Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

September 26, 2022 (Monday)

A headline in the New York Times today read: “Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s.” The story explained that more money in the hands of consumers thanks to federal stimulus spending, along with a new skepticism of stretched supply lines, has created a rebound in American manufacturing.

Since the 1970s, authors Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, and Ana Swanson explain, outsourcing and automation have meant that every recession has seen factory jobs disappear and never return as employers used downturns to move operations to countries with lower wage levels. This time, though, American manufacturers have not only regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic, they have also added about 67,000 more. Those numbers would be higher if the labor market weren’t so tight, a condition leading employers to offer higher wages and better benefits.

Biden has made it clear that he is trying to overturn 40 years of “supply side” economics, ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. This system was designed to free up capital at the top of the economy through tax cuts and deregulation in the belief that putting capital in the hands of the wealthy—the “supply side”— would lead them to invest more in the economy, thus making it grow more quickly and providing more jobs. While Republicans came to embrace that ideology wholeheartedly, in fact it never showed signs of increasing economic growth. What it did was to move wealth dramatically upward. It also made the measure of the economy the health of Wall Street rather than Main Street.

Since Abraham Lincoln’s administration, which faced a similar economic stratification and a similar justification for it, another approach to the economy has stood against this ideology. Leaders from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt have argued that providing opportunity for people at the lower end of the economy—the “demand side”—would drive production and consumption, spreading prosperity upward. Biden has followed in this tradition. Insisting that he would build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out,” he, along with the Democrats in Congress, bolstered domestic manufacturing with measures like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.

Now, statistics show, that investment has paid off. Chad Moutray, the chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, told the New York Times reporters: ​​“We have 67,000 more workers today than we had in February 2020. I didn’t think we would get there, to be honest with you.”

National Economic Council director Brian Deese told the reporters, “One of the most striking things that we are seeing now is the number of companies—U.S. companies and global companies—that are committing to build and expand their manufacturing footprint in the United States, and doing so based on their view that not only did the pandemic highlight the need for more resilience in their supply chains, but that the United States is creating a policy environment that makes long-term investment here in the United States more attractive.”

Meanwhile, the real net worth of the bottom 50% of U.S. households has climbed 60% since Biden took office, now reaching $67,524.

One of the things that will continue to feed this change is the plan to forgive significant student loan debt, especially among low-income Black and Brown Americans. This story is hitting the news today after the Congressional Budget Office responded to a series of questions posed by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) and Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), both fervently opposed to the program. The CBO’s responses to those specific questions have been widely published, suggesting the program will cost the U.S. $400 billion. This is sparking cries about its expense, but this particular CBO number calculates the cost over the next 30 years rather than the usual ten, does not address the stimulus effects of the relief, and does not take into account how much anyone would actually have repaid. The estimate is, the CBO states in its letter, “highly uncertain.”

In contrast to Biden’s economic program, on Friday the new government of Prime Minister Liz Truss announced the most radical tax cuts in Britain since 1972, cutting the top income tax rate as well as corporate taxes to spur the economy. This unfunded cut will mean borrowing at rising interest rates. Concerns about inflation, already hammering the British economy, made the value of the pound, which is the English unit of currency, drop to its lowest level since 1985.

These different economic visions are in conflict here in the United States. Former Trump economic advisor Steve Moore reacted to the Truss tax cuts by saying: “This is exactly what we should be doing in the US." White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein said: “President Biden has been very clear about the negative track record of trickle-down, Reagan-style tax cuts.”

Republicans have managed to keep voters behind their economic program by downplaying it and emphasizing cultural issues, primarily abortion, which reliably turned out anti-abortion voters. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans have a demographic problem: a majority of voters support reproductive rights and are turning out to vote, and there is no longer a reason for anti-abortion voters to show up.

So Republican leaders are downplaying abortion: reporter Eric Garcia noted today that Republican representative and Senate candidate Ted Budd (R-NC), who is a cosponsor of the House version of Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) national abortion bill, didn’t mention his stance in a recent rally with former president Trump. They are also inventing new cultural crises, most notably an attack on LGBTQIA folks but also a renewed attack on immigrants.

Trump has gone further, jumping aboard the QAnon train, which the FBI considers a domestic terrorism threat, as his own legal troubles are mounting. His lawyers failed to slow down the criminal investigation into his theft of documents, including many marked with the highest levels of classification. New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump, his company, and his children and two associates for fraud. And now the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is beginning to turn up more information.

On Friday the committee subpoenaed Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos to ask about a phone call he had with Trump in July 2022 (not a typo) in which Trump tried to get him to change the 2020 result in Wisconsin. Vos is challenging the subpoena.

In the lead-up to Wednesday’s midday public hearing of the committee, Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that election denier Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel associated with Trump loyalist Michael Flynn, was in contact with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in late December 2020 about gaining access to the voting systems in Arizona and Georgia. Waldron referred to Arizona as “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,” to overturn the election.

Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, was texting QAnon links to Meadows. And now, after flirting with QAnon since 2020, Trump has embraced it wholeheartedly, first “retruthing” social media posts featuring him as a QAnon hero and warning that “The Storm Is Coming,” then using QAnon music at a rally. Now, he has sent out an email calling for the death penalty for drug dealers—a favorite theme of fascists since the 1930s and a major part of the program of former dictator Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom Trump admires—along with the warning that “Under Democrat control, the streets of our great cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims,” tapping into the QAnon themes of violent retribution for those they see as preying on America’s youth.

“I certainly will do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump isn’t anywhere close to the Oval Office,” Representative Liz Cheney said this weekend at The Texas Tribune Festival, which highlights politics and policy. “And if he is the nominee, I won’t be a Republican.” She warned that a Republican majority in the House would empower Trump Republicans like Jim Jordan (OH), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), and Lauren Boebert (CO).

And when asked if Trump should testify before the committee, Cheney answered: “Any interaction that Donald Trump has with the committee will be under oath and subject to penalty of perjury.”

[milliefink]

September 27, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, President Joe Biden held an event in the Rose Garden at the White House to celebrate the lower drug costs possible thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed without any Republican votes in either the House or the Senate. Phasing in over the next few years, the measure will cap the out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $2000 a year and make vaccinations free for seniors on Medicare. If the price of drugs rises faster than inflation, drug companies will have to rebate the difference to Medicare. And Biden noted that today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the premium for Medicare Part B, which pays for doctor visits, will decrease this year.

All of this was possible, he said, because the biggest corporations in America will have to pay a minimum corporate tax of 15%. “The days of billion-dollar companies paying zero taxes are over.” “And,” he added, “we’re doing all this by bringing down the deficit at the same time. You hear about us being ‘big spenders’? Well, they raised the debt by $2 trillion. We’ve reduced the deficit in my first year, 2021, by $350 billion.”

Biden called out the Republican budget plan, written by Florida senator Rick Scott, to sunset all federal legislation in five years, promising that Congress will reauthorize it if it is worthwhile. This means that every five years, Congress will have to vote to reauthorize Social Security and Medicare or they will end. Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson has gone further, calling for moving Social Security and Medicare spending from mandatory spending, which is protected, to discretionary spending, which must be reapproved every year, thus making it vulnerable to cuts or even elimination.

“I have a different idea,” Biden said. “I’ll protect those programs. I’ll make them stronger. And I’ll lower your cost to be able to keep them.”

Biden likely made this stand, at least in part, because Republican attack ads have been telling seniors that the Democrats have made cuts to Medicare. It is technically true that costs will drop: the government should save $237 billion between 2022 and 2031 from the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug policies. But these savings come from the fact that the IRA lets the federal government negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over prices, not because it will cut the benefits seniors receive.

Disinformation seems to be the hallmark of the midterm campaign.

In June, Republicans championed the overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion, at first insisting that the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens’ Health decision would simply send the question of abortion rights back to the states. Now, with Republican lawmakers calling for a national law outlawing abortion everywhere, those running for election are scrubbing their websites of their abortion stances and downplaying the issue.

