thought.
"I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny – Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. "
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I learned a great deal this evening. Many thanks.
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June 2, 2022 (Thursday)
Yesterday, Kyle Cheney at Politico flagged a new document released last week by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. John Eastman, the lawyer informally advising Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has tried repeatedly to slow down or stop producing the documents the courts have told him he must. As part of that process, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter reviewed a number of documents. In March, he concluded that one particular memo must be released under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, a rule that shields communications between lawyers and their clients.
That memo was perhaps “the first time members of President Trump’s team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action,” Carter wrote. He said that the memo “knowingly violated the Electoral Count Act,” the 1887 law that establishes clear procedures for states to certify their electoral votes and assigns to the Vice President the role of opening the certified electoral votes. Carter continued that the memo “likely furthered the crimes of obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Last week, the January 6 committee made the memo public in its ongoing legal fight with Eastman.
The memo is a several-page document from Kenneth Chesebro to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, then sent to Eastman, outlining precisely how then–vice president Mike Pence could refuse to count the electors for Democrat Joe Biden. It is the detailed version of the story we now know all too well: Trump activists in the states would claim their own electors, and even though they would not be legally certified, Pence would say he couldn’t count in either slate until the election was more closely examined. Chesebro hammered hard on the idea that the Constitution gave the vice president alone the authority to determine the outcome of a presidential election. This, he wrote, was the “strict textual, originalist basis” rather than the rules set out in the Electoral Count Act.
His plan was for Pence to refuse to preside over the counting of electors, as specified in the ECA, and instead to have Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) or another Republican in the chair. That officer would refuse to count the ballots where there were two slates, thus insulating Trump and Pence from the election steal.
Chesebro’s goal was not necessarily to install Trump back in the White House, which he was not entirely convinced the Supreme Court would accept “even though a majority might well agree…that the Constitution is correctly construed, from an originalist perspective.” Instead, he hoped that, even “if Biden were to win in the Court, much will still have been accomplished, in riveting public attention on election abuses, and building momentum to prevent similar abuses in the future.”
There’s plenty here to unpack, but what jumps out to me is that last line. The conspirators planned to break a federal law in place since 1887 in order to convince Americans that Democrats stole a presidential election—the “big lie”—all with the larger goal of making sure that there could be no “similar abuses in the future.”
We have reached a place where Republican leaders no longer believe in the principle the nation’s Founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The idea that a government’s legitimacy comes from the fact its people choose it was the huge leap the Founders made to create a nation based not on monarchy but on democracy, and it is one of the two foundational principles of our government. Republicans appear to have rejected this principle and moved to the position that the election of Democrats is illegitimate and stopping such a victory—even if it is fairly won—is important enough to break long-standing laws in order to do it.
And so, even after the January 6 plan failed, they have spent a year insisting that Democrat Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have won the presidency legitimately, despite the overwhelming popular vote and winning electoral vote, the many recounts and legal challenges confirming his victory, and the admission by Trump’s own attorney general that the vote was fair and Trump lost.
Their propaganda has worked. On May 31, Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times noted after the recent Republican primaries that candidates, even those candidates who insisted there was voter fraud in 2020, brushed off the idea that there might have been anything fishy about the Republican primaries. Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), who worked hard to undermine the 2020 election with false claims that it was fraudulent and who spoke at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse in body armor urging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol, told Epstein and Corasaniti that he wasn’t worried about election fraud in Republican primaries because there wasn’t any.
“I’m in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don’t normally vote in Republican primaries,” Mr. Brooks said. In another interview, he said that in Alabama, fraud happens “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.” Republicans, it seems, believe that Democrats cheat but they do not, although an investigation by the Associated Press after the 2020 election found only 475 potential cases of voter fraud in the six states Republicans insisted had been stolen for Biden, most of which were not counted because they were caught, and which, collectively, would not have changed the outcome. These fraudulent votes were not identified by party, and the high-profile cases that have hit the news have involved Republicans, not Democrats.
Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who worked with Trump to overturn the Georgia count and introduced lawyer John Eastman to the White House effort to come up with a constitutional argument for throwing out Biden’s electors, recently told a conservative radio host: “The only way they win is to cheat.”
This lie has fed the fury of those Republicans increasingly convinced that Democrats will destroy the country, and they are now, as the conspirators planned, taking steps to make sure that Democrats cannot win another election. One of their key projects is what former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon calls the “precinct strategy”: he is urging Trump’s followers to take over Republican precincts so that they can choose poll workers and have a say in who sits on the boards that oversee elections.
A recent piece by Alexandra Berzon in the New York Times explains how Cleta Mitchell has taken this idea on the road, working with right-wing organizations from the Republican National Committee down to fringe groups to create an “army” of poll workers and election monitors. “We’re going to be watching,” she told that radio host. “We’re going to take back our elections.” Mitchell claims she is simply promoting “citizen engagement,” but participants are primed to believe that elections are being stolen and to approach election officials as enemies. The RNC has already recruited nearly 12,000 poll workers and more than 5,000 poll watchers.
On June 1, Heidi Przybyla of Politico reviewed a number of videos that revealed the Republican National Committee’s plan to hamstring the Democrats in future elections by installing partisan Republicans in Democratic-majority precincts as election workers. They can then challenge Democratic voters with the help of “an army” of party lawyers on call. An RNC spokesperson said the party is simply trying to restore balance in election workers in heavily Democratic urban areas, especially Detroit. But challenging ballots has the potential not only to intimidate voters, but also to create enough disruption to sow doubt about an election and justify intervention by Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Nick Penniman, who founded the nonpartisan election watchdog group Issue One and now is its chief executive officer, told Przybyla, “This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together…. It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.”
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June 3, 2022 (Friday)
In 1981, Reagan Republicans took power with the plan of cutting the government back to the form it took in the 1920s. But Americans like a basic social safety net and protection for consumers and workers, so to win votes for tax cuts and deregulation, Republican leaders warned that white Christian men who just wanted to work hard for their own success were under attack by a government in thrall to minorities, women, lazy organized workers, and secularists who were destroying traditional values and turning the country over to socialism.
As wealth concentrated upward and it became harder and harder for ordinary Americans to rise, Republican leaders demonized Democrats and, when voters kept electing them, delegitimized elections themselves. Increasingly, they talked of the need for violence to protect individualism from an overreaching government.
Finally, as of January 6, 2021, they have rejected the idea of democracy and have convinced their followers—and perhaps themselves—that the only way to save America is to destroy it.
Today, Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on January 5, Marc Short, then–vice president Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told Pence’s lead Secret Service agent that Trump was about to turn against Pence publicly and that the vice president could be in danger. Clearly, members of the administration anticipated violence on January 6 and, astonishingly, expected it because of the actions of the U.S. president.
President Joe Biden took office with what appeared to be the idea that he could wean Republicans away from their growing fascination with authoritarianism by creating a government that rebuilt the economy to work for ordinary people.
His American Rescue Plan enabled the U.S. to come out of the pandemic with the strongest economy among any of the liberal democracies that make up the Group of Seven (G7)—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and the nation’s economy is on track to grow faster this year than China’s for the first time since 1976.
Today’s jobs report shows that employers are still adding jobs: there were 329,000 new non-farm jobs in May. Unemployment held steady at 3.6%, with Black Americans showing the highest gains in labor force participation. With almost two job openings available for every unemployed person, wages continue to rise, up .4% since April. Wage growth for the year is over 5%. The stock market responded by dropping, likely a reflection of an expectation that the strong jobs report will mean the Fed will raise interest rates again soon.
Biden celebrated the numbers but said, “There’s no denying that high prices, particularly around gasoline and food, are a real problem for people. But there’s every reason for the American people to feel confident that we’ll meet these challenges.”
That inflation has been driven by a number of factors: increased demand, increased savings, supply chain snarls, and even the rising wages that are putting money into the pockets of those unaccustomed to economic gains. And since February, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has further disrupted oil markets, supply chains, and, increasingly, food.
