except for protections against gun violence, of course. states shall make no landing there. and if the gop enacts a federal abortion ban. state power will then also suddenly be constrained
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I admit I was skeptical of the wisdom of the proposals to remove Trump’s three appointees and vacate their decisions, but this convinces me. I’m not sure what that process would look like, but I’m on board. McConnell’s violation of the constitutional obligation of the Senate lends additional justification on top of Trump’s criminality.
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July 1, 2022 (Friday)
It has been a very long seven days, a week that will certainly show up in the history books. What may not make such a splash in the books, though, is how freaking exhausting it is to be living through this moment.
I, anyway, am ready for a good night’s sleep.
Sending you all a picture I snapped from the kayak a couple of weeks ago when we went inland for a change.
It was such a calm moment…
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I’m not “liking” this cos I like it, but I think you get that.
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July 2, 2022 (Saturday)
Summer 1964 was known as the “Freedom Summer.”
Americans, Black and white, southern and northern, eager to defend the right of all Americans to vote, planned to register Black people for the upcoming election. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point. Under Bob Moses, a New York City teacher who began voting work in Mississippi in 1961, volunteers set out. Just as they were getting underway, on June 21, three voting rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
No one knew where they had gone, but although some white people tried to argue they had chosen to disappear simply to call attention to their cause, no one with a grip on reality in that racially charged era imagined they had gone anywhere good.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, who as Senate majority leader had wrestled the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, was determined to pass the stronger civil rights bill his predecessor President John F. Kennedy had advocated in 1963. Indeed, just five days after Kennedy’s murder, Johnson had told Congress: "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”
Southern white men passionately defended their right to rule over their Black neighbors through state legislation, but Johnson, for all that he hailed from Texas, wanted none of that. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”
The House of Representatives had been considering a civil rights bill since June 1963 but had left for winter recess without its being moved out of the Rules Committee, where the chair, staunch segregationist Howard Smith (D-VA), bottled it up. During the recess, so many congressmen heard from constituents angry the bill hadn’t passed that Smith backed down and let it out of committee. The House passed the bill on February 10 and sent it on to the Senate, where everyone knew the southern segregationists would not give up easily.
And they didn’t. The Senate began to debate the bill on March 30, and southern Democrats launched a filibuster. In those days before the Senate rules change, filibusters required that senators actually hold the floor to talk a bill to death, so they made up squads of senators who rested and spoke in teams. The head of the southern bloc, Richard Russell (D-GA), said: “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”
Meanwhile, the northern Democrats in favor of the bill held their own. At stake were the votes of those Republicans who liked the idea of civil rights in principle but didn’t want to increase the power of the government, whose business regulation they opposed.
As the spring wore on, Black people and their white neighbors demonstrated their support for civil rights by integrating formerly segregated spaces, while opponents of the bill attacked them. On June 18, when Black and white people jumped into a whites-only swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, the hotel’s owner, James Brock, poured acid into the pool. While the water diluted the acid enough that the swimmers were not injured, law enforcement arrested them. News crews covered the incident. Seeing a white man pour acid into a swimming pool to drive out Black people was the last straw.
The next day, Republican Everett Dirksen (R-IL), the Senate minority leader, managed to deliver enough Republican votes to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) to break the filibuster. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who said, “I am unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color or creed, or on any other basis,” voted against ending the filibuster, saying he believed it was “a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government, namely, that of a constitutional republic in which 50 sovereign states have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the central or Federal Government.”
The Senate passed the bill on June 19 and sent their version back to the House. Meanwhile, rage over the three missing voting rights workers grew, and Johnson used that anger to pressure the House to pass the bill.
It did. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.
Just before he wrote his name, Johnson addressed the American people on television “to talk to you about what that law means to every American.”
Keenly aware of the bill’s timing, he noted: “One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week, a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor not only to found a nation, but to forge an ideal of freedom—not only for political independence, but for personal liberty; not only to eliminate foreign rule, but to establish the rule of justice in the affairs of men.”
That was a triumph, but “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.”
Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.”
