I think she’s referring to the 14 characteristics of fascism:
As you say, it’s not clear which don’t apply. Maybe #10?
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Like most Republicans, he obviously didn’t think that one through to its logical conclusion: Franco is despised (history) and I think most religious experts would agree that he’s roasting in hell.
It’s difficult to think of a more anti-union group than contemporary Republicans. Unless it’s police unions, which more closely resemble violent gangs than labor unions.
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True, true. I was thinking more of what was directly mentioned in John Daniel Davidson’s statement.
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October 21, 2022 (Friday)
This morning, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Democratic president Joe Biden contrasted his record in office against that of his Republican predecessor, and the visions of the Democrats and Republicans going forward.
Biden began with his usual line: that he set out to rebuild the middle class by building “an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” He noted that since he took office, the nation has added 10 million jobs and has seen unemployment drop to 3.5%, a 50-year low. In 11 states, unemployment is at all-time lows, and 17 states have unemployment rates under 3%.
He also highlighted that the country has added almost 700,000 manufacturing jobs and that companies are continuing to invest in new industries, at the same time that we are rebuilding our roads, airports, bridges, and ports.
But his main point today was to demonstrate how the Democrats’ program does not, in fact, blow up the nation’s finances the way Republicans have insisted for forty years. Biden focused on the deficit, which is the gap between what the government takes in through taxes and other revenue sources and what it pays out. Republicans insist that social welfare spending racks up government debt; Biden emphasized today that the Democrats’ investment in the nation has not increased the federal deficit. Indeed, the opposite is true: today the administration announced that the deficit this year fell by $1.4 trillion. This was the largest-ever decline in the federal deficit. Last year’s drop was $350 billion.
The deficit climbed every year of the Trump presidency, including in the years before the pandemic. Trump and the Republicans added $400 billion to the deficit, primarily because of their $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and for corporations.
Biden was not simply talking about today’s numbers; he was making a case that government investment in ordinary Americans is better for the nation’s finances than handing more money to the wealthy, which Republicans claim will goose the economy to produce higher tax revenues and thus balance the budget. Biden was pointing out that unlike the Republicans’ supply-side economics, the Democrats’ version of the economy actually works.
The numbers prove his point. According to Politifact, Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have exploded deficits, while Democrats have brought deficits down. Reagan sent the deficit from $70 billion to $175 billion. George H.W. Bush took it to $300 billion. Bill Clinton—with help from Bush’s willingness to raise taxes—got the deficit to zero. George W. Bush took it back up to $1.2 trillion with unfunded wars. Barack Obama cut that back to $600 billion. And Trump’s tax cuts sent it skyrocketing again, even before pandemic spending sent it higher still.
Biden’s reduction of the deficit is due in part to the end of some of those pandemic programs, in part to the booming economy which is producing high tax revenues, and in part to higher taxes on the wealthy. He highlighted it today because, as he pointed out, the Republicans are promising further tax cuts that will send the deficit soaring upward again. The pattern is for them to cut taxes for the wealthy and then, when the deficit increases, complain that there is no money for social welfare programs and that Democrats advocating them are in favor of wasteful spending.
Biden emphasized that Republicans have told us what they will do if put back into power. They will pass massive tax cuts for the wealthy, after which they plan to repeal the administration’s actions—like the ability of Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act—that are bringing down the deficit. After their plan explodes the deficit again, they have said they would cut Medicare and Social Security.
“The election is not a referendum,” Biden said, “it’s a choice.”
But it’s a choice people might not see because of the headline-grabbing drama coming from the MAGA Republicans.
This morning, Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced Trump ally Stephen Bannon to four months in prison and a fine of $6,500 for contempt of Congress after Bannon ignored a subpoena from the the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Nichols’s sentence was at the upper end of the sentencing guidelines for his offense. Nichols permitted Bannon to stay out of prison while he appeals his sentence.
And yet, Bannon’s sentencing was not the day’s big news. The January 6th committee today subpoenaed former president Trump to produce documents and to testify before it under oath. “[W]e have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multi-part effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transition of power.”
The committee wants testimony, under oath, “regarding your dealings with multiple individuals who have now themselves invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination regarding their communications with you.” The professional staff of the January 6th committee, “including multiple former federal prosecutors,” as well as congressional members, will conduct the deposition. “If, like other witnesses identified above,” the committee wrote, “you intend to invoke your Fifth Amendment rights…, please so inform the Select Committee promptly.”
The committee also ordered Trump to produce documents, including—among other things—any records sent through the encrypted channel Signal, including not only messages he placed or received, but also those placed “at your direction.” It also asked specifically for all documents that referred “in any way” to the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, or any other similar gang. It also called out specifically communications with a number of those already associated with the attempt to overturn the election—Roger Stone, Stephen Bannon, Michael Flynn, Jeffrey Clark, and so on—as well as Trump’s former deputy chief of staff Anthony Ornato, who was also a Secret Service agent, and “any employee of the Secret Service with whom you interacted on January 6, 2021.”
The committee noted that their subpoena of a former president was “a significant and historic action” that they did not take lightly. But they pointed out that former presidents John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford had all testified before Congress after they left office, with Roosevelt saying: “an ex-President is merely a citizen of the United States, like any other citizen, and it is his plain duty to try to help this committee or respond to its invitation.”
The committee wants the documents by November 4. It plans to start Trump’s testimony on or about November 14.
But Trump’s no good, very bad day was not over. Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post broke the story that, according to sources “familiar with the matter,” the federal documents Trump took when he left the White House, recovered during the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, contained highly sensitive material about Iran and China, including information about Iran’s missile program. The exposure of the Iran and China information would reveal U.S. intelligence methods, inviting retaliation and weakening our national security.
After the story broke, Trump took to his social media network to suggest that the National Archives and Records Administration and the FBI “plant into documents, or subtract from documents,” suggesting that there is still much to learn about what those documents are, and where they might have gone.
Today, after the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that he must testify before the Fulton County grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Graham argues that his phone calls about the election were protected by the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, under which legislative speech is protected, because as the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he needed to review “election-related issues.”
The lower courts disagreed, saying that the Constitution does not protect “communications and coordination with the Trump campaign regarding its post-election efforts in Georgia, public statements regarding the 2020 election, and efforts to ‘cajole’ or ‘exhort’ Georgia election officials.”
Finally, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin today called his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu for the first time since May 13. The Pentagon says it wants to keep the lines of communication open.
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The dress code.
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I think that, as a historian, things like that are simply reflex for her. “Define your terms” is so ingrained, she includes it as a matter of course. Like I, as lawyer, have issues definitively stating something without any qualifiers. Or it’s intentional- meant for a young reader going through these papers a decade or more from now. I certainly hope she collects and publishes them all. They could be a very powerful tool for teachers and professors to include in certain history modules.
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October 22, 2022 (Saturday)
For all there is to say about policies and lawmakers and jockeying among nations, at the end of the day, the story is always, always, always about people.
This image is from autumn in Ukraine, on the outskirts of Kyiv, taken by a friend before the Russian invasion.
I’m going to try to catch up on some sleep-- the pace of the news lately has been grueling. I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Nadia Povalinska.]
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October 23, 2022 (Sunday)
Over the weekend, the Maricopa County Elections Department announced that two people, both armed and dressed in tactical gear, stationed themselves near a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. They left when law enforcement officers arrived. At least two voters later filed complaints of voter intimidation, both complaining that they were filmed dropping off ballots. One complained of being accused of “being a mule,” a reference to people who are allegedly paid to gather ballots and stuff drop boxes for Democratic candidates.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer issued a statement: "We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box… [V]igilantes outside Maricopa County’s drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead they are leading to voter intimidation complaints.”