Inflation has also been driven by the concentration of industry in the past several decades, which provided economies of scale but now sees us hamstrung as vital industries are controlled by a few operators. Notably, the pandemic shifted consumer preferences to online shopping, and the recovering economy kept that buying active. Shipping containers piled up on wharves with goods undelivered, and since just nine carriers control 80% of the global shipping market, they have been able to raise prices to triple their profits in 2021. The price for moving a container to the U.S. from China is now 12 times higher than it was before the pandemic.
Global oil production is also still out of whack with the rebounding global economy. Production dropped dramatically during the pandemic, with oil-producing nations cutting production by about 10% globally. Producers have been slow to increase production to keep up with the global recovery, not least because they are making record profits. Last month, Shell, which is Europe’s largest energy company, reported its largest quarterly profit ever, at $9.1 billion. It said it would use the windfall to buy back shares of the company, increasing the value of its stock.
The baby formula crisis has also been exacerbated by this concentration of industry. In the U.S, 90% of infant formula is produced by four firms, and they are protected from foreign competition by high tariffs. When one of the four, Abbott Nutrition, closed its Sturgis, Michigan, plant to deal with contamination, it sparked a true crisis.
Biden has tried to deal with these issues with the power he wields in the executive branch. He negotiated deals with U.S. carriers to clear out the pileup of containers in vital ports and asked Congress to pass legislation to increase competition in the carrying trade. (Both the House and the Senate have passed such bills, but they have not yet reconciled them to make one bill Biden can sign.) He released oil from the strategic reserve and asked Saudi Arabia to increase production, a request its leaders refused, but yesterday OPEC+ (the 13 members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries plus 10 oil-producing countries not in OPEC) agreed to begin ramping up their output back to where it was before the U.S. got them to reduce production in April 2020.
The administration has tried to increase the supply of infant formula by easing the way for more imports, worked with Abbott Nutrition to reopen their Sturgis plant safely, flown in two planeloads of formula from Europe, and arranged for a third planeload donated by United Airlines to arrive on June 9. On May 18, President Biden delegated authority to U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra to address the shortage of infant formula. Becerra has invoked the Defense Production Act for the third time to increase infant formula supplies. It is not clear how bad the shortage remains. While store shelves are empty, buying is up 13% since April, suggesting that people may be stocking up.
Biden has emphasized that he wants to move more manufacturing back to the U.S. to stop the sorts of disruptions that have caused inflation. On Wednesday, he pointed out that the U.S. has added 545,000 manufacturing jobs since he took office and that the U.S. created more manufacturing jobs in 2021 than in almost any year in 30 years. “This didn’t happen by accident,” he said. “This is a direct result of my economic plan to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out.” He called on Congress to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act to support domestic manufacturing.
On Tuesday, Biden published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal touting his economic successes and explaining how he plans to transition from the red hot economy of the past year to stable, steady growth. He promised to work with anyone “willing to have an open and honest discussion that delivers real solutions for the American people.”
Will any Republicans take him up on it? Something else Biden wrote makes me doubt it: “I ran for president because I was tired of the so-called trickle-down economy. We now have a chance to build on a historic recovery with an economy that works for working families.”
The big news today is that former Trump aide Peter Navarro was arrested on two counts of contempt of Congress. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol had subpoenaed Navarro to hear testimony and read documents about his participation in the attack on our government. Although he has talked openly about the plan to overturn the election, he refused to comply with the subpoena.
Navarro was livid at being arrested and handcuffed and put in a cell, saying that if they had just called him and said they needed him down at court, he’d have shown up. (He appeared to miss the point that the subpoena he ignored is basically a call that says, “Hey, we need you down at the court….”) He claims that authorities have violated the Constitution.