“The purpose of the law is simple. It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others. It does not give special treatment to any citizen…. It does say that…those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”
“Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions—divisions which have lasted all too long. Its purpose is national, not regional. Its purpose is to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom, a more constant pursuit of justice, and a deeper respect for human dignity.”
“We will achieve these goals because most Americans are law-abiding citizens who want to do what is right,” he said. “My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”
It was indeed a time of testing. When the American people came together to push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opponents of it saw a call to arms. Two weeks after Johnson signed the bill, a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the nomination. On July 16, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina were the ones that put him over the top for the nomination.
On August 4, the U.S. had a powerful example of what certain Americans thought of as “extremism in the defense of liberty” when the missing bodies were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and it turned out that Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, had murdered them.
Voters in the 1964 election continued to back Johnson’s vision of the world, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. And those voters perhaps took false hope that their will had triumphed when Goldwater won only his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. They didn’t see there was a shift underway that would transform first the Republican Party, and then the nation itself.
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For all his mistakes, LBJ was a master politician… but even he likely wouldn’t have been able to handily overcome the power of social media, numerous established and ad hoc conspiracy platforms, and foreign enemy interference.
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One ‘good’ assault deserves another.
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July 3, 2022 (Sunday)
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”
“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually to include women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Words to live by in 2022.
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But LBJ was politically ruthless. He would not have hesitated to invite Manchin to the Oval Office for an old-school ass-chewing, with teeth behind it. He would have convinced Pat Toomey to retire early after the election and open up a spot in the Senate for a Dem governor to at least make a temporary appointment. He would not have compromised on voting rights or legislation curbing police racism. Hell, he would have actually done something about police racism, such as an executive order to back up increasing consent decrees against PDs that exhibit biased policing. Etc.
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Right?
While it’s true that today’s Republicans are akin to mass shooters, today’s establishment Democrats – starting at the top with Biden – are like the do-nothing Uvalde police.
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Lady Bird would have made sure he acted. Then she would have deployed her own soft power.
It was also Lady Bird Johnson who, in 1964, insisted on releasing a statement in support of their close friend and top political adviser, Walter Jenkins, who was arrested on what was then called a “homosexual morals” charge in a YMCA men’s room a few blocks from the White House. Lyndon Johnson wavered, suggesting they keep quiet for political reasons. But Lady Bird Johnson would not abandon their friend in his hour of need.
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Indeed. And to me, that’s also a reminder: Where the hell is Jill Biden?
While we elected her husband, not her, it would still be nice to hear her at least speaking up more often. Or even at all.
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She has a day job - and a damn important one, too!
From Wikipedia:
Biden is thought to be the first wife of a vice president or president to hold a paying job during her husband’s tenure.
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Zero argument there.
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July 4, 2022 (Monday)
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
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July 5, 2022 (Tuesday)
Traditionally, Americans have celebrated the Fourth of July with barbecues, picnics, celebrations, and parades as people come together to celebrate our democracy without regard to political party. In Highland Park, Illinois, yesterday morning, a gunman opened fire on a Fourth of July parade with a high-powered rifle, killing 7, physically wounding at least 47 others, and traumatizing countless more. There were more than a dozen other mass shootings over the holiday weekend, as well. All told, mass shootings this weekend caused at least 15 deaths and injured at least 91.
Police arrested the alleged Highland Park shooter, a white 21-year-old, without incident, inspiring comparisons to the police shooting of 25-year-old Jayland Walker of Akron, Ohio, last week after a stop for a minor traffic violation. Walker fled from the scene in his car and then fled from the car. Officers shot him, saying now they believed he was reaching for a gun. A medical examiner found 60 bullet wounds (not a typo) in Walker’s body, which a medical examiner said was handcuffed when it arrived at the coroner’s office. Walker was unarmed. He was Black.
Today, prosecutors charged the suspect in the Highland Park shooting with 7 counts of murder and said more charges will be forthcoming.
Last month, in the wake of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and 2 teachers, Congress passed the first gun safety law in almost 30 years. The law provides incentives to encourage states to expand background checks before people aged 18 to 21 can buy a gun. It prohibits those who have been convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun, although it clears their record after 5 years without incident. It sets aside money for mental health resources and incentivizes states to create red flag laws. It also clarifies who requires a federal license to sell firearms.