But today a 2019 radio interview with Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano, now the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, emerged. In it, Mastriano said that women obtaining abortions should be charged with murder. Mastriano has tried to say that his personal views are “irrelevant” because the legislature is in charge of rewriting the laws, but last week at Pennsylvania’s March for Life he called abortion rights “the single most important issue…in our lifetime,” and he has said he looks forward to signing restrictive measures into law.

Mastriano has called his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro, extreme, although Shapiro supports current state law.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has also gotten in on the disinformation game. Texas governor Greg Abbott has been ferrying migrants from the southern border north, appealing to the right-wing base with the argument that such movement will illustrate to “liberal” cities the burdens such migrants impose on the border states. On September 14, DeSantis got into the act, flying 48 unsuspecting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. As DeSantis said: “The minute even a small fraction of what those border towns deal with every day are brought to their front door, they all go berserk.”

In fact, the people of Martha’s Vineyard welcomed the migrants, fed and sheltered them, and got them back to the mainland where they could have access to housing and human services. More to the point, it is a myth that Republican-dominated border states are bearing the brunt of migrants seeking asylum. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post asked the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC) to figure out where the asylum seekers in the U.S. are.

From court records, TRAC calculated that 750,000 people are awaiting asylum hearings. More than 125,000 of them are in California. More than 110,000 are in New York. About 98,000 are scheduled for hearings in Florida, while about 75,000 are waiting in Texas. Most of the rest are scheduled for court hearings in Democratic-dominated states, such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

DeSantis’s political performance has drawn attention not only from those who like the cruelty he has displayed, but also from those who have asked questions about the $1.6 million contract his administration signed with air charter company Vertol Systems to move the migrants. NBC’s Marc Caputo noted that Vertol has contributed to DeSantis’s top allies and is well connected to Republican Florida lawmakers. A later plan to fly migrants to Delaware near Biden’s beach home was canceled, and the DeSantis administration refused to release a copy of the Vertol contract.

The Florida state budget that authorized $12 million for moving migrants specified that “unauthorized aliens” were to be flown from “this state”: Florida. The migrants taken to Martha’s Vineyard were not “illegal immigrants” as DeSantis’s office says; they were legally seeking asylum—and thus were “authorized” to be in the U.S.—and were flown not from Florida but simply touched down there on their trip from Texas to Massachusetts.

Shortly before midnight on the day DeSantis shipped the migrants, his deputy press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, tweeted a photograph of former president Barack Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard home, saying “7 bedrooms with 8 and a half bathrooms in a 6,892-square-foot house on nearly 30 acres. Plenty of space.”

Now, Hurricane Ian is about to make landfall in Florida either tomorrow or early Thursday and threatens to be one of the most dangerous and costliest storms in U.S. history. Tonight, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center warned that it would hit land as a Category 4 storm. In addition to hurricane-force winds, they predict a storm surge of up to 12 feet between Fort Myers and Sarasota, and up to 2 feet of rain.

In the Rose Garden today, Biden assured people that his administration “is on alert and in action to help the people of Florida.” Biden approved DeSantis’s request for emergency assistance as soon as he received it, sent in federal assistance before the storm hit, and spoke with the mayors of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, the areas most likely to be in the storm’s path.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has already sent 700 personnel to Florida, along with 3.5 million liters of water, 3.7 million meals, and hundreds of generators. Biden urged people to obey the instructions of local officials: “Your safety is more important than anything.”

Tonight, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted that President Biden spoke with DeSantis this evening about “the steps the Federal government is taking to help Florida prepare for Hurricane Ian. The President and the Governor committed to continued close coordination.”

Because of the storm, the public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed.

[milliefink]

September 28, 2022 (Wednesday)

More than 1.5 million Florida residents are without power as Hurricane Ian is pounding the southwestern coast and moving inland. The hurricane was close to a Category 5 storm when it made landfall about 3 this afternoon, with the predicted 12-foot storm surge materializing near Fort Myers. It has been slowing since it hit land, but the damage, including to this year’s orange crop, is already considerable.

This destructive storm highlights the distance between reality and the ideology that calls for getting rid of the federal government.

As a newly elected congress member in 2013, now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Now, with Florida on the ropes, DeSantis asked President Joe Biden for an emergency declaration to free up federal money and federal help even before the storm hit, and said Tuesday, “We all need to work together, regardless of party lines.”

Since the 1980s, the argument for dismantling the government has been that federal regulations hamper the operation of the free market, thus slowing economic growth, while the taxes required to maintain a bureaucratic system take money away from those who otherwise would invest in businesses. The avowed theory is that a freely operating market will free up money on the “supply side” of the economy. Flush with cash, investors will theoretically pump that money into new enterprises that will hire workers, and everyone will prosper together.

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office released a study of trends in the distribution of family wealth between 1989—immediately after President Ronald Reagan began the antiregulation and antitax push—and 2019. In those thirty years, total real wealth held by families tripled from $38 trillion to $115 trillion. But the distribution of that growth was not even.

Money moved toward the families in the top 10%, and especially in the top 1%, shifting from families with less income and education toward those with more wealth and education. In the 30 years examined, the share of wealth belonging to families in the top 10% increased from 63% in 1989 to 72% in 2019, from $24.3 trillion to $82.4 trillion (an increase of 240%). The share of total wealth held by families in the top 1% increased from 27% to 34% in the same period. In 2019, families in the bottom half of the economy held only 2% of the national wealth, and those in the bottom quarter owed about $11,000 more than they owned.

The relative invisibility of these statistics after forty years under Republican ideology has enabled today’s Republicans to insist the Democrats are “socialists” who are trying to redistribute wealth downward even as our laws are clearly redistributing it upward.

Last night, California governor Gavin Newsom, who is running for reelection, insisted on MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight that Democrats must push back against the Republican domination of culture wars. Newsom pointed out that 8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates are Republican states and that the gun death rate in Texas is 67% higher than that in California. Newsom expressed dismay that Democrats aren’t better at advocating their policies.

That omission is likely a result of the fact that after World War II, it never occurred to most Americans that anyone here would need to defend democracy. And yet we are now facing the rise of “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which argues that democracy’s protection of equal rights weakens societies by destroying their moral core and by splitting the people internally. Its adherents call for limiting the vote; privileging white, heterosexual Christian citizens; and standing behind an authoritarian leader who will stamp out opposition—that is, a system that is not a democracy at all.

There is a direct correlation between growing economic inequality and the growing popularity of authoritarianism. Scholars of authoritarian systems note that a population that feels economically, religiously, or culturally dispossessed is an easy target for an authoritarian who promises to bring back a mythological world in which its members were powerful.

But, having lifted strongmen into power, they learn that they were only tools to put in place someone whose decisions are absolute and who is no longer bound by the law.

Today the New York Times published a series of telephone calls from Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. The men were poorly equipped, badly commanded, completely disillusioned, and utterly disgusted with Russian president Vladimir Putin, while their people back home complained that the economy was collapsing and the gains of the past 30 years were being swept away.

Meanwhile, Russia has had to strip its troops away from its borders to replace the soldiers lost in Ukraine, and the situation does not appear to be improving. The calls published in the New York Times were captured before Russia’s current mobilization, which has prompted a mass exodus out of the country. Since last week, 53,000 Russians have fled to Georgia; more than 98,000 have fled to Kazakhstan.

In the U.S. today, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Jackson Grigsby of CNN reported on footage taken by a Danish film crew that followed Trump loyalist Roger Stone for about three years for a documentary. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has seen the footage and permitted the release of certain clips from around the time of the 2020 election and the January 6 attack.