Reacting to the arrest, Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told Newsmax, “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you.” He claimed that the grand jury acquitted lawyer Michael Sussman of lying to the FBI about his contact with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign with the argument that “[o]f course you’re gonna lie. Everybody lies!” but that is, of course, not true. The jury said that the Department of Justice, which brought the suit against Sussman, did not prove its case. It is against the law to lie to Congress or to the FBI. Navarro has not been tried yet; he has simply been indicted.
And on Wednesday, as the horrific murders of schoolchildren and teachers in Uvalde, Texas, have been followed by several more mass killings, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson claimed that Democratic efforts to promote gun safety are not about public health. Instead, he said, Democrats want to disarm the people because they’re afraid of a popular uprising against them because “they know they rule illegitimately.”
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June 4, 2022 (Saturday)
The Gettysburg Address it wasn’t.
Seventy-five years ago, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had been a five-star general in World War II, gave a commencement speech at Harvard University.
Rather than stirring, the speech was bland. Its long sentences were hard to follow. It was vague. And yet, in just under eleven minutes on a sunny afternoon, Marshall laid out a plan that would shape the modern world.
“The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” he said. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”
In his short speech, Marshall outlined the principles of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The speech challenged European governments to work together to make a plan for recovery and suggested that the U.S. would provide the money. European countries did so, forming the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948. From 1948 to 1952, the U.S. would donate about $17 billion to European countries to rebuild, promote economic cooperation, and modernize economies. By the end of the four-year program, economic output in each of the countries participating in the Marshall Plan had increased by at least 35%.
This investment helped to avoid another depression like the one that had hit the world in the 1930s, enabling Europe to afford goods from the U.S. and keeping low the tariff walls that had helped to choke trade in the crisis years of the 1930s. Marshall later recalled that his primary motivation was economic recovery, that he had been shocked by the devastation he saw in Europe and felt that “[i]f Europe was to be salvaged, economic aid was essential.”
But there was more to the Marshall Plan than money.
The economic rubble after the war had sparked political chaos that fed the communist movement. No one wanted to go back to the prewar years of the depression, and in the wake of fascism, communism looked attractive to many Europeans.
“Marshall was acutely aware that this was a plan to stabilize Western Europe politically because the administration was worried about the impact of communism, especially on labor unions,” historian Charles Maier told Colleen Walsh of the Harvard Gazette in 2017. “In effect, it was a plan designed to keep Western Europe safely in the liberal Western camp.”
It worked. American investment in Europe helped to turn European nations away from communism as well as the nationalism that had fed World War II, creating a cooperative and stable Europe.
The Marshall Plan also helped Europe and the U.S. to articulate a powerful set of shared values. The U.S. invited not just Europe but also the Soviet Union to participate in the plan, but Soviet leaders refused, recognizing that accepting such aid would weaken the idea that communism was a superior form of government and give the U.S. influence. They blocked satellite countries from participating, as well. Forcing the USSR either to join Europe or to divide the allies of World War II put Soviet leaders in a difficult position and at a psychological disadvantage.
With a clear ideological line dividing the USSR and Europe, Europeans, Americans, and their allies coalesced around a concept of government based on equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy: the tenets of liberal democracy. As Otto Zausmer, who had worked for the U.S. Office of War Information to swing Americans behind the war, put it in 1955: “America’s gift to the world is not money, but the Democratic idea, democracy.”
In the years after the Marshall Plan, European countries expanded their cooperative organizations. The OEEC became the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961 and still operates with 37 member countries that account for three fifths of world trade. And the U.S. abandoned its prewar isolationism to engage with the rest of the world. The Marshall Plan helped to create a liberal international order, based on the rule of law, that lasted for decades.
In his commencement speech on June 5, 1947, Marshall apologized that “I’ve been forced by the necessities of the case to enter into rather technical discussions.” But on the ten-year anniversary of the speech, the Norwegian foreign minister had a longer perspective, saying: “this initiative taken by Marshall and by the American Government marked the beginning of a new epoch in western Europe, an epoch of wider, and above all more binding, cooperation between the countries than ever before.”
Not bad for an eleven-minute speech.
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