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November 27, 2022 (Sunday)
Another quick note at the end of this holiday weekend to mark yet another story that shouldn’t be overlooked:
Protests have broken out across China after the country’s strict zero-Covid policies appear to have delayed firefighters responding to a deadly apartment fire Thursday night in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, which lies in the country’s vast northwest.
Official reports say at least ten people died and nine others were injured in the fire, and protesters took to the streets in anger at the lockdown and strict testing and quarantine policies the government insists are imperative to protect the country’s vulnerable elderly.
The protests quickly spread to cities around the country and have become political protests against Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who was reelected for