In July 2020, Stone was already saying that Trump’s team would not accept the results of the election, clearly expecting that Trump would lose. The day before the election, he said: “F*ck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.” Like Steve Bannon, Stone also said that Trump should simply declare victory, saying: “Possession is nine tenths of the law." The filmmakers later recorded him asking for a pardon for his participation in the insurrection, noting that since Trump had already pardoned him once, after his conviction for lying to lawmakers about his actions and his relationship to Russia in the 2016 campaign, no one would care if Trump pardoned him again.

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who presided over Roger Stone’s trial for lying to lawmakers about his ties to Russia during the 2016 election, called out “high-ranking members of Congress and state officials” for being “so afraid of losing their power” that they won’t contradict Trump when he lies that he won the 2020 election. She warned that the courts must hold the line against the lies and the violence Republican lawmakers are encouraging.

Meanwhile, Trump’s demand for a special master to review the materials FBI agents took from Mar-a-Lago on August 8 has put him on the spot. The demand for the review seemed designed to slow the examination of the documents with classification markings, but those have now been exempted by an appeals court, and special master Judge Raymond Dearie is puncturing Trump’s wild claims that he declassified documents or that the FBI planted them at Mar-a-Lago by asking Trump’s lawyers to put those claims in writing for the court.

Dearie has asked them to identify which of the 200,000 pages of documents not marked classified Trump wants to claim are covered by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. If he wants to claim executive privilege, he also must explain why the executive branch, currently run by President Biden, has no right to see those documents.

Dearie has also asked them to verify by Friday the inventory written by the FBI agents of what they recovered or to note what items on it were allegedly planted. So, the lawyers must either admit that Trump held classified documents or claim that he declassified them (there is no evidence that he did), assert that the FBI planted those documents, or lie. Instead, they are trying to avoid verifying the inventory.

That review will cost Trump a lot. He has to pay a vendor to digitize the roughly 200,000 pages, then pay $500 an hour for the review, plus the cost of his own lawyers.

While those machinations are taking place, today, for the first time since 1969, the White House held a conference on hunger, nutrition, and health. Biden is bringing together the private sector and government to try to end hunger in America by 2030. The 1969 conference under President Richard Nixon led to a big expansion in food assistance programs. Now, a variety of companies and foundations have pledged $8 billion to address food insecurity, while Democrats in Congress are calling for more free meals in schools and extending school food programs through the summer. Biden has also called for making the expanded child tax credit permanent.

[milliefink]

September 29, 2022 (Thursday)

Today the Senate approved a short-term extension of government funding to prevent a shutdown. The deal funds the government until December 16 and also provides about $12 billion in aid to Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion. The House is expected to pass the measure tomorrow.

Behind this measure is a potential nightmare scenario. MAGA Republicans have already threatened to refuse to fund the government unless President Joe Biden and the Democrats reverse all their policies. If Republicans take control of either the House or the Senate—or both—in the midterms, they have the potential to throw the government into default, something that has never happened before.

The Republicans have this weapon because the U.S. has a weird funding system put in place more than 100 years ago. Congress appropriates money for programs that the Treasury then has to fund. But there is a “debt ceiling” for how much the government can borrow. If Congress has spent more money than the debt ceiling will permit, Congress must raise that ceiling or the government will default.

The debt ceiling is not an appropriation, it simply permits the government to pay debts already incurred.

Congress actually originally intended the debt ceiling to enable the government to be flexible in its borrowing. In the era of World War I, when it needed to raise a lot of money fast, Congress stopped passing specific revenue measures and instead set a cap on how much money the government could borrow through all of the different instruments it used.

Now, though, the debt ceiling has become a political cudgel because if it is not raised when Congress spends more than it has the ability to repay, the country will default on its debts.

Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than 100 times since it first went into effect, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan, and indeed, the Republicans raised it three times under former president Donald Trump. But when they had to raise it almost exactly a year ago under Biden, Republicans refused.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned then that a default “could trigger a spike in interest rates, a steep drop in stock prices and other financial turmoil. Our current economic recovery would reverse into recession, with billions of dollars of growth and millions of jobs lost.” It would jeopardize the status of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency. Financial services firm Moody’s Analytics warned that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9%, and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth.

And yet, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, said, “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will…help Democrats…resume ramming through partisan socialism.” His stand was in part because it was not clear he had the votes he needed to support an increase, even though establishment Republicans like McConnell were quite aware of the damage a default would create.

Driving the Republican stance was former president Trump, who pushed MAGA Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want. “The way I look at it,” he wrote, “what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country. Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.” Trump was not happy when McConnell backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added, “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.”

Now the equation has changed. With the Republican Party controlled by its MAGA members, it is not clear that a Republican-dominated House or Senate would allow the government to pay its bills. The ranking member of the House Budget Committee, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, told Alayna Treene of Axios that he thinks the Republican should use the debt ceiling as leverage to “reverse” the administration’s “radical” policies. He indicated he would like the Republicans to pass a bill tying a higher debt ceiling to the destruction of all the Democrats’ policies and dare Biden to reject it. “Surely he wouldn’t default,” Smith said.

This plan is an echo of an effort by former Confederate leaders to destroy the federal government’s Reconstruction policies by withholding funds until the president did as they demanded. In 1879, having taken control of both houses of Congress during a recession, Democrats believed they had a mandate to get rid of federal protection of Black rights. Insisting they were fighting for liberty from a tyrannical government, they attached to appropriations bills riders that would force President Rutherford B. Hayes either to withdraw the remaining U.S. troops in the South (it’s a myth that they left in 1877) or to leave the government unfunded.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an image of Fort Sumter, the installation in Charleston Harbor fired on by Confederate troops in April 1861, with the caption: “REVOLUTIONARY, AS USUAL—It is not the first time that an attempt has been made to stop the Government.” Three weeks later, the cover of Harper’s Weekly showed a skeletal U.S. soldier, starved at the infamous Andersonville prison camp, as a symbol of the starvation of the government.

Southern Democrats told newspapers they had blundered when they fought on the battlefields: far better to control the country from within Congress. Extremist newspapers threatened violence as they called for congress members to “drive or starve Mr. Hayes into signing a bill that sweeps these obnoxious laws out of existence.” But some fellow Democrats thought the southerners had gone too far. The Chicago Times deplored “the revolutionary course of attempting to subordinate the president to the dominant party in congress by menacing the very existence of the constitution.”

Republican House minority leader James Garfield (R-OH) noted: “They will let the government perish for want of supplies.” “If this is not revolution, which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.” A Civil War veteran who had seen battle at Shiloh and Chickamauga, Garfield understood revolution.

Garfield and Hayes refused to bow to the ex-Confederates’ demands, and their stand rallied northerners who had begun to drift toward the Democrats back to their standard. The Democrats were engaged in “a conspiracy against the government itself,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, and voters agreed. In the election of 1880, they rejected Democratic presidential candidate Winfield S. Hancock, who had been considered the frontrunner, and instead elected Garfield, who ran on a platform that emphasized a strong national government and defense of Black rights.

In 1879 the congressional fight was a continuation of the themes of the Civil War, played out over the funding of the government. If today’s Republicans retake power in the fall elections, a similar fight in 2023 will likely look much the same.

[gatto]

@milliefink

“There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will…help Democrats…resume ramming through partisan socialism.”

that’s easy enough. if republicans just agree to support social safety net programs, then the programs are instantly non-partisan. problem solved!