The presence of armed vigilantes outside of voting places is a scene directly out of the 1876 “redemption” of the South.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party used the federal government to defend equality before the law and to expand opportunity for ordinary Americans. After the war, they included the newly emancipated southern Black population in their vision of an economy based on legal equality and free labor. When white southerners tried to force their Black neighbors back into submission, Congress passed the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act, establishing the right of Black men to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions.
White southerners who hated the idea that Black men could use the vote to protect themselves terrorized their Black neighbors to keep them from voting. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers and calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to stop southern Republicans—both Black and white—from voting in favor of the new state constitutions. They killed nearly a thousand Unionists before the 1868 elections, terrorizing their neighbors and undercutting democracy in the South.
Even more effective than Ku Klux Klan ropes and clubs and bullets in the long run, though, were the new tactics to which white Democrats turned when they realized that the violence of the Ku Klux Klan simply hardened Republican resolve. They insisted that government policies promoting black equality were simply a redistribution of wealth as poor men—especially poor Black men—voted for lawmakers who would agree to fund roads and schools and hospitals with tax money. In the postwar South, the people most likely to own taxable property were white men.
Black voting, they insisted, was “Socialism in South Carolina.”
In 1876, “Redeemers” set out to put an end to the southern governments that were elected in systems that allowed Black men to vote. “Rifle clubs” held contests outside Republican political rallies, “Red Shirts” marched with their guns in parades.
Their intimidation worked. Democrats took over the South and created a one-party system that lasted virtually unbroken until 1965. Without the oversight that a healthy multiparty system provides, southern governments became the corrupt tools of a few wealthy men, and the rest of the population fell into a poverty from which it could not escape until the federal government began to invest in the region in the 1930s.
The great triumph of Movement Conservatives in the 1980s was to convince Republican voters to ditch the ideology of their founding and instead embrace the ideology of the old Confederacy.
After World War II, the vast majority of Americans in both parties agreed that the government should protect equality before the law and promote equal access to resources. That system gave us highways, business regulation, world-class universities, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, clean air and water, labor protections, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor.
But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision opened the way for those opposed to the so-called liberal consensus to claim that white tax dollars were paying for Black benefits. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the subsequent shift of Black voters to the Democratic Party, Republicans increasingly accused Black voters of looking for handouts. By 1980, Ronald Reagan made it to the White House with stories of a Black “welfare queen,” promising to put money back in the pockets of taxpayers. After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration (Motor Voter) Act, Republicans began to insist that Democrats won only by cheating. They began to rewrite election laws to make it harder for Democratic-leaning populations to vote.
And now, we are in the next stage of that pattern: Republicans are using intimidation to keep Democrats from voting. In addition to the direct intimidation in Arizona, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security in August arrested 19 people who had been assured by state officials that they could vote; Georgia Republicans are launching mass challenges to Democratic voters, overwhelming election offices; and in several states, pro-Trump activists have hounded election officials out of office.
If we continue in this direction, we already know how it turns out: with a corrupt one-party government that favors an elite few and mires the rest of us in a world without recourse to legal equality or economic security.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. At our most successful moments, Americans have backed not the vision of the Confederates but that of Lincoln, working to create a government of laws, not of men, and of equal access to opportunity for all.
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October 24, 2022 (Monday)
Over the weekend, Xi Jinping of China secured a third term as the general secretary of the Communist Party, strengthening his grip on China and shifting the country away from the shared power system it had moved toward over the past decades. Other strongmen, including North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and Russian president Vladimir Putin, were among the first to congratulate him.
Today, the U.S. government appeared to fire a shot across Xi’s bow when the Department of Justice made a big public announcement of charges against 13 Chinese operatives in three different criminal cases. The charges included the alleged obstruction of a criminal prosecution in the U.S. against a Chinese telecommunications company (understood to be Huawei).
In what seemed a reminder of the power of U.S. intelligence, U.S. officials made it a point to emphasize first of all that Chinese operatives believed they had bribed a U.S. official to do their bidding, while in fact, the U.S. officer was a double agent working for the FBI. This appeared to be a statement to the Chinese government about the capabilities of U.S. intelligence, but it also reinforced the idea of the strength of our intelligence capabilities in the face of recent stories that the former president took secrets about Iran and China with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.
The officials at the announced press conference reiterated a theme. “Today’s complaint underscores the unrelenting efforts of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government to undermine the rule of law,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace. “We will always act decisively to counteract criminal acts that target our system of justice.” Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew G. Olsen added: “The Department of Justice will not abide nation-state actors meddling in U.S. criminal process and investigations, and will not tolerate foreign interference with the fair administration of justice.”
FBI director Christopher Wray said: “The mission of the FBI is to protect both the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States—and this case represents a threat to both…. [I]ntelligence officers from the People’s Republic of China threatened not just the proceedings of our criminal justice system but the very idea of justice itself. A threat to justice is a threat to the foundation of our free society, and the FBI remains constantly vigilant and committed to protecting the U.S. from these threats.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland added: "[T]he government of China sought to interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights. They did not succeed.”
In other news about foreign affairs, the U.S., France, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement yesterday saying that they “reiterate our steadfast support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression. We remain committed to continue supporting Ukraine’s efforts to defend its territory for as long as it takes.”
Earlier that day, the defense ministers of each of those countries spoke to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu “at his request.” They rejected Russia’s recent “transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory,” saying the world sees that assertion as a “pretext for escalation,” and they reject it as such. The countries continue to share a “determination to continue supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainian people with security, economic, and humanitarian assistance in the face of President Putin’s brutal war of aggression.”
That statement was the backdrop for a letter from 30 of the progressive members of the Democratic Party to President Joe Biden today, apparently urging him to “pursue every diplomatic avenue” with Russia to find a solution to the war “that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.” They wrote “as legislators responsible for the expenditure of tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in military assistance in the conflict.”
Some observers have seen in this document pressure on Biden to change his approach to supporting Ukraine, but the letter reads as if it champions his approach. It cheers on Biden’s “commitment to Ukraine’s legitimate struggle against Russia’s war of aggression” and applauds his avoidance of direct military conflict with Russia, which would “lead to ‘World War III, something we must strive to prevent.’” It notes the difficulty of engaging with Russia “given its outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine and its decision to make additional illegal annexations of Ukrainian territory,” and agrees that it is not America’s place to make decisions about Ukraine without the leadership of the Ukrainians.
But it urged Biden—a man steeped in foreign affairs, who has made diplomacy central to his foreign policy—to “make vigorous diplomatic efforts” to find a “rapid end to the conflict.” In short, the letter seemed to be a way before the midterms to assure progressive voters on the one hand and conservative voters on the other, both concerned about the financial cost of supporting Ukraine, that Democrats are mindful of the costs of the Ukraine defense and are trying to find solutions. But the letter was widely interpreted as a call for concessions to Putin, and by this evening, some of the congress members who had signed it felt obliged to reaffirm their support for the administration’s Ukraine policy.
Democratic leaders have made their position on Ukraine and democracy clear. Tonight, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made a statement before attending the First Parliamentary Summit of the International Crimea Platform, which Ukraine established in 2021 to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and to which she was invited by Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and by Ruslan Stefanchuk, speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, known as the Rada. Representatives of more than 50 nations are at the meeting in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, to support Ukraine.