Republicans rejected the reinstatement of an assault weapon ban such as we had between 1994 and 2004, federal background checks, and an end to the law shielding gun manufacturers from being sued when their guns cause deaths. But enough Republicans joined the Democrats to break a filibuster, and the bill passed, 65 to 33, with all Republicans in the minority.
President Biden signed the law on June 25, saying, "While this bill doesn’t do everything I want, it does include actions I’ve long called for that are going to save lives.”
Meanwhile, New York legislators responded to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc., v. Bruen, which struck down the state’s 100-year-old law for concealed-carry permits and newly asserted that individuals have a constitutional right to carry a gun in public, by tightening gun safety laws. A new New York law prohibits concealed carry on private property unless property owners explicitly say it’s okay. It also makes it a crime to carry a concealed weapon in “sensitive locations,” which include schools, hospitals, demonstrations, bars, and Times Square, among other places. It requires background checks, training, and good moral character, and it provides an appeals process for applicants whose requests for a concealed carry license are denied.
The Supreme Court said the old New York law was not sufficiently uniform; the new one is designed to work within the court’s parameters. New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the law on Friday. It will go into effect on September 1, 2022.
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy today signed a package of more stringent gun laws for his state, too. Seven new laws, passed largely along party lines, regulate and track the sale of ammunition, require those moving to New Jersey to register their guns within 60 days, permit the attorney general to sue gun industry participants, and so on.
Today, a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, issued a stack of subpoenas as part of the investigation into whether Trump and his allies illegally tried to influence the 2020 election in that state. Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis opened the investigation after a recording of Trump pressing Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger came to light in early 2021.
The grand jury subpoenaed Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jacki Pick Deason, and Jenna Ellis, who is now working for Trump-endorsed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. In 2021, Ellis declared she was leaving the Republican Party because it was no longer “conservative” enough for her.
The grand jury is looking at the creation of the fake electors from Georgia and at the various fake claims Trump allies put forward about the election being “stolen.” Eastman’s subpoena refers to his December 3, 2020, appearance before the Georgia State Senate, where he told lawmakers “that they had both the lawful authority and a ‘duty’ to replace the Democratic Party’s slate of presidential electors, who had been certified as the duly appointed electors for the State of Georgia after the November 2020 election, due to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud within the state. There is evidence that the Witness’s appearance and testimony at the hearing was part of a multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”
At least two phone calls Graham made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger or his staff in which Graham apparently asked about “reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” are at the heart of the subpoena to Graham.
Representatives Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Liz Cheney (R-WY) of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol said this weekend that more witnesses have come forward since Cassidy Hutchinson testified last week. The aide to Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows offered explosive testimony directly tying Trump and Meadows to planned violence on January 6.
Sarah Matthews, deputy press secretary in the Trump administration, will testify at a future hearing. Matthews jumped to Hutchinson’s defense after her testimony last week, tweeting, “Anyone downplaying Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t understand how the Trump (White House) worked or is attempting to discredit her because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is.” Matthews resigned on January 6, saying in a statement, “I was honored to serve in the Trump administration and proud of the policies we enacted. As someone who worked in the halls of Congress I was deeply disturbed by what I saw today. I’ll be stepping down from my role, effective immediately. Our nation needs a peaceful transfer of power.”
After Hutchinson’s testimony, we learned that the Trump organization and his allies have been paying for lawyers to represent those called by the January 6 committee as witnesses. Hutchinson offered much more information to the committee when she got rid of the lawyer Trump’s team provided and engaged her own lawyer. Immediately, Trump complained that “[h]er story totally changed!” suggesting that the Trump team might be pressuring witnesses not to cooperate with the committee.
“What they said to me is as long as I continue to be a team player, they know that I’m on the team, I’m doing the right thing, I’m protecting who I need to protect, you know, I’ll continue to stay in the good graces in Trump world,” one witness told the committee. “And they have reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts and just keep that in mind as I proceed through my depositions and interviews with the committee.”
The committee has planned the next public hearing for July 12 at 10:00 am.