[PsiPhiGrrrl]

@gatto

if republicans just agree to support social safety net programs

Well, they do keep promising their supporters that they’ll create their own, much better programs that never get finished or delivered. If anyone asks why, they blame Democrats. Republicans will lie, cheat, and steal to take control of whatever levels of government they can. Once they’re in office, they get rid of programs that don’t enrich and/or empower them (or ones that put their power grabs at risk). Remember the US Postal Service! If at first they don’t succeed, they just try, try again:

When Reagan Tried to Destroy the Postal Service

How Republicans Crippled The United States Postal Service

Here Are All The Postal Service Leaders’ Ties To Trump And The GOP

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/512364-house-republicans-allege-democrats-are-fabricating-usps-crisis/

[milliefink]

September 30, 2022 (Friday)

After a two-month stalemate, earlier this month Ukraine launched a game-changing counteroffensive against the Russians occupying their eastern territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Over the summer, Ukrainian forces destroyed Russian arms, command centers, and supplies behind Russian lines with U.S.-supplied long-range High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), then began to talk of a counteroffensive in the south, near Kherson. To guard against such a move, Russia moved many of its soldiers from the northeast to Kherson, leaving its northeastern troops stretched thin.

On September 6, Ukrainians moved, but not near Kherson in the south. Instead, they struck hard on the weakened northeastern lines, cutting quickly through the stretched and disheartened Russian occupiers and capturing more than 6000 square miles in less than a week. Russian troops abandoned their weapons and fled.

Russian president Vladimir Putin had launched the war on February 24 with the expectation that a lightning-quick attack would give him control of Ukraine before other nations could react, much as when he had invaded Crimea in 2014, or Georgia in 2008.

But he did not reckon with the careful rebuilding and training the Ukrainian military had undergone since 2014 as it worked to hold off Russia. He also misjudged the strength and commitment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which former president Trump had worked hard to dismantle. In office only a year at that point, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had made reconstructing the world’s democratic alliances a top priority.

Those alliances held against Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation as they had not before when Putin had bought appeasement with promises: “Don’t believe those who try to use Russia to scare you, who say that, after Crimea, other [Ukrainian] regions will follow,” he said in 2014. “We don’t want to carve up Ukraine. We don’t need this.” In 2022, international sanctions began to bite into and then to bring down the Russian economy, while shipments of weapons and economic support kept the Ukrainians supplied. Rather than a quick, successful strike, Putin found himself in a drawn-out and deeply unpopular conflict.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive tightened the screws further. Putin responded to it on September 21 by hinting that he might use nuclear weapons and calling for what initially was described as “partial” mobilization, a move he had tried to avoid because of its potential to turn the Russian people against him. Immediately, Russian men headed for the country’s borders, while civilians and draftees, provided with few supplies and no training, began to resist.

Putin also announced that the four occupied regions would hold referenda on joining Russia and would be part of Russia as soon as those referenda occurred, so any attacks on them would be considered attacks on Russian territory. With this upfront admission that the vote was predetermined, Putin’s move was clearly designed to enable him to keep the Ukrainian territory he seems about to lose. It also violated international law by attacking another nation’s sovereignty, and Biden and other democratic leaders condemned it in advance.

Then, on September 26, the Nord Stream pipelines on the floor of the Baltic Sea that send natural gas from Russia to Europe appear to have been sabotaged with TNT in what appears to have been a warning that Russia could attack the critical infrastructure of NATO countries. In this case, neither of the pipelines was in use, and blowing them up might simply have been a way to get rid of them in such a way to collect insurance on assets that are losing value as Europe turns to alternative energy.

But the explosions might also have been a warning that the seven major pipelines delivering Norwegian gas to Europe could be next. Former president Trump promptly “truthed”: “Do not make matters worse with the pipeline blowup. Be strategic, be smart (brilliant!), get a negotiated deal done NOW. Both sides need and want it. The entire World is at stake. I will head up group???”

Today, in a televised ceremony, Putin announced that the sham referenda had taken place and that “there are four new regions of Russia.” The four territories, which Russia does not fully control, cover about 18% of Ukraine. Putin’s speech seemed to indicate a concern that the countries under his sway are sliding away. He focused on the “West,” claiming that Russia itself is under attack from western democracies. “The West is looking for new opportunities to hit us and they always dreamt about breaking our state into smaller states who will be fighting against each other,” he said. “They cannot be happy with this idea that there is this large country with all [these] natural riches and people who will never live under a foreign oppression.”

He offered to negotiate for an end to the war, but said that the “four new regions of Russia aren’t up for negotiation.”

Journalist Anne Applebaum, who is a specialist on Central and Eastern Europe, identified Putin’s actions as a war not just on Ukraine, but on world order and the rule of law, a system embraced by the democratic world. It is, she writes in The Atlantic, “a statement of contempt for democracy itself.” That world order says that big countries cannot attack smaller countries and that mass slaughter is unacceptable. In contrast, in Putin’s world, she writes, “Only brutality matters.”

Secretary of State Blinken tweeted: “Today, we took swift and severe measures in response to President Putin’s attempt to annex regions of Ukraine—a clear violation of international law. We will continue to impose costs on anyone that provides political or economic support for this sham.”

In turn, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine is applying for “accelerated ascension” into NATO. Ukraine’s membership in the organization would require other NATO countries to send troops to fight Russia. Admission to NATO requires the consent of all 30 members, and that consent is unlikely to materialize in the midst of a war, but Zelenky’s announcement overshadowed Putin’s.

Zelensky appealed to the ethnic minorities conscripted into Russian armies not to fight, telling them that more than 58,000 Russian soldiers had already died in Ukraine and warning them that they do not have to die for Putin. If they do come, he warned, those who are sent without dog tags should tattoo their names on their bodies so the Ukrainian authorities can inform their relatives when they are killed.

“The United States condemns Russia’s fraudulent attempt today to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory,” President Biden said. “Russia is violating international law, trampling on the United Nations Charter, and showing its contempt for peaceful nations everywhere. Make no mistake: these actions have no legitimacy.”

The U.S. announced new sanctions against Russians and Russian entities and will continue to provide aid to the Ukrainians. In what sounded like a reference to the damaged pipelines, Biden told reporters “America’s fully prepared with our NATO allies to defend every single inch of NATO territory, every single inch,” Mr. Biden said, adding: “Mr. Putin, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops have advanced around the city of Lyman and appear to be on the cusp of encircling the Russian troops there. Lyman is a key logistics and transportation hub, and the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, says its loss “will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping.”

Today, a Washington Post op-ed by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, now serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony on trumped up charges, bore a title unimaginable a year ago: “This is what a post-Putin Russia should look like.”

[gatto]

@milliefink

Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops have advanced around the city of Lyman and appear to be on the cusp of encircling the Russian troops there. Lyman is a key logistics and transportation hub, and the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, says its loss “will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping.”

[milliefink]

October 1, 2022 (Saturday)

I started to write a quick wrap-up of some of today’s stories, only to find that there is no such thing as a quick wrap-up these days. I don’t know about you, but I need some days when I am not deep in the weeds of who is doing what, and why, especially when a lot of those weeds are toxic.

So here, tonight, is a Saturday photo… and an unusual one. Last weekend, we were out with a friend at night and the stars were cascading across the sky. But instead of turning my camera up, I pointed mine down toward the black harbor and ended up– quite unintentionally– with a very Maine sort of display.

An unexpected gift in the most unlikely of circumstances.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

[milliefink]

October 2, 2022 (Sunday)

There’s a moment in Representative Adam Schiff’s 2021 book Midnight in Washington that jumps out. The book centers around the first impeachment of former president Trump for withholding congressionally approved funds for Ukraine to fight off Russian incursions. In managing the impeachment trial before the Senate, Schiff (D-CA) and his team had prepared thoroughly and carefully to demonstrate that Trump had, in fact, withheld the money in order to force Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to help Trump rig the 2020 election.

Trump’s team wanted Zelensky to announce that he was launching an investigation into Hunter Biden, whose father, Joe Biden, was the opponent Trump most feared for the 2020 presidential election. The media would jump at such an announcement and chew it over until by the time the election came around, voters would associate Biden with criminality, just as they had condemned Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, over her use of a private email server.

As Schiff prepared to summarize the powerful testimony that supported the case for impeachment, a member of his staff stopped him. Schiff recalled the staffer telling him: “They think we’ve proven him guilty. They need to know why he should be removed.”

Schiff interpreted that question to mean that senators wanted to know why THEY should remove him. After all, he was giving them the judges they wanted and permitting them to run the country as they wished.

Schiff’s masterful summary of the case both at the trial and in his book answered that question, explaining that senators should have taken on themselves the responsibility for removing Trump from office because he threatened the country’s national security and, if not checked, would continue to abuse his power.

In the end, only one Republican Senator, Mitt Romney (R-UT), voted to convict Trump of abuse of power (but not obstruction of Congress), but that one vote from “one brave man,” Schiff recalled, “had validated my belief and that of the Founders, that the people possessed sufficient virtue to be self-governing.”

But there is another interpretation of the reason senators wanted to know why Trump should be removed even though they admitted he was guilty of trying to rig an election with machinations that hurt the country’s national security: The leaders of the Republican Party had abandoned the rule of law.

After World War II, political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained that lies are central to the rise of authoritarianism. In place of reality, authoritarians lie to create a “fictitious world through consistent lying.” Ordinary people embraced such lies because they believed everyone lied anyhow, and if caught trusting a lie, they would “take refuge in cynicism,” saying they had known all along they were being lied to and admiring their leaders “for their superior tactical cleverness.” But leaders embraced the lies because they reinforced those leaders’ superiority, and gave them power, over those who did believe them.

That pattern, in which lies undermine the rule of law, seems to be going around these days. It is in the news internationally as Russian president Vladimir Putin is directly challenging international law both by taking Ukrainian territory by force and by committing war crimes. He justifies that destruction of the rule of law by claiming that sham referenda in four regions of Ukraine have made those regions Russian, and that any attempt of Ukrainians to reclaim their territory will be an attack on Russia that may require a nuclear response.

The rejection of the rule of law is also in the news at home, as Republican leaders appear to be following Trump’s lead. Tonight, New York Times reporters Edgar Sandoval, Miriam Jordan, Patricia Mazzei, and J. David Goodman explained the lies behind Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s dumping of migrants at Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts last month.

Since Biden took office, Republicans have tried to make unauthorized immigration a key election issue. In June 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Arizona governor Doug Ducey invoked the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an agreement that lets states send aid to each other after a governor has declared a disaster or an emergency. Abbott has declared a disaster and Ducey an emergency over the influx of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that the Biden administration is “unwilling or unable” to secure the border. They called for governors of other states to send “additional law enforcement personnel and equipment” to “arrest migrants who illegally cross the border into our territory.”

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis all pledged to send law enforcement to Texas and Arizona; South Dakota governor Kristi Noem one-upped them by announcing that she would send 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and that billionaires Willis and Reba Johnson from Franklin, Tennessee, would pay for the troops.

Florida’s budget this year—signed in June—continued this trend with a $12 million fund “to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens out of Florida.” According to Douglas Soule of the Tallahassee Democrat, that money came from interest on the $8.8 billion Florida got from the American Rescue Plan to address the coronavirus pandemic. Because it was interest, rather than principal, it was not covered by the federal requirement to address Covid-19, as the federal money itself was.

The idea was to highlight federal transportation of “unauthorized” migrants into Florida, but by August the money was untouched because there actually weren’t large groups of migrants coming to the state. So DeSantis focused instead on Texas, where a woman the New York Times reporters identified as Perla Huerta, a U.S. Army veteran who was a combat medic and a counterintelligence agent for two decades before being discharged last month, recruited destitute migrants to go north with the promise of work. Vertol Systems, which charters airplanes and is well connected with Florida Republican politicians, was paid more than $1.5 million, but how they were hired and by whom is not clear.

The people the operation targeted were legal asylum seekers, who were provided with fake maps and misled about where they were going.

Putin has to reckon with reality, in the form of Russian men fleeing the country, protests in Dagestan and elsewhere, the international community standing firm on the law, and Ukrainian forces continuing to gain ground. Less than a day after Putin announced he had taken the Ukrainian regions, Russian troops fled from the key transport city of Lyman.

Whether DeSantis and the Republican Party will have to reckon with reality in 2022 remains unclear. But it seems unlikely that any reality check will come from Republican leaders. Just this weekend, they have refused to comment on Trump’s inflammatory statement about Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), which seemed to encourage violence against him and included a racist smear against McConnell’s wife, Trump transportation secretary Elaine Chao.

In the Washington Post, columnist Karen Tumulty concluded that while Trump was outrageous, “there is plenty of fault to go around. The Republican Party’s refusal to denounce him makes them complicit.”

[milliefink]

October 3, 2022 (Monday)

This morning, the trial of Oath Keeper founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes and four others began in Washington, D.C. They are on trial for various counts of seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent U.S. officials from carrying out their official duties, obstruction of justice, and impeding police officers, all related to their important part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

These are five of the nine charged; according to Lawfare editor Roger Parloff, who has been following the case closely, the other four will go on trial in November, and the split is because there wasn’t a courtroom big enough in Washington to hold a trial of all nine. Parloff also notes that the last “unambiguously successful” seditious conspiracy trial was of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheik, and his associates for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993. Since then, the charge has been used to prosecute small al-Qaeda cells.

Prosecutors said the Oath Keepers set out on January 6 “to shatter a bedrock of American democracy” by stopping the peaceful transfer of power. They stockpiled weapons, breached the Capitol, and tried “to stop by whatever means necessary the lawful transfer of presidential power, including by taking up arms against the United States government,” attacking “not just the Capitol, not just Congress, not just our government—but our country itself.”

The defense said the government was mischaracterizing what happened, and overreaching. The Oath Keepers came to Washington as security guards dedicated to “peacekeeping,” who showed up expecting that then-president Donald Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act to activate the Oath Keepers to defend Trump’s government.

Also today, the Supreme Court began its new term this week with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the bench. In the minority, Jackson will not change the right-wing slant of the court, which the editorial board of the New York Times on Saturday called “a judicial arm of the Republican Party,” discarding “the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.”

One of the cases before the Supreme Court in this session is Moore v. Harper, which is about the “independent state legislature” doctrine. That doctrine is a new legal theory based on the election clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reads that "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” The theory says that this clause means that the legislature alone can determine elections in a state, unchecked by the state courts or even the state constitution.

The case comes from North Carolina, where the state supreme court in February declared that the new congressional and state legislature maps so heavily favored Republicans as to be “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Republican-dominated legislature says it alone has the power to determine state districts.

Revered conservative judge J. Michael Luttig, who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, is clear about this doctrine’s illegitimacy. Calling Moore v. Harper “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding,” he made his understanding of that case clear in an article in The Atlantic today titled “There Is Absolutely Nothing to Support the ‘Independent State Legislature’ Theory.” The subtitle explained: “Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution.”

Luttig correctly identifies this theory as “the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”; had it been in place, Trump’s scheme for throwing out Biden’s electors in favor of his own would have worked, and he would now be in the White House. Luttig calls it “baffling” that six of the Supreme Court justices have “flirted” with the theory, because “[t]here is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.” Indeed, the Constitution says just the opposite.

While Trump’s loyalists continue to try to stack the mechanics of our system in favor of the former president, his troubles continue to mount. Yesterday, even the Wall Street Journal editorial board complained of Trump’s “reckless…tirade” against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a tirade this political historian, who is very aware of the power of words, will not quote in public. The editorial board called Trump out for endangering McConnell’s life.

In an interview with Chauncey DeVega of Salon today, lawyer and Lincoln Project founder George Conway warned that Trump “is basically a cornered animal,” trapped by legal troubles, losing his connection to the public, and facing consequences for his actions for the first time in his life.

Conway predicted that Trump’s theft of government documents is “the shortest distance between him and an orange jumpsuit, for the simple reason that it is a simple case.” “Given the details of the case and all the related charges, I don’t know how the DOJ doesn’t prosecute Trump,” he said. “And I don’t know how Trump is not convicted, especially if he is tried in the District of Columbia.”