Pelosi said she was proud to meet with Stefanchuk “to convey the Congress’ bipartisan and bicameral commitment to the fight being waged by the heroic people of Ukraine…. As Putin escalates his appalling atrocities against civilians, we reaffirm this truth: Crimea is Ukraine, Russia’s unlawful occupation of all Ukrainian territory must end, and Russia must be held accountable for its crimes.”
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October 25, 2022 (Tuesday)
There are quotes, and then there are quotes.
Tonight, in the debate between Democratic candidate John Fetterman and Republican candidate Mehmet Oz as part of their campaigns to replace Republican Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey, who is retiring, Oz said he wanted abortion decisions to be made by “women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so that states can decide for themselves.”
His answer seems likely to have been carefully crafted to lead with women and doctors—a signal to pro-choice constituencies—before pivoting to the state’s rights argument at the heart of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. He might have hoped that both sides would hear what they wanted to in his answer.
But hoo, boy, was that sentence a mistake. The idea that “local political leaders” should be participating in decisions about a woman’s most fundamental health care is not going to play well with…well, virtually anyone.
Pennsylvania is a crucial state for Republican hopes to take control of the Senate. Groups linked to the Republican Senate Leadership Fund political action committee just slashed their New Hampshire advertising to pour another $6 million into the Pennsylvania Senate race to help Oz, but that quotation is going to hurt their efforts.
There is very little else of great consequence that must be dealt with tonight, but here are two general observations:
First of all, Kurt Bardella hit the nail on the head today when he wrote in the Los Angeles Times that no one really has any idea what is going to happen on Election Day, “especially the pollsters who routinely get things wrong.” Those telling us the outcome is clear are doing us a disservice. Bardella reminded readers of the 2020 headline from Vanderbilt University: “Preelection polls in 2020 had the largest errors in 40 years.”
Second, there has been much public discussion today of the idea that Democrats are in disarray after yesterday’s letter from the Progressive Democratic Caucus asking President Joe Biden to consider negotiations with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
This seems to me an odd interpretation of this political moment. The Democrats have just finished an 18-month stint in which, with squeaky thin majorities, they have managed to hammer together coalitions that have passed an astonishing number of major pieces of legislation. The letter was too clever by half, it seemed to me, in what looked like an attempt to reach out to those constituencies concerned about the financial costs of supporting Ukraine. It fueled the narrative of those Republicans eager to defund Ukraine, and walking it back today looked weak, even though their statements enabled the signatories to reiterate their support for the party and for democracy.
Meanwhile, few pundits are talking about the extraordinary disarray among the Republicans, who could not even agree on a program to put before the voters this year, and who have swung back and forth on the major questions of abortion and whether they believe the 2020 election was legitimate.
The splits between establishment Republicans and MAGA Republicans are so deep that the Alaska Republican Party voted yesterday to censure Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell’s super PAC has spent more than $5 million on ads attacking the Trump-backed Republican in Alaska’s Senate race. The attacks are designed to help Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski, who won Trump’s hatred by voting to convict him of inciting the January 6 insurrection.
The Trump-backed candidate said that “the Alaska Republican party has just told [McConnell]”—who is a leader of the national party, after all—“to butt out of our state.”
This strikes me as a disarray deeper than that shown by a misguided and quickly recalled letter, especially since this latest split in the Republican Party comes on top of the loss of supporters ever since the party turned to Trump as a leader. And before that, of course, beginning in the 1990s, the party purged anyone the right wing thought was insufficiently committed to tax cuts, calling them “RINOs” for “Republicans In Name Only.”
Indeed, if the Republicans today look like they’re in lockstep, that seems less like legislative discipline than like the takeover of a broad-tent party by radicals and incendiaries whose interest in actually governing appears to be limited: when he was elected to the Senate in 2020, Republican Tommy Tuberville of Alabama revealed that he did not know the three branches of the U.S. government.
Since the ideology of the modern party was, until recently, to gut the federal government, there was no need to argue about how to do anything: Republican lawmakers simply had to stop Democrats from legislating. In the same interview in which he mischaracterized the structure of the government, Senator-elect Tuberville told Todd Stacy of the Alabama Daily News that, once in office, he would focus on learning “[t]he filibuster rules and stuff like that of how you can really slow the progress of something that you don’t like.”
But just saying no is not, ultimately, a governing strategy for the twenty-first century. The Republican Party’s diminished base has now shifted toward backing a strong government that will impose its will on the rest of us, while for all their disagreements—or perhaps because of them—Democrats have demonstrated that lawmakers across a wide spectrum of political beliefs really can work together to pass popular legislation.
Which vision will prevail in the U.S. will play out over the next two years.
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October 26, 2022 (Wednesday)
The administration has been continuing its push to demonstrate that it is working for ordinary Americans. Last month, President Joe Biden asked all agencies to find ways to cut “junk fees,” the hidden fees, charges, and add-ons that hit consumers on everything from airline and concert tickets, to hotels, to banking services and cable bills. These include the “service fees” on concert tickets, “family seating fees” on airlines, “termination fees,” and so on, and they account for tens of billions of dollars a year of revenue for corporations.
Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) warned banks that surprise overdraft fees and depositor fees for customers who deposit a check that bounces are “likely unfair and unlawful under existing law.” The CFPB is also looking into credit card fees. The Federal Trade Commission has started a rule-making process that addresses surprise fees for event ticketing, hotels, funeral homes, and so on; earlier this year, it brought actions against junk fees in the auto industry that are awaiting finalization.
The White House noted that while there is nothing wrong with a company charging reasonable add-on fees for additional products or services, junk fees designed to confuse consumers or lock in advantageous pricing in favor of the seller hurt businesses by making it hard for consumers to compare real prices or by locking them into contracts so they can’t move to a different provider.
Today, Biden reminded reporters that the price of gasoline is still falling and noted that getting rid of junk fees will save American consumers more than $1 billion a year.
In related news, a panel of three judges, all appointed by Trump, recently declared unconstitutional the system that funds the CFPB.
Also in related news: whitehouse.gov, which is where you go to read White House press releases, has a Halloween bat flying around the White House on the medallion at the top of the page (which was a nice surprise when I finally noticed it as I was reading about the not-necessarily-wildly-exciting world of junk fees).
President Biden and Israeli president Isaac Herzog met today, six days before the Israeli election and a day before Israeli and Lebanese officials are scheduled to sign a historic maritime boundary agreement, brokered by Special Presidential Coordinator for the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment Amos Hochstein. This was Herzog’s first private meeting with Biden, and both presidents reiterated their mutual support.
Herzog is widely perceived to be a moderate, while the return to power of right-wing former leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who openly railed against Democrats during his tenure, would be expected to cause friction with U.S. Democrats. On Tuesday, House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) invited Herzog to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress next year to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the modern Israeli state. Pelosi and Schumer said the invitation came as well from House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), should they be in control of their respective houses at that time.
Herzog told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he was “extremely pleased” that Americans had rejected the antisemitism of rapper and clothing designer Ye (formerly known as Kanye West). Multiple outlets reported that today Ye showed up uninvited and unannounced at Skechers Los Angeles headquarters to find a new home for his signature sneakers after being dropped by Adidas, but was escorted from the building.
Today, attorneys for former President Trump accepted service of the subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The subpoena requires Trump to provide documents by November 4 and to testify by November 14.
Meanwhile, Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward has asked the Supreme Court to block a subpoena from the January 6 committee for her phone records during the time she served as a fake elector to override the Arizona voters and over the period of January 6, 2021. Justice Elena Kagan has temporarily blocked enforcement of the subpoena so the full court can determine how to proceed.