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Which ain’t a threat, ya understand. Just a reminder. The boss, i mean the preznit, he keeps an eye on these things. And on you. His eye, it’s stuck on you like glue, ya understand?
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July 6, 2022 (Wednesday)
Eighteen months ago today, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. Thanks to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, we are learning more about just how deep that plot ran, and more evidence is dropping almost daily.
Yesterday, for example, Politico revealed a two-minute trailer for the documentary about the Trump family by British filmmaker Alex Holder. With extraordinary access to the family, Holder witnessed what the trailer portrays as the attempt of the Trump family to create an American dynasty, and its determination to hold onto power even if it meant the destruction of American democracy.
Today, Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that the committee has secured an agreement with Trump’s White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone to testify in a videotaped, transcribed interview. Last week’s testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson put great pressure on Cipollone to testify. She said that she and Cipollone had had several conversations about the illegality of the things Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows were doing.
She recounted Cipollone’s determination to prevent Trump from going to the Capitol with the rioters he sent there, alleging that if Trump went, Cipollone said, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” He also insisted that Trump must call off the rioters, even after Meadows said the president didn’t want to.
He will testify privately the day after the January 6 committee’s next public hearing.
There is movement on other issues surrounding the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as well. Yesterday, a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury issued a subpoena for Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), among others, and today Graham’s lawyers said they will challenge the subpoena. They say the investigation is a “fishing expedition” and that any information it turns up would go straight to the January 6th committee. They assert that as then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham “was well within his rights to discuss with state officials the processes and procedures around administering elections.”
The subpoena refers not to processes and procedures around administering elections, of course, even if it were in fact appropriate for a senator from South Carolina to ask questions about such procedures in Georgia. It refers to at least two phone calls Graham made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger or his staff in which Graham apparently asked about “reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump.” And, in November 2021, Graham admitted he reached out not only to officials in Georgia, but to those in Arizona and Nevada as well.
This outreach had nothing to do with the Senate Judiciary Committee; Graham was plainly working for Trump’s campaign. Further undercutting this argument is that it is not the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees elections; it is the Senate Rules Committee.
Former federal prosecutor Shanlon Wu tweeted that Graham is challenging the subpoena on the grounds that the grand jury is working for the congressional committee, and thus the subpoena will “erode the constitutional balance of power and the ability of a Member of Congress to do their job.” Wu said the legal course is as follows: Graham’s challenge will lose in state court and then his lawyers will try to get a federal court to stop the enforcement of a state subpoena. Wu said that the Supreme Court is unlikely to agree that the state of Georgia is a branch of the federal government. He called it “an arrogant[,] pompous and legally weak argument from Graham [that] should be slam-dunk rejected by any court that hears it.”
Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) was more succinct. He tweeted: “It’s a subpoena. Not a request to RSVP.”
There are more subpoenas in the news. Today, New York state judge Arthur F. Engoron held Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm that valued the Trump properties under investigation by New York attorney general Letitia James, in contempt of court for failing to comply with subpoenas about the valuation of certain Trump properties. A spokesperson for the company says that the company has gone to “extreme lengths” to comply with the subpoena, although it has not managed to produce the documents yet. The delay of the documents is crucial because Trump and two of his children are scheduled to testify about the valuations next week under oath.
The firm will be fined $10,000 a day until it provides the documents the subpoenas require.
What all these demands for information under oath do is establish what really happened, in contrast to the false narratives political operatives have spun in front of television cameras and on the internet, where they are not bound by any requirement to tell the truth.
The slow accumulation of facts over fiction might well become a financial crisis for those who participated in Trump’s narrative. The Fox News Corporation, One America News Network, and Newsmax are currently facing multibillion dollar lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, a voting machine company and an election software company, that those channels claimed had stolen the 2020 election for Biden.
Smaller companies OAN and Newsmax are financially vulnerable to lawsuits alone, to say nothing of an adverse judgment, but according to an article by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, FNC has more to worry about than money. We already know that FNC hosts and White House officials were in contact about the January 6 insurrection, and in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, FNC could have to hand over documents that might tell us more about that connection.
Angelo Carusone, chief executive officer of Media Matters for America, told Gabbatt: “I think once you start to pull the discovery material, what you’re going to find is there was a lot of communication between the Trump people both internally and externally about pushing very specific lies and narratives.”
The role of fact versus narrative is on display elsewhere in our government as well.
Both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, the flagship organizations of professional historians in the U.S., along with eight other U.S. historical associations (so far), yesterday issued a joint statement expressing dismay that the six Supreme Court justices in the majority in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision that overturned Roe v. Wade ignored the actual history those organizations provided the court and instead “adopted a flawed interpretation of abortion criminalization that has been pressed by anti-abortion advocates for more than thirty years.” Although the decision mentioned “history” 67 times, they note, it ignored “the long legal tradition, extending from the common law to the mid-1800s (and far longer in some states, including Mississippi), of tolerating termination of pregnancy before occurrence of ‘quickening,’ the time when a woman first felt fetal movement.”
The statement focuses less on politics than on the perversion of history, noting that “[t]hese misrepresentations are now enshrined in a text that becomes authoritative for legal reference and citation in the future,” an undermining of the “imperative that historical evidence and argument be presented according to high standards of historical scholarship. The Court’s majority opinion…does not meet those standards.”
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July 7, 2022 (Thursday)
Today, President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 17 individuals who Biden says “demonstrate the power of possibilities and embody the soul of the nation—hard work, perseverance, and faith. They have overcome significant obstacles to achieve impressive accomplishments in the arts and sciences, dedicated their lives to advocating for the most vulnerable among us, and acted with bravery to drive change in their communities—and across the world—while blazing trails for generations to come.”
The seventeen appear to have been chosen quite deliberately to provide a snapshot of a multicultural, nonpartisan society in which people work to overcome hardship and contribute to the public good.
Biden praised decorated gymnast Simone Biles, who has won 19 World Championship gold medals and 4 Olympic gold medals, for her advocacy for the mental health and safety of athletes, children in the foster care system, and victims of sexual assault.
Sister Simone Campbell is “a prominent advocate for economic justice, immigration reform, and healthcare policy.” Dr. Julieta García “was the first Hispanic woman to serve as a college president and dedicated her career to serving students from the Southwest Border region.” Former Member of Congress Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords, the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona State Senate and later a U.S. representative, survived gun violence and co-founded a nonprofit organization dedicated to gun violence prevention.
Attorney Fred Gray “represented Rosa Parks, the NAACP, and Martin Luther King, who called him ‘the chief counsel for the protest movement.’” Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, led both Apple, Inc., and Pixar. “His vision, imagination and creativity led to inventions that have, and continue to, change the way the world communicates, as well as transforming the computer, music, film and wireless industries.” Father Alexander Karloutsos has been a Greek Orthodox priest for more than 50 years, “providing counsel to several U.S. presidents.” Khizr Khan is a Gold Star father (which means he lost his son Captain Humayun Khan in the military service of the U.S.) and “is a prominent advocate for the rule of law and religious freedom.”
Sandra Lindsay was prominent in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, working as a critical care nurse in New York. She was “the first American to receive a COVID-19 vaccine outside of clinical trials and is a prominent advocate for vaccines and mental health for health care workers.” Senator John McCain, who died in 2018, was a prominent Republican politician from Arizona, famous as an independent thinker who often bucked his party to do what he considered right. Diane Nash helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that “organized some of the most important civil rights campaigns of the 20th century.”
Olympic and two-time World Cup champion soccer player Megan Rapinoe works “for gender pay equality, racial justice, and LGBTQI+ rights.” Former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, a Republican, has been “a prominent advocate on issues including campaign finance reform, responsible governance, and marriage equality.” Richard Trumka, who died in 2021, led the AFL-CIO for more than a decade and worked for social and economic justice. Brigadier General Wilma Vaught broke gender barriers as she rose through the ranks of the U.S. Air Force. “When she retired in 1985, she was one of only seven women generals in the Armed Forces.” Award-winning actor, director, and producer Denzel Washington has “served as National Spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for over 25 years.”
And civil rights advocate Raúl Yzaguirre, who was a U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, led the National Council of La Raza for 30 years.
“Decorated athletes and military heroes, artists, civil rights giants, activists and trailblazing representatives, intellectuals, and innovators,” Biden tweeted. “That’s America. And these are our 2022 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients.”
President John F. Kennedy established these awards for ”especially meritorious contributions to… [t]he security or national interests of the United States, or…world peace, or…cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” “In a period when the national government must call upon an increasing portion of the talents and energies of its citizens,” Kennedy said, “it is clearly appropriate to provide ways to recognize and reward the work of persons, within and without the Government, who contribute significantly to the quality of American life.” And yet for all their apparent civic-minded origins, a 2018 study by political scientists E. Fletcher McClellan, Christopher Devine, and Kyle C. Kopko showed that the medals have become increasingly political since 1981 as presidents seek to reward donors and associate their presidencies with individuals who will appeal to their voters or show their administrations in a good light.
The difference between Biden’s first 17 award recipients and those former president Trump honored reflects their different visions of the country. Trump favored white people and focused on athletes, especially golfers; cultural icons (Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley); or icons in the Republican Party’s rightward swing (media figure Rush Limbaugh, economist Arthur Laffer, jurist Antonin Scalia). Trump also awarded a medal to Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) on January 4, 2021, and, on January 11, 2021, to Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH).
That vision of the government as a way to reward loyalists might have moved past legal boundaries. New York Times journalist Michael S. Schmidt yesterday reported that both former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe were tapped for extremely rare invasive tax audits by the Internal Revenue Service during the Trump administration. Those audits are supposed to be random, and the chances that both Comey and McCabe, whom Trump singled out as enemies for their role in the Russia investigation, were randomly chosen seem small. The two men were unaware the other had gone through the deep audit until a reporter told them.
Today, the IRS director Charles Rettig, the Trump appointee under whom the audits took place, asked the inspector general of the Treasury Department to investigate the matter.
There was international condemnation of right-wing policies in the U.S. today, when the European Parliament voted 324 to 155, with 38 abstaining, to condemn the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. It also demanded that the European Union recognize the right to abortion in its charter, and to provide “safe, legal and free abortion services, pre-natal and maternal healthcare services, voluntary family planning, youth-friendly services, and HIV prevention, treatment and support, without discrimination.”
U.S. Secret Service director James Murray announced his retirement from the agency today to take a position as security chief at Snapchat’s parent company, Snap. Former president Trump appointed Murray to the head of the Secret Service in May 2019. Questions about the loyalties of certain Secret Service agents have swirled since January 6, but the White House said the resignation was not connected to the recent testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who mentioned hearing of a physical altercation between Trump and an agent after Trump spoke at the Ellipse on January 6.
In the U.K. today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson stepped down as head of the Conservative Party after dozens of officials in his government resigned over repeated scandals. He says he will step down as prime minister when the party chooses his replacement, likely this fall. Party leaders may force him out sooner. In a statement, Biden said that “the special relationship between our people remains strong and enduring…. I look forward to continuing our close cooperation with the government of the United Kingdom, as well as our Allies and partners around the world, on a range of important priorities. That includes maintaining a strong and united approach to supporting the people of Ukraine as they defend themselves against Putin’s brutal war on their democracy, and holding Russia accountable for its actions."
Tonight, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot in the chest while he was giving a campaign speech in the city of Nara. His condition is critical. Police have arrested a male suspect in the shooting. Washington Post Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief Michele Ye Hee Lee tweeted: “Can’t overstate how shocking this shooting is—not only because Abe is very popular and prominent, but also because gun violence is extremely rare incident in Japan, a country with some of the world’s strictest gun laws.”
President of the European Council Charles Michel tweeted that Abe is “a true friend, fierce defender of multilateral order & democratic values.” He promised that the European Union stands with Japan and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Finally, former president Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter celebrated their 76th wedding anniversary today. Theirs is the longest presidential marriage in our history. They were married in Plains, Georgia, on this date in 1946.
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Put the CEO in jail until they comply. Let’s see how quickly they find those documents, then!
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