To get out of trouble, Conway said, Trump will threaten violence. And, indeed, he has been doing so, telling a crowd on October 1, “I don’t believe we’ll ever have a fair election again. I don’t believe it.” Legal analyst and former U.S. attorney Joyce White Vance accurately identifies this as "[a] message designed to justify abandoning democracy & installing a strongman.”

And yet, just tonight, Trump’s troubles got worse. Josh Dawsey and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post directly connected Trump to the withholding of the federal documents when they reported that in February, Trump asked one of his lawyers, Alex Cannon, to lie to the National Archives and Records Administration, telling them that he had returned everything the archives wanted. Cannon refused. In May, after a subpoena, former One America News personality and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb did sign a document saying that Trump had handed over “all documents that are responsive to the subpoena” after a “diligent search.” Bobb has now retained an attorney and says she’s willing to talk to the Department of Justice about her role in the case.

In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”

Trump is not the only one in hot water tonight. Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast reported that a former girlfriend of Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia revealed that Walker paid for her to have an abortion in 2009. Walker has taken an extreme stand against abortion, saying he opposes it without any exceptions and supports the Republican plan for a federal law to ban the procedure nationwide. Abortion is the big dividing line between Walker and his opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock, who supports abortion rights. Walker called the story “a flat-out lie,” but the woman provided Sollenberger with a receipt from a clinic, a check from Walker, and a get well card Walker had signed, while Walker’s campaign has been marred by his own repeated lies.

Then, an account that appeared to be that of Walker’s adult son, who had been a big supporter of his father’s campaign on social media, got involved, tweeting that Walker had made “a mockery” of him and his mother. “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence,” the younger Walker tweeted.

The elder Walker claims he will sue the Daily Beast tomorrow morning.

For his part, when Shannon McCaffrey and Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked Senator Warnock about the story, he said he would continue to focus on policy. “I’ll let the pundits decide how they think it will impact the race,” Warnock said. “But I have been consistent in my view that a patient’s room is too narrow and cramped for space for a woman and the government.”

[docosc]

Moore is the most terrifying case since, well, Dobbs. USSC has become a cheerleader for authoritarianism, right down to Alito claiming that we are not allowed to question their objectivity. IANAL, so my interpretation is necessarily questionable, but it seems they will decide whether “any government so conceived, can long endure.”

[LutherBlisset]

@milliefink

In place of reality, authoritarians lie to create a “fictitious world through consistent lying.”

True not only for authoritarians, but for all humans, I am afraid.

However, authoritarian politicians and their close supporters are doing this on a different scale and level.

Hannah Arendt was spot-on for quite a lot of things. I think it’s past time for me to re-read her work.

@milliefink

In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”

Fictitious, yes. Consistent?

Well, Mr. Trump, it might be inside your head, but we are on the outside…

[gatto]

@docosc

it seems they will decide whether “any government so conceived, can long endure.”

and frighteningly – from what i understand – the first time this legislature supremacy idea was pushed was during bush v gore. and guess who was working on bush’s side: roberts, kavanaugh, and barrett.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/17/politics/bush-v-gore-barrett-kavanaugh-roberts-supreme-court/index.html

[Kii]

@milliefink

The defense said the government was mischaracterizing what happened, and overreaching. The Oath Keepers came to Washington as security guards dedicated to “peacekeeping,” who showed up expecting that then-president Donald Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act to activate the Oath Keepers to defend Trump’s government.

@milliefink

Prosecutors said the Oath Keepers set out on January 6 “to shatter a bedrock of American democracy” by stopping the peaceful transfer of power.

These two things are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, proving the defense theory only leads to the prosecutors’ allegations.

[milliefink]

October 4, 2022 (Tuesday)

Anti-abortion Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker did not, in fact, sue the Daily Beast over the story he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. Instead, his son Christian Walker took to social media to call his father out for lying, abuse, and abandonment and to call out MAGA Republicans for continuing to support his father while claiming to believe in “family values.”

Walker’s supporters immediately blamed the son for hurting his father’s campaign. The candidate himself stayed away from the media, attending a private event sponsored by “Prayer Warriors for Herschel.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, organized to elect Republicans to the Senate, and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, both reaffirmed their support for Walker. They will continue to keep spending to boost his campaign. Still, concern about the outcome in Georgia has prompted the right-wing super PAC Club for Growth Action to plan a massive $2 million ad buy in Spanish for the Nevada senate race, backing Republican Adam Laxalt against Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto.

Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and a former writer and editor for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart, made the position of party leadership clear: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles,” she said. “I want control of the Senate.”

It is unclear if this scandal will hurt Walker with supporters who have already swallowed lies about his businesses, academic achievements, relationship with law enforcement, unacknowledged children, and accusations of domestic violence. But abortion is a key issue—perhaps THE key issue—in this election, and the demonstration that a Republican Senate candidate is calling for a nationwide abortion ban even as he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion will likely not sit well with those upset about the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Republicans are determined to take control of the country no matter what it takes.

Today, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who is up for reelection, revised his August story about his role in overturning the 2020 election. After saying his part in the delivery of fake electoral votes to the vice president was only “a couple seconds,” he now says that he texted with Wisconsin-based lawyer Jim Troupis, who was working for Trump to overturn the results of the election in Wisconsin, for about an hour. He also downplayed the events of January 6 as not an “armed insurrection.”

In the Washington, D.C., trial of the Oath Keepers today, though, prosecutors played a recording of a November 2020 meeting in which Oath Keepers planned to bring weapons to Washington and “fight” for Trump. The gang’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, said it would be “great” if protesters were there, because violence would enable Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

“Pepper spray is legal. Tasers are legal. And stun guns are legal. And it doesn’t hurt to have a lead pipe with a flag on it,” codefendant Kelly Meggs told attendees.

A lawyer for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed in court today that the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination when testifying before the committee. Ward was one of Arizona’s false electors.

Also today, in a story about Trump’s disregard for the correct handling of classified records, Washington Post reporters Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima, and Jacqueline Alemany said Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, told them that Trump “rejected the Presidential Records Act entirely.”

The Presidential Records Act is a federal law.

In contrast to the course of the current Republican Party, President Joe Biden has focused on demonstrating that democracy works. Today, the CHIPS and Science Act, which provided $52 billion in public investment in semiconductor manufacture, appeared once again to pay off: Micron announced that it would spend up to $100 billion over the next 20 years to build up to four plants in upstate New York near Syracuse to build computer chips. The company estimates that the project will create almost 50,000 jobs generally over the next 20 years, with about 9,000 of those in the plants themselves.

“To those who doubted that America could dominate the industries of the future, I say this,” Biden said in a statement. “[Y]ou should never bet against the American people.”

Today, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson brought an important new philosophy to the law when the Supreme Court heard arguments over Merrill v. Milligan, a voting rights case. This case concerns Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which, as summarized by the Department of Justice, “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified” in the act.

In 2021, Alabama’s legislature cut the state into seven districts that “crack and pack” Black voters. About 27% of the residents of Alabama are Black, but they are either “packed” into one district or “cracked” among the others, diluting their overall strength.

Registered voters, the Alabama chapter of the NAACP, and the multifaith Greater Birmingham Ministries sued under the Voting Rights Act. A district court of three judges, two of whom were appointed by Trump, agreed that the redistricting violated the law and gave the legislature two weeks to redraw the map to create two Black-majority districts.

The state immediately filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, which was granted, allowing the states to use the original map for this year’s elections.

In today’s arguments, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund G. LaCour Jr. claimed that states must draw districts that are “race neutral.” When Justice Jackson pressed him to explain, he turned to the Fourteenth Amendment, saying it “is a prohibition, not an obligation, to engage in race discrimination.”

Jackson then turned on its head the so-called “originalism” that has taken over the court. “I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution and what the framers and founders thought about,” she said, “and when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment in a race-conscious way.”

She’s right, of course, and while she followed up with more Reconstruction history, she could have gone even farther: when President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 civil rights bill on the explicit grounds that it was not race neutral (among other things), Congress repassed it over his veto and based the Fourteenth Amendment on it.

Jackson’s approach was about more than this case, important though it is. She brought to the court what has been called “progressive originalism” or, perhaps more accurately, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern’s term “egalitarian constitutionalism.” The Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—give to the federal government the power to protect individual rights in the states, and originalists’ avoidance of them has always stood out. Those amendments launched an entirely new era in our history; scholars call it a “second founding.”

Now, it appears, that second founding has an advocate on the Supreme Court.

[milliefink]

October 5, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today the OPEC+ oil cartel announced it will cut output by 2 million barrels a day, beginning in November. Since the world currently consumes about 100 million barrels of oil a day, this will be a cut of about 2%.

OPEC is short for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It includes 13 member states, led by Saudi Arabia, and produces 44% of the world’s oil. Eleven other countries work alongside OPEC and make up OPEC+. Those additional countries include Russia, and together with OPEC, they control more than half of the world’s oil, about 55% of it.

OPEC+ countries cooperate to reduce market competition and raise prices.

The cost of oil has dropped steadily during the course of the summer, falling about 32% until it fell below $80 a barrel for the American oil the U.S. uses as a benchmark. With today’s announcement, the price of a barrel of oil started to move upward again.

The decision of OPEC+ to cut production is not simply about prices. It is about the ongoing struggle over democracy playing out in Ukraine, as the Ukrainians fight off the Russian invaders.

The Russian economy depends upon oil sales, and the U.S. and European Union have sought to cut into that money to hurt Russia’s ability to continue its attack in Ukraine. A day ago, after Russia illegally annexed four regions of Ukraine, the 27 member nations in the European Union joined the G7 (which is made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) to set a price cap on Russian oil, in addition to another round of sanctions. Theoretically, this plan should have enabled countries that need Russian oil for heat this winter to get it, while keeping the prices low enough to starve Putin’s war efforts.

Russia is co-chair of OPEC+ and is desperate for oil money, on which its economy depends. That economy is crumbling under international sanctions, and Russia’s oil production has dropped about a million barrels a day at the same time that the country has been forced to discount its oil to sell it. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is failing, it needs more money, and Russia asked for the OPEC+ cuts to increase prices.

“It’s clear that OPEC+ is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, and OPEC+ delegates said the move was, indeed, a big win for Russia.

Biden took heat earlier this year when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to ask leaders to increase production, in part to ease gas prices here in the U.S., which soared after the economy came roaring back after the worst of the pandemic passed and after Putin invaded Ukraine. At the time, the Saudis increased production slightly, but this announced cut makes Saudi Arabia’s rejection of Biden’s request clear, even though the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, said that OPEC+ was simply trying to stabilize markets in the face of a cooling global economy.

It is not immediately clear just how badly this development will hurt prices as the global economy slows and there is less demand for oil. Still, the announcement of the cuts a month before the U.S. midterms certainly seems like an attempt to influence U.S. politics. It is no secret that Saudi leaders cultivated the Trump family, which returned their overtures, and last year, Saudi leader Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled the advisors of the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund to invest $2 billion of the fund in a new investment company run by Jared Kushner, former president Trump’s son-in-law.

Of today’s news, the Biden White House said: “The president is disappointed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. At a time when maintaining a global supply of energy is of paramount importance, this decision will have the most negative impact on lower- and middle-income countries that are already reeling from elevated energy prices.”

Apparently recognizing that higher oil prices could well translate into higher gas prices and hamstring the Democrats right before the midterms, the White House statement touted how the president and allies around the world have helped to bring gas prices down by $1.20 to an average of $3.29 a gallon. It said that the administration would continue to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a release that has significantly lowered oil prices and is part of why OPEC+ is upset. The administration will also continue to increase domestic production and has asked U.S. energy companies, which have been making record profits, to close “the historically large gap between wholesale and retail gas prices—so that American consumers are paying less at the pump.”

The administration also said that “in light of today’s action,” it would “consult with Congress on additional tools and authorities to reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices.”

“Finally,” it said, “today’s announcement is a reminder of why it is so critical that the United States reduce its reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels.” It reminded Americans that the Inflation Reduction Act was the nation’s most significant investment ever in transitioning to clean energy and increasing energy security by fulfilling our energy needs at home.

(Folks: Perhaps fittingly, our power is out. I won’t be able to make corrections tonight, so apologies in advance if I’ve messed something up. And don’t worry– we are perfectly safe– this just happens here sometimes.)

[milliefink]

October 6, 2022 (Thursday)

The scandal involving Herschel Walker, the staunchly anti-abortion Georgia candidate for the Senate who appears to have paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, got worse today. After he claimed he did not know the woman who said he paid for an abortion, the woman said she was the mother of one of his other, newly acknowledged, children, so of course he knows her.

Just five years ago, Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA), who belonged to the Republican Pro-Life Caucus, resigned just hours after the story broke that he pressured a woman with whom he was having an affair to get an abortion. Now, Republicans are rallying around Walker, with former NRA spokesperson and former Breitbart writer Dana Loesch saying: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Will Bunch pointed out that Republican leaders have not condemned Walker for his hypocrisy on abortion, his lies about it and about the many other things he has lied about during the campaign, or the many allegations of domestic violence women have made about him. Instead, his campaign says it has raised half a million dollars since the news broke, while Walker recorded an ad claiming he has been “saved by grace.”

Bunch noted what many observers have already called out: that the Republicans no longer care about anything but winning. But he went on: they insist on winning so they can put their vision of Christian domination into effect. “[T]he so-called ‘family values’ of American fundamentalists…turn out to be mere window dressing that can be tossed for the movement’s true aim: authoritarianism,” he wrote.

Bunch linked to a piece that scholar of fascism Brynn Tannehill published in today’s New Republic, noting that religion in the U.S. is declining among younger folks and that older evangelicals are increasingly concerned they are losing power, at the same time that their Christianity has become a political identity. Tannehill wrote: “The real danger of this widening schism…lies in this creating the conditions for a future that looks more like present-day Russia or Iran.”

The Republican Party’s shift toward authoritarianism is clear in the refusal of a majority of the party’s nominees for office this fall to agree that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Amy Gardner of the Washington Post ran the numbers and found that 299 Republican candidates for the House, Senate, and important state offices are election deniers, and that 174 of them are running in districts that are safely Republican. If Republicans win the House in November, election deniers will form a strong voting bloc that will affect the choice of the next speaker; some are already complaining that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is too moderate. Many of those elected in states will oversee state elections.

The Republican narrative that Democrats can win only by cheating began back in 1994, after the Democrats made registering to vote easier with the 1993 so-called Motor Voter Act. In 1994, losing Republican candidates complained their opponents had cheated, and congressional Republicans kept that narrative alive with congressional investigations. Over time, “voter fraud” became the way Republicans explained away the unpopularity of their ideas.

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

In Arizona, where the Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, has said that Biden is an illegitimate president and the Republican nominee for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, has said that he would not have certified the true 2020 election results in Arizona, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) last night at an event at Arizona State University urged Arizona voters to elect Democrats.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

The trial of five Oath Keepers in Washington, D.C., for seditious conspiracy has provided more insight into how far members of the gang were willing to go to keep Trump in office. Today, former Oath Keeper John Zimmerman, who left the gang before January 6, 2021, testified that he heard Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes talking in September 2020 with someone Zimmerman believed was a member of the Secret Service.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Bertino, a leader of the extremist right-wing Proud Boys gang that worked alongside the Oath Keepers on January 6, 2021, today told a federal judge he will plead guilty to seditious conspiracy. Bertino, who was not in Washington on January 6, was a top lieutenant to Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and is now cooperating with the Justice Department. Like others involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Bertino appeared to believe they were “SAVING THE CONSTITUTION,” as he posted to the rioters. He later wrote: “1776 motherfckrs.”

Lawyers for Trump have told New York Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, and Katie Benner that the Justice Department does not think Trump has returned all the documents he stole from the White House. That information came from Jay I. Bratt, who leads the Justice Department’s counterintelligence operations, and it has split Trump’s lawyers between those who want him to cooperate and those backing Trump’s instinct to fight.

We still don’t know just what is in those documents, and who else has seen them. This is an unfortunate wild card as Biden is trying to rebuild alliances to defend democracy. In the trial of Thomas J. Barrack Jr., an investor and Trump backer being prosecuted for secretly working for the United Arab Emirates during Trump’s term, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson today said he did not know about the contacts between Barrack, Jared Kushner, and representatives for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that are coming to light in trial testimony.

In contrast to those backing Trump, Biden today worked toward equal justice before the law when he pardoned all U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been convicted of possession of marijuana. Many state governments have already made possession legal—a position that Americans overwhelmingly support—and since arrests for possession fall far more heavily on minorities than on white offenders although their rates of marijuana use are similar, advocates for fairness in the criminal justice code have called for this reform. While the pardon will free few if any incarcerated people, it will get rid of criminal records that make it harder to get jobs, housing, and educational opportunities.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has advocated for a comprehensive marijuana reform bill for years, tweeted: “This is a step forward in correcting the historical injustices of failed drug policies.”

Biden called for governors to pardon possession offenses at the state level and asked officials to look into moving marijuana to a less dangerous category of drug, but he made it clear he wanted to keep “important limitations on trafficking, marketing, and under-age sales.”

[milliefink]

October 7, 2022 (Friday)

The day began with news that during Trump’s first impeachment trial, all the Republican senators believed Trump had broken the law when he tried to force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to smear Hunter Biden before he would release the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia. “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” warned Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), according to a forthcoming book by Politico reporter Rachael Bade and Washington Post reporter Karoun Demirjian.

But then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) kept the Republican senators behind Trump by telling them: “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing…. It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

Republicans did not manage to hold the Senate, of course, in part because Trump’s fury at Republican leaders’ refusal to force Georgia to throw out its electoral votes made him depress Republican voting in the special Senate election that ultimately yielded two Democratic senators—Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—and gave Democrats 50 seats. Because Vice President Kamala Harris, the deciding vote in the tied Senate, is a Democrat, control of the Senate shifted to the Democrats.

Democratic control of the House, Senate, and presidency ushered in an economic strategy discredited by Republicans since 1981. Rather than cutting taxes and regulations to move money upward to the “supply side” of the economy in the hope that wealthy investors would expand industries and hire more workers, the Democrats focused on getting money into the hands of ordinary Americans. This investment in the “demand side” was the heart of government economic policy between 1933 and 1981 and brought about what economists know as the “great compression,” in which the wealth gap that had characterized the country in the 1920s shrank considerably. After President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and shifted the country toward supply side economics, that compression reversed to become the “great divergence.”

Their approach to the economy made Democrats invest in economic recovery from the worst of the pandemic with the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill passed in March 2021 with no Republican votes. That bill ushered in a dramatic economic recovery—the most rapid of any of the G7 wealthy nations—with the U.S. adding ten million jobs since Biden’s inauguration. No other president in our history has seen this level of job growth in his first two years in office.

Today a new jobs report revealed that the U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 3.5%. That was more jobs and a lower unemployment rate than economists expected. That job growth has affected all Americans. The Hispanic jobless rate has fallen from 8.6% in Trump’s last month to 3.8% now; the Black jobless rate went from 9.2% to 5.8%. Notable in the numbers, though, was that K–12 education lost more than 21,000 workers in September, putting the number of teachers and support staff 309,000 people lower than it was before the pandemic.

That extraordinary job growth, along with money saved during the pandemic, helped to drive inflation, as people were able to pay higher prices for goods and services jacked up by supply chain tangles, transportation shortages, and price gouging. But so far, it does not seem that we are locked into an inflationary spiral as we were in the 1970s.

Seemingly paradoxically, today’s good news about jobs drove the stock market downward. Investors are guessing that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates to slow down the economy. If it costs more to borrow, businesses will likely cut back hiring and wages. Less money in people’s hands should slow the inflation that’s still high.

The Democrats have also hammered out legislation to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. Last November, they passed the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges and to extend broadband to rural areas. More than 60% of Americans wanted infrastructure investment, and for that bill, which is often called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Democrats picked up “aye” votes from 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican representatives.

But former president Trump attacked those Republicans who voted for the measure, insisting that Republicans’ main goal was to keep Biden from accomplishing anything. “Very sad that the RINOs in the House and Senate gave Biden and Democrats a victory on the ‘Non-Infrastructure’ Bill,” Trump said. “All Republicans who voted for Democrat longevity should be ashamed of themselves, in particular Mitch McConnell, for granting a two month stay which allowed the Democrats time to work things out at our Country’s, and the Republican Party’s, expense!”

Trump loyalists threatened to strip committee assignments from Republicans who supported the bill. They complained about what Minnesota representative Tom Emmer called “President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar socialist wish list.” Arizona representative Paul Gosar said: “this bill only serves to advance the America Last’s socialist agenda, while completely lacking fiscal responsibility.” Kentucky representative Andy Barr said the measure was a “big government socialist agenda.” Iowa representative Ashley Hinson said the law was a “socialist spending spree.” Representative Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said: “I will not support funding for policies that drive our country into socialism.”

In the CNN piece today that collected all those quotations, authors Edward-Isaac Dovere and Sarah Fortinsky went on to point out that, despite their insistence that government investment in infrastructure is socialism (it is not, by the way), all these representatives and more have been quietly applying to take that money to their districts, often in the same language Democrats used to justify the bill in the first place. Improving highways would “serve as a social justice measure,” Emmer wrote. “The completion of this project means improved economic opportunities for ethnically underserved communities.” Adding bicycle lanes to a rural area, Mullin wrote, “would greatly improve sustainability by reducing emissions and redeveloping an existing infrastructure plan.”

The president has directed his administration not to let politics or votes for the bill influence how project grants are awarded. But for all their talk of socialism and wasteful spending, Republicans clearly understand that the American people want investment in the country and that such investment improves their quality of life. They just don’t want to vote for it after years of rallying voters with a narrative that any Democratic investments in the country are far-left radicalism.

Today Biden named the Republicans who voted against the infrastructure law and then asked for money. Biden said, “I was surprised to see so many socialists in the Republican caucus.”

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

That extraordinary job growth, along with money saved during the pandemic, helped to drive inflation, as people were able to pay higher prices for goods and services jacked up by supply chain tangles, transportation shortages, and price gouging. But so far, it does not seem that we are locked into an inflationary spiral as we were in the 1970s.

This isn’t the way most serious economists are wording it. The primary driver of inflation in 2022 has been profit-taking by corporations. There remains some hangover in supply chains; that is also a factor. Job growth and wage growth are the smallest factors, and merely keep most people from financial ruin in the face of dramatically increased prices - for now.

Robert Reich has been beating this drum since July.

@milliefink

Less money in people’s hands should slow the inflation that’s still high.

He’s also been very critical of the Fed and their relentless increase in interest rates. Because wages aren’t the problem; greed is. Raising interest rates (and taking money out of the economy) won’t lower prices - it will raise them! It’s simple business; if my unit sales go down, I make up for it by raising the price. At least, if I have a compelling (or necessary) product in a limited field, that’s what I do. So instead it will mean more suffering by workers, increased unemployment, increased foreclosures and evictions, and more homelessness.