Trump’s next legal move is unclear, but his political moves seem designed to scuttle the aspirations of his rivals. He announced today that he will be in Miami on November 6, holding a rally with Senator Marco Rubio to boost Rubio’s reelection campaign. Notably absent from the announcement was Florida governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis’s people were angry at DeSantis’s exclusion, not least because Trump’s appearance at a rally in Florida two days before the election will take all the oxygen out of that day for DeSantis.
A Republican consultant told Politico’s Matt Dixon and Gary Fineout: “You’ve got the Sunday before Election Day totally hijacked by Trump parachuting in on Trump Force One taking up the whole day….No Republican could go to a DeSantis event that day. None. And DeSantis won’t be here? This is big.”
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oy vey 
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October 27, 2022 (Thursday)
Data released this morning from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis showed that the nation’s gross domestic product—that is, the total value of goods and services produced in the U.S.—was up in the third quarter of 2022, increasing at an annual rate of 2.6%. This increase reflected increases in “exports, consumer spending, nonresidential fixed investment, federal government spending, and state and local government spending,” as well as decreases in imports. That growth was partly offset by lower housing sales.
Disposable personal income and personal savings were also up.
The previous two quarters had shown the economy contracting, and since Republicans have made the notion that the country is in a recession a centerpiece of their campaign messaging, President Joe Biden was quick to celebrate the news, saying in a statement that “today we got further evidence that our economic recovery is continuing to power forward.” He noted that the country has added 10 million jobs since he took office and that employment remains at a 50-year high.
New York Times economic and business reporter Ben Casselman complicated the story a bit. He noted that the data from the past three quarters—two down, one up—shows that the economy is slowing, and he suggested that this quarter’s big swing upward is due to changes in trade and inventories. But, he pointed out, slowing the economy a bit is exactly what the Federal Reserve is trying to do: slow demand to bring down inflation.
The primary tool the Fed uses to do that is interest rates, but those adjustments are very blunt instruments, and those people interested in continuing growth are always worried the Fed will raise interest rates too much, too fast, throwing the economy into reverse. Trying to figure out exactly how to adjust the economy so inflation slows but employment doesn’t, seems to me to be rather like trying to catch an egg on a plate, as the saying goes.
Biden observed today that inflation remains a problem—“we need to make more progress on our top economic challenge: bringing down high prices for American families”—but noted that gas prices continue to fall (the average price of a gallon of gas today was $3.76 a gallon). He also pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act’s reduction of drug prices and health care premiums, which will go into effect next year. In addition, the administration yesterday announced plans to stop so-called junk fees on consumers, as well.
Yesterday, Jim Tankersley and Emily Cochrane of the New York Times noted that Republicans are emphasizing inflation as a reason to vote Democrats out of office. Republicans say they will reduce government spending and pass more tax cuts, including a repeal of the tax increases on corporations that the Democrats passed this summer. They promise to cut funding for the IRS, which Congress funded to enable it to go after corporations and the very wealthy who cheat on their taxes.
But, Tankersley and Cochrane point out, “few economists on either end of the ideological spectrum expect the party’s proposals to meaningfully reduce inflation in the short term.” Indeed, economists say tax cuts could make inflation worse by freeing up more money.
What would take money out of the economy, though, is Republicans’ promise to get rid of the IRA’s new health care tax credits and caps on drug prices. They also promise to stop Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which would put loan burdens back on about 40 million Americans, thus cutting down their disposable income.
Meanwhile, London-based oil company Shell today reported its third-quarter adjusted earnings. They were the second highest on record for Shell: $9.45 billion. (Shell’s top earnings period was the second quarter of this year, when it reported $11.5 billion.) Profits for Paris-based TotalEnergies were $9.9 billion. That’s more than double what their profits were in the same period last year. Shell says it will use the windfall to buy back about $4 billion of its shares, making this year’s total buybacks $18.5 billion. It will also increase dividends to shareholders.
According to Stanley Reed of the New York Times, Shell’s chief financial officer told reporters that the company had not paid Britain’s new windfall tax on oil and gas profits because the company’s spending on projects in the North Sea had reduced profits, but that they expected to see the tax kick in next year.
If Biden is focusing on the economy before the midterms, the Republicans seem to be doubling down on their ties to the right-wing movements around the world. In a speech today, Russian president Vladimir Putin appeared to be reaching out to right-wing Americans when he divided “the West,” into two groups: one of “traditional, mainly Christian values” that aligns with Russia, and one of “aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial” values “acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite” and trying to impose its “strange” values on the world.
Antisemitism is also on the rise on the American right in what looks like outreach to those embracing European-style fascism. Former president Trump recently warned American Jews to “get their act together” and show more support for Israel “before it is too late,” while the recent outbursts from artist Ye (also known as Kanye West) have led Adidas to cancel its contract with him and upended his other projects. In Pennsylvania the Republican candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, a right-wing Christian who opposes the separation of church and state, has made attacking the Jewish faith of his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a big part of his campaign.
“Empirically, something is different,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, told Michelle Boorstein and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post. “The level of public animosity towards Jews is higher than it’s been in recent memory.” My own guess is that increasing antisemitism on the part of Republicans is not simply the encouragement of hate such as that exhibited four years ago today when a gunman murdered eleven people and wounded six more at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, but is rather an attempt to signal directly to neo-Nazis before the election that the party wants their support.
The danger posed by the current-day Republican Party’s embrace of authoritarianism is not going unchallenged. Indeed, it is remaking American politics as defenders of democracy band together. Today, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) endorsed Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) for reelection, her first endorsement of a Democrat since the Republican Party turned on her over her insistence on holding Trump to account for the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Both women sit on the House Armed Services Committee. Cheney called Slotkin “a good and honorable public servant who works hard for the people she represents, wants what’s best for the country, and is in this for the right reasons.” Cheney continued: “While Elissa and I have our policy disagreements, at a time when our nation is facing threats at home and abroad, we need serious, responsible, substantive members like Elissa in Congress. I encourage all voters in the 7th district—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents—to support her in this election.” The two will appear together at an “evening for patriotism and bipartisanship” on November 1.
And in Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, and Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat, have just endorsed each other in the upcoming election. The Alaska Federation of Natives has endorsed them both.
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Reminder: I also post these without a paywall at Substack as Letters from an American. If you want them as an email, you can also get that delivered for free by signing up there.
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October 28, 2022 (Friday)
At about 2:30 am, police in San Francisco who had been asked to do a wellness check discovered that an assailant had broken into the San Francisco home of House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and attacked her husband, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, with a hammer, shouting, “Where’s Nancy?” The attacker apparently tried to tie Mr. Pelosi up “until Nancy got home” and told police he was “waiting for Nancy.”
Mr. Pelosi suffered a fractured skull and serious injuries to his right arm and his hands. He underwent surgery today. He is expected to recover.
Speaker Pelosi was in Washington, D.C., at the time. The House speaker is the third-ranking officer of our government, second in line to succeed the president. An attack on her is an attack on our fundamental government structure.
Those who knew the alleged attacker, 42-year-old David DePape, say his behavior has been concerning. His Facebook page featured conspiracy theories common on right-wing media, saying Covid vaccines were deadly; that George Floyd, the Minneapolis man murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, actually died of a drug overdose; that the 2020 election was stolen; and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was a “FARCE.” He reposted a number of videos by Mike Lindell, the Trump loyalist and chief executive officer of the MyPillow company, lying that the 2020 election was stolen.
Matthew Gertz of Media Matters reviewed DePape’s blog and found it “a standard case of right-wing online radicalization. QAnon, Great Reset, Pizzagate, Gamergate and all there, along with M[en’s] R[ights] A[ctivist]/misogyny, hatred of Blacks/Jews/trans people/’groomers,’ and anti-vax conspiracy theories.”
According to Harry Litman, the legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, DePape has been booked so far only on state crimes, including attempted homicide and elder abuse. According to Joyce White Vance at Civil Discourse, evidence that he went after Mr. Pelosi in order to intimidate Speaker Pelosi or stop her from performing her official duties would constitute a federal crime.
The attack on Mr. Pelosi comes after right-wing figures have so often advocated violence against the House speaker that the rioters on January 6 roamed the U.S. Capitol calling for her in the singsong cadences of a horror movie. Before she ran for Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said Pelosi was a “traitor” and told her listeners that treason is “a crime punishable by death,” and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) once “joked” about hitting Speaker Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel if he becomes speaker himself, prompting laughter from his audience.
Whipping up supporters against a perceived enemy to create a statistical probability of an attack without advocating a specific event is known as “stochastic terrorism.” Without using that phrase, Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) explained it today: “[W]hen you convince people that politicians are rigging elections, drink babies blood, etc, you will get violence. This must be rejected.”
Right-wing media channels immediately spun the home invasion and attack into Republican talking points, saying that “crime hits everybody” and that “this can happen anywhere, crime is random and that’s why it’s such a significant part of this election story.” Some tried to pin the attack on President Joe Biden, blaming him for not healing the country’s divisions; Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin said of Pelosi and her husband: “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send her back to be with him in California.” Aaron Rupar of Public Notice called out how few Republicans publicly condemned the attack and how many tried to pin the blame for it on Democrats.
Late yesterday, Twitter’s board completed the $44 billion sale of the company to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has promised to be an advocate for free speech and to reopen the platform to those previously banned for spreading racist content or disinformation—including former president Trump—but his actual purchase of the site might complicate that position.
In the technology magazine The Verge, editor Nilay Patel wrote, “Welcome to hell, Elon.” The problems with Twitter, Patel wrote, “are not engineering problems. They are political problems.” The site itself is valuable only because of its users, he points out, and trying to regulate how people behave is “historically a miserable experience.”
Patel notes that to attract advertising revenue, Musk will have to protect advertisers’ brands, which means banning “racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total a**holes.” And that content moderation, of course, will infuriate the right-wing cheerleaders who “are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.” And that’s even before Twitter has to take on the speech laws of other countries.
Musk clearly understands this tension. Trying to reassure advertisers before the sale, he tweeted: “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Car manufacturer General Motors has temporarily stopped running ads on Twitter until its direction becomes clearer.
Today, racist and antisemitic content rose sharply as users appeared to be testing the limits of the platform under Musk. The Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies disinformation on social media, noted that posters on the anonymous website 4chan have been encouraging users to spread racist and derogatory slurs on Twitter. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism, which focuses on civil rights law, backed this observation up today when it noted that on October 27, an anonymous post on 4chan, which users immediately spread to extremist Telegram channels, told followers how to increase antisemitic content on Twitter.
In the first 12 hours after Musk acquired the site, the use of the n-word increased nearly 500%.
After a few high-profile accounts appeared to have been reinstated, this afternoon, Musk tweeted that he is creating a council to figure out a content moderation policy, and that no major content decisions or reinstatements will happen until it creates a policy. At the very least, this should protect Twitter from becoming associated with new accounts promoting violence before the midterm elections.
And that is a concern. Today, the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, and U.S. Capitol Police warned of violent extremism surrounding the upcoming midterm elections, including attacks on “candidates running for public office, elected officials, election workers, political rallies, political party representatives, racial and religious minorities, or perceived ideological opponents.”
The aim of those attacking our elections is to discredit our democracy.
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Reminder: these letters are available for free on Substack under Letters from an American. You can also get them as emails.
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October 29, 2022 (Saturday)
This week, news broke that as a guest on the right-wing Real America’s Voice media network in 2020, Republican candidate for Michigan governor Tudor Dixon said that the Democrats have planned for decades to topple the United States because they have not gotten over losing the Civil War. According to Dixon, Democrats don’t want anyone to know that white Republicans freed the slaves, and are deliberately strangling “true history.”
Dixon’s was a pure white power rant, but she was amplifying a theme we hear a lot these days: that Democrats were the party of enslavement, Republicans pushed emancipation, and thus the whole idea that Republican policies today are bad for Black Americans is disinformation.
In reality, the parties have switched sides since the 1850s. The shift happened in the 1960s, and it happened over the issue of race. Rather than focusing on party names, it makes more sense to follow two opposed strands of thought, equality and hierarchy, as the constants.
By the 1850s it was indeed primarily Democrats who backed slavery. Elite southern enslavers gradually took over first the Democratic Party, then the southern states, and finally the U.S. government. When it looked in 1854 as if they would take over the entire nation by spreading slavery to the West—thus overwhelming the free states with new slave states—northerners organized to stand against what they called the “Slave Power.”
In the mid-1850s, northerners gradually came together as a new political party. They called themselves “Republicans,” in part to recall Jefferson’s political party, which was also called the Republican party, even though Jefferson by then was claimed by the Democrats.
The meaning of political names changes.
The new Republican Party first stood only for opposing the Slave Power, but by 1859, Lincoln had given it a new ideology: it would stand behind ordinary Americans, rather than the wealthy enslavers, using the government to provide access to resources, rather than simply protecting the wealthy. And that would mean keeping slavery limited to the American South.
Prevented from imposing their will on the U.S. majority, southern Democrats split from their northern Democratic compatriots and tried to start a new nation based on racial slavery. They launched the Civil War.
At first, most Republicans didn’t care much about enslaved Americans, but by 1863 the war had made them come around to the idea that the freedom of Black Americans was crucial to the success of the United States. At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln reinforced the principles of the Declaration of Independence and dedicated the nation to a “new birth of freedom.” In 1865 the Republican Congress passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ending enslavement except as punishment for crime (we really need to fix that, by the way).
After the war, as southern Democrats organized to reinstate white supremacy in their states, Republicans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment, giving the federal government power to guarantee that states could not deny equal rights to American citizens, and then in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing Black men the right to vote. They also established the Department of Justice to defend those rights. But by 1871, white Republicans were backing away from federal protection of Black Americans.
Democrats continued to push white supremacy until 1879, when former Confederates took over Congress and threatened to destroy the government unless the federal government got out of southern affairs altogether (it’s a myth that the army left the South in 1877). Voters turned so vehemently against the former Confederates trying to impose their will on the nation’s majority that national Democrats began to shift away from their southern base, which dominated the southern states. In 1884 they ran New Yorker Grover Cleveland for office and won.
For the next fifty years, both national parties would waffle on race, trying mostly to ignore it.
But World War II changed the equation.
Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun to offer some economic protections to Black Americans with the 1930s New Deal, but Black soldiers coming home from the war demanded true equality. The blinding of Black veteran Isaac Woodard in 1946 by South Carolina law enforcement officers woke Democratic president Harry S. Truman up to the need for equal protection of the laws.
Unable to get civil rights laws through Congress, Truman worked to desegregate federal contracting and military installations. Immediately, racist southern Democrats, led by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, broke away from their own president to form their own short-lived “Dixiecrat” party backing racial segregation.
Then, in 1954, Republican Dwight Eisenhower put Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, at the head of the Supreme Court. It promptly used the Fourteenth Amendment to declare the segregation of public schools unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. It seemed both parties had come around to supporting racial equality.
But white supremacists in the South responded to desegregation by attacking their Black neighbors. So in 1957, with a bipartisan vote, Congress passed a civil rights act to protect Black voting. Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history to try to stop it.
Republicans who hated the government’s postwar regulation of business saw an opening to get the Dixiecrat contingent on their side. In 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative, published under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, called for getting rid of the business regulation and social safety laws passed since 1933, and claimed that the Supreme Court’s protection of civil rights was unconstitutional.
When Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he gave a rousing inaugural address promising to bring freedom to the world but, afraid of alienating southern Democrats, didn’t mention race at home. World War II veteran James Meredith promptly decided to test just how committed to human rights Kennedy actually was. Meredith sued for admission to the University of Mississippi, and when the courts ruled the state had to admit him in 1962, Kennedy had to choose between the northern wing of his party that supported civil rights, and the southern racists. Pushed by his brother and attorney general Robert, Kennedy backed Meredith’s registration with federal troops.
Republicans already mad at business regulation now worked to pick up the white supremacists who had backed the Dixiecrats and who, by 1964, were attacking Black Americans and their white allies as they tried to enroll Black voters. In 1964, Republicans ran Goldwater for president on a platform calling for slashing federal power and empowering the states to run their affairs as they wished. Goldwater lost the election, but Strom Thurmond publicly switched parties, and Republicans picked up the five states of the Deep South (as well as Arizona) for the first time since Reconstruction.
Democrats, meanwhile, went all in on racial equality. Kennedy had come around to calling for civil rights legislation, and after his assassination, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, pushed hard first for the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which Congress passed while FBI agents were searching for three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi—and then, after law enforcement officers in Selma, Alabama, attacked voting rights advocates as they crossed a bridge named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Democrats had become the party of equality. But the votes for the civil rights laws had been bipartisan, and it was not at all clear that the Republicans wouldn’t also back civil rights. After all, Goldwater had gotten shellacked when he made common cause with white supremacists.
But in 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon knew he had a hard fight ahead of him. He figured he needed to pick up the old Dixiecrats, who were now politically homeless. He went to Thurmond with a quiet promise not to use the federal government to protect Black rights in the South in exchange for his support. This “Southern strategy” worked. Thurmond publicly backed Nixon.
From then on, white supremacists made up a key part of the Republicans’ base, and the party increasingly pushed on old racial themes—Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, for example, or George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad, or the trope of “makers” and “takers”—to keep them on board.
The parties had switched positions over equality and hierarchy. Since 1964, Republicans have always won the majority of the nation’s white vote, while Democrats rely on Black voters, especially Black women.
And that is the actual true history of how it happened that a Republican candidate for office, representing a party that once defended civil rights, made white power rants on public media.
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October 30, 2022 (Sunday)
Spent the morning editing the new book manuscript (editing is way more fun than writing the thing in the first place, but I can’t put a comma where it belongs for love or money). By noon it was in the high 50s and sunny, and it seemed virtually a requirement to head out in the kayak.
It was worth it. The harbor looked like a lake on a perfect late fall day with that low autumn light that nineteenth-century painters flocked to Maine to capture.
Back to editing tonight, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
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October 31, 2022 (Monday)
Last night, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court declared that voters in Brazil have elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva president, replacing right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro. A factory worker from a young age, the new leader, popularly known as Lula, is a workers’ rights supporter who held the presidency from 2003 to 2011. In office, he launched programs to end hunger, strengthen family agriculture, provide housing, and protect Brazil’s environment, including the rain forests. During his first term, malnutrition among Brazil’s poor was cut by half, from 14% to 7%.
Former president Trump saw Bolsonaro as an ally: Bolsonaro followed Trump’s playbook to rise to the presidency in 2018, governed as Trump did, and worked to delegitimize Lula’s victory even before voting began. In a video statement before the election, Trump called Bolsonaro “one of the great people in all of politics and in all of leadership of countries,” and told voters: “He has my complete and total endorsement…. Don’t lose him. Don’t let that happen. It would not be good for your country.”
Democratic leaders around the world congratulated Lula shortly after election officials declared him the winner. President Joe Biden tweeted his congrat ulations to Lula within minutes for his election “following free, fair, and credible elections.” The leaders of Canada, France, and the United Kingdom hurried to congratulate Lula, in part to head off Bolsonaro’s refusal to accept the results of the election. In late August 2021, Bolsonaro vowed he would win the 2022 election, be arrested, or be killed.
Bolsonaro has stayed silent, refusing to concede the election but, so far, not contesting it either. He has said he will speak tomorrow. But right-wing figures in the U.S. are urging him to fight. Trump ally Steve Bannon insisted that the vote was rigged and that Bolsonaro “cannot concede”; right-wing agitator Ali Alexander, who helped to organize the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, used the hashtag StopTheSteal when he noted, “In Brazil, the MILITARY has the right to insert itself into an election where there is suspected FRAUD. We must have an AUDIT NOW!”
For his part, Lula has promised an inclusive government that will protect the rain forest and try to heal the nation’s political divisions. “I will govern for 215 million Brazilians…and not just for those who voted for me. There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people—one great nation,” Lula told a crowd after his election. “It is in nobody’s interests to live in a country that is divided and in a constant state of war.”
The effect of the sort of political division Lula called out has been highlighted in America this weekend as the country has tried to come to grips with the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, by a radicalized 42-year-old man who has spent the past two years living in a garage. In addition to the state charges already filed against him, federal prosecutors today charged David DePape, the alleged assailant, with assault and attempted kidnapping with intent to “impede, intimidate, or interfere” with an official’s ability to perform official duties.
An FBI affidavit described what happened at the Pelosis’ San Francisco home early in the morning of October 28. DePape, who was a stranger to Mr. Pelosi, broke through a glass door with a hammer and surprised Mr. Pelosi, who was asleep in bed. DePape told Mr. Pelosi he was looking for Nancy and that he would tie Mr. Pelosi up with zip ties while he waited for her. Mr. Pelosi went into a bathroom and called 911 at 2:23 am. When the officers arrived at 2:31, the two men were at the front door, both holding onto a hammer while DePape was holding Mr. Pelosi’s forearm with his other hand.
When the officers asked them to drop the hammer, DePape pulled it out of Mr. Pelosi’s hand and swung it at his head, fracturing his skull.
DePape later told San Francisco Police officers that he intended to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and talk to her. If she told “the truth,” he would let her go, but if she “lied”—as he was certain she would—he intended to break her kneecaps to show other members of Congress what could happen to them. He said he considered Speaker Pelosi “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party.” He said he didn’t leave after Mr. Pelosi called 911 because “much like the American founding fathers with the British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender.”
He told officers he swung the hammer at Mr. Pelosi because Mr. Pelosi’s actions resulted in his “taking the punishment instead.”
The parallels between DePape’s rhetoric and plans and the January 6th attack on the Capitol—right down to the zip ties and the references to the American Revolution—have made Republicans desperate to spin the deadly attack as a reflection of political violence on both sides of the aisle, of the general violence they insist is happening in the cities, or—appallingly and without evidence—of a gay tryst gone bad. Others have tried to turn an assault on the husband of the Speaker of the House, the second in line for the presidency, in an attempt to get at her, into fodder for jokes. Conservative commentator Tom Nichols tweeted that the moment “feels like a turning point…. [I]f we’re not going to ostracize people who are yukking it up over taking a hammer to a man in his 80s, then we’re a different society.”
On today’s Morning Joe television show, Mika Brzezinski drew the obvious parallels between January 6 and the attack on Mr. Pelosi, calling the incident out as the second deadly threat against the House Speaker’s life in two years, and laying the blame for it on the rhetoric of right-wing extremists, including the former president. “While surgeons operated on the fractured skull of the 82-year-old grandfather, deranged right-wing fanatics, Trump media allies, and some of the most powerful people in the world were feverishly trying to stir up conspiracy theories that distracted from the central political headline of this story,” she said, “that years of Republican propaganda and Trump-fueled fascism led 42-year-old David DePape to break into Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home, seemingly with the intent to harm her.”
Meanwhile, the man at the heart of “Trump-fueled fascism” continues to try to evade the law. Yesterday the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol obtained eight emails that a judge says show Trump and his lawyers planning to defraud the courts by filing lawsuits they knew contained false information, and trying to abuse the legal system to stop Trump’s election loss. John Eastman, the author of the infamous memo setting up a plan to steal the election, is trying to get the committee to return or destroy the emails.
Today, Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to block the House Ways and Means Committee from seeing his tax returns. An appeals court decided that the committee could see them, but Trump is pretty clearly trying to delay, hoping a Republican House will kill the request.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro now faces investigations and possible criminal charges that have been delayed while he enjoyed presidential immunity. He has told two senior officials he is worried that, out of office, he will go to prison.
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November 1, 2022 (Tuesday)
The Biden White House has tried since President Joe Biden’s inauguration to move past the Trump years and to focus instead on strengthening democracy by rebuilding the American middle class and by renewing our alliances and friendships with democratic allies. As his message has repeatedly been drowned out by the cultural messaging of the Republicans, Biden has begun to criticize their economic plans more directly, especially in the last few weeks. Today the White House released a fact sheet laying out exactly what it would look like to have the Republicans’ economic plans put into effect.
The Republican Party as a whole has not put forward a legislative agenda before this election to attract voters. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told donors, lobbyists, and senators in December 2021 that the party would focus only on attacking Biden and the Democrats. A Republican operative told Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene of Axios, “One of the biggest mistakes challengers often make is thinking campaigns are about them and their ideas…. No one gives a sh-t about that. Elections are referendums on incumbents.”
Other Republicans disagreed with McConnell and have offered plans that cater to their base but run the risk of alienating non-MAGA voters. The White House highlighted some of those points today, focusing on prescription drug costs, Social Security, and Medicare.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August with Democratic votes alone, allows Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies, caps the annual cost of medication at $2,000, caps insulin costs for those on Medicare at $35 a month, and lowers health care premiums for those whose coverage comes from the Affordable Care Act.
The White House said that Republicans want to repeal these measures, and in October, Senate Republicans James Lankford (OK), Mike Lee (UT), Cynthia Lummis (WY), and Marco Rubio (FL) in fact introduced the “Protecting Drug Innovation Act” to remove the negotiation ability, price caps, and health care premium adjustments in the Inflation Reduction Act “as if such parts had never been enacted.” Lee explained that “price controls never work” but instead “exacerbate the problems they seek to resolve. Mandating fixed prescription drug prices will ultimately result in the shortening of American lives.”
Republican leaders have also called for policies that threaten Social Security and Medicare. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which funds senatorial campaigns, issued an eleven-point plan to “Rescue America” that called for—among other things—sunsetting all laws five years after passage and reauthorizing the ones that lawmakers wanted to keep. (Scott later added a twelfth point to the plan: cutting taxes.)
When challenged that his plan would threaten Medicare, Scott has repeated a talking point that Politifact, the Washington Post Fact Checker, CNN, and FactCheck.org have all called false: that Democrats are threatening Medicare because they “cut $280 billion out of Medicare.” In fact, the Inflation Reduction Act saves the government—and therefore taxpayers—somewhere between $237 billion and $288 billion by permitting it to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies; it does not cut services. In other words, Scott is lying that reduced government spending on Medicare thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act—savings the Republicans want to end—is the same thing as calling to sunset the program in five years.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has called for making the funding for Social Security and Medicare discretionary, meaning it would have to be voted on annually, rather than leaving it as mandatory, covered by statute. “We’ve got to turn everything into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt,” Johnson told a right-wing radio show. “Because, again, as long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.”
Like the plans of other Republicans, those of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), chaired by Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, start from the position that taxes on the wealthy hurt workers by causing “the misallocation of capital, creating a less robust economy, and leading to slower wage growth and job creation.” The RSC released a budget in September that rejected the idea of raising taxes to stabilize Medicare and Social Security and instead called for increasing the age for Medicare eligibility to 67 and that for Social Security eligibility to 70.
The Republican argument for weakening these popular programs is that they are too big a drain on the federal budget and that it is important to continue cutting taxes on the wealthy in order to free up capital for them to reinvest in the economy. This has been Republicans’ argument since 1980, but it has never produced either the economic growth or the tax revenue its supporters promised. In contrast, Biden and the Democrats maintain that cutting the nation’s social safety net will create hardship that will not be offset by tax cuts for the wealthy.
Biden and former president Barack Obama, who has been speaking in states with close races, have repeatedly made the point that Americans pay into Social Security throughout their working lives and have earned the payments they eventually receive. Today, in front of an audience in Florida, Biden read directly from Scott’s plan to sunset laws, quoted Johnson’s plan to make Social Security discretionary, and said “Who in the hell do they think they are?”
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November 2, 2022 (Wednesday)
“Anecdotal data point,” conservative commentator Tom Nichols tweeted this afternoon, “Had lunch with an old friend, a fellow former [Republican] (but not in politics or media or anything) and he said that things feel different after the Pelosi attack. Not sure why. I feel the same thing; not sure that it’ll matter, but have that same sense.”
Perhaps it is the echoes of lawyer Joseph Nye Welch, who in 1954 on television confronted Joseph McCarthy as the Wisconsin senator shredded people’s lives by accusing them of being communists: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Perhaps it is the many observers pointing out that in a time when more than half the Republicans running for office have refused to acknowledge that Democratic President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and when Republican legislatures are claiming the right to choose presidential electors without the input of voters, “American democracy is on the line.”
Or perhaps it is the sheer horror of Republican politicians joking about a brutal attack on the Speaker of the House, the second in line for the presidency, an attack that left her elderly husband with a fractured skull, but Nichols is right: something feels different.
Tonight, President Joe Biden gave a speech on democracy. He began by describing the attack on Paul Pelosi, then noting that the attacker’s demand, “Where’s Nancy?”, echoed the words “used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January the 6th, when they broke windows, kicked in the doors, brutally attacked law enforcement, roamed the corridors hunting for officials and erected gallows to hang the former vice president, Mike Pence.”
That enraged mob had been whipped into a frenzy by former president Trump’s repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. That lie, Biden said, has “fueled the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation over the past two years.”
Biden urged us to “confront those lies with the truth,” for “the very future of our nation depends on it.” “We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America. Whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever.”
“Democracy itself” is at stake in the upcoming election, Biden said. He appealed “to all Americans, regardless of party, to meet this moment of national and generational importance.” Nothing is guaranteed about democracy in America, he said, “Every generation has had to defend it, protect it, preserve it, choose it. For that’s what democracy is. It’s a choice, a decision of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
“We the people must decide whether we will have fair and free elections and every vote counts. We the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic, where reality’s accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred. We the people must decide whether the rule of law will prevail or whether we will allow the dark forces and thirst for power put ahead of the principles that have long guided us.”
Biden warned that the same forces that challenged the 2020 election, despite all the confirmations of its results, are setting out to question the legitimacy of the 2022 election. MAGA Republicans are “trying to succeed where they failed in 2020, to suppress the right of voters and subvert the electoral system itself. That means denying your right to vote and deciding whether your vote even counts.” They’ve encouraged violence and intimidation of voters and election workers, Biden said. “It’s damaging, it’s corrosive, and it’s destructive.”
“And I want to be very clear,” Biden said, “this is not about me, it’s about all of us. It’s about what makes America America. It’s about the durability of our democracy. For democracies are more than a form of government. They’re a way of being, a way of seeing the world, a way that defines who we are, what we believe, why we do what we do.”
Biden warned that “we can’t take democracy for granted any longer.”
“Democracy means the rule of the people, not the rule of monarchs or the moneyed, but the rule of the people. Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one, one person, one interest, one ideology, one party…. [T]he lives of billions of people, from antiquity till now, have been shaped by the battle between these competing forces, between the aspirations of the many and the greed and power of the few, between the people’s right for self-determination and the self-seeking autocrat, between the dreams of a democracy and the appetites of an autocracy.”
“What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure and…whether the American system that prizes the individual bends toward justice and depends on the rule of law, whether that system will prevail. This is the struggle we’re now in, a struggle for democracy, a struggle for decency and dignity, a struggle for prosperity and progress, a struggle for the very soul of America itself.”
Biden listed the “fundamental values and beliefs that unite us as Americans.” First, “we believe the vote in America’s sacred, to be honored, not denied; respected, not dismissed; counted, not ignored. A vote is not a partisan tool, to be counted when it helps your candidates and tossed aside when it doesn’t.” “Second,” he said, “we…stand against political violence and voter intimidation.” “We don’t settle our differences…with a riot, a mob, or a bullet, or a hammer. We settle them peacefully at the ballot box.” Third, he said, “we believe in democracy…. History and common sense tell us that liberty, opportunity, and justice thrive in a democracy, not in an autocracy.”
“At our best,” the president said, “America is not a zero-sum society where for you to succeed, someone else has to fail. A promise in America is big enough…for everyone to succeed…. Individual dignity, individual worth, individual determination, that’s America, that’s democracy and that’s what we have to defend.”
He urged voters to judge the candidates by whether they would accept the legitimate will of the American people. “Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?” The answer to that question should be decisive. “Too many people have sacrificed too much for too many years for us to walk away from the American project and democracy…. It’s within our power, each and every one of us, to preserve our democracy.”
“You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies where it always does, with the people, in your hands, in your heart, in your ballot.”
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November 3, 2022 (Thursday)
While most of us have been watching the jockeying around the election, our legal system has continued to work on its own clock.
Yesterday morning, Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein, and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported more about the eight emails lawyer John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining a plan by which then–vice president Mike Pence could steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump, tried to hide from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The emails included discussions between Eastman, fellow Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and others about how to stop Congress from counting the certified 2020 electoral ballots on January 6, 2021.
In the emails, Chesebro urged arranging to get a case before Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court so he could issue a stay that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in Georgia. They should “frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.” Thomas oversees the circuit court that includes Georgia, and he would “end up being key” to getting Biden’s victory overturned.
Eastman responded: “I think I agree with this.” Such a move by Thomas could “kick the Georgia legislature into gear.”
As a young lawyer, Eastman clerked for Thomas, and Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers noted that Eastman and others were in this same period of time writing to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, who was urging state legislators to overturn the election by submitting fake slates of electors.
Froomkin pointed to a New York Times article from June 15, 2022, which explained that on December 24, 2020, five days after Trump had announced a “protest” at the Ellipse to be held on January 6, Eastman wrote to Chesebro that Eastman had heard there was a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices about whether they should take up the election issue. Chesebro replied that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
So we seem to have a deliberate attempt to throw a court case to Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was urging the overthrow of the election, and to pressure the Supreme Court to act by creating chaos in the streets, all in order to keep former president Trump in the White House.
In the case of the 11,000 government documents the former president took to Mar-a-Lago, the Department of Justice has offered immunity in the case to Kash Patel, a man closely tied to former president Trump, to testify about Trump’s handling of those documents. Patel has previously invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, after telling the right-wing Breitbart media network that Trump declassified the documents before he left the White House in January 2021. Prosecutors cannot use anything Patel says against him at trial so long as he testifies truthfully. A federal judge ordered him to testify before a grand jury, which he did today.
In the case of the Trump Organization’s fraudulent business practices, New York Judge Arthur Engoron today ordered an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization and blocked it from transferring assets without court approval. Trump lawyers complained that this move was “about seizing control of a successful company,” but the attorney general’s office said it was trying to guard against “ongoing fraudulent activity or deceptive activity.” In September, on the same day the New York attorney general’s office brought suit against the Trump Organization for fraudulent business practices, representatives from that organization created a new company called Trump Organization II. The judge has appointed a monitor to make sure the old company doesn’t transfer assets to the new company to avoid legal action.
Trump promptly attacked the decision, calling Engoron “a puppet judge” and saying the decision is “Communism come to our shores.” Later, he told a crowd that “a radical left lunatic judge in New York City who is totally controlled by my worst enemies in the Democrat Party…started a process of property confiscation that is akin to Venezuela, Cuba, or the old Soviet Union.”
The characterization of a decision to make sure the Trump Organization does not continue to break the law after a pattern of fraudulent behavior as “Communism” is a product of the U.S. interpretation of the 1991 fall of the USSR. Republicans then made the mistake of assuming that democracy and unfettered capitalism always traveled together. Over the years, Republicans have largely ignored the “democracy” part of that equation and continually doubled down on the idea that the American system means that businesses should be able to do whatever they wished. In that warped formulation, any oversight must be like Soviet-style communism.
Trump also called his followers on his social media site to “fight back against radical tyranny and save our Country!”
This call for violence echoes the former president’s calls to stop the counting of the certified electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and it illustrates why it is so important for the Department of Justice to enforce the laws. If there is no penalty for lawbreaking, there is no deterrent from breaking laws going forward. But, in fact, the Justice Department has been calling to account those who participated in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol: in September, former New York City police officer Thomas Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
With actual penalties mounting against those who answered to Trump’s previous calls for violence, it is unclear how many will answer again, although Trump appeared to be trying to rally them with what observers say is a frivolous lawsuit filed yesterday against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, complaining that “she attacks great and upstanding businesses.”
Penalties appear to be mounting for those breaking the law for Republican election victories. Republican operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge of telecommunications fraud for robocalls to depress the Black vote in Cleveland in 2020 and are facing fines and up to a year in prison. And earlier this week, a judge ordered two leaders of True the Vote, a right-wing organization pushing the voter fraud conspiracy theories at the heart of the debunked film 2000 Mules, to jail for contempt of court. An election logistics software company they have publicly accused of stealing the election for Biden has sued them for defamation; they claim to have evidence of election fraud but have refused to produce it.
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is currently on trial in New York for criminal tax fraud. Prosecutors allege the company avoided taxes by paying executives with apartments, cars, and school tuitions.
While legal news has piled up, the upcoming midterm elections have not gone away. Tonight, television personality Oprah Winfrey, who was largely responsible for bringing Republican Mehmet Oz to national prominence on her television show, endorsed his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, for senator from Pennsylvania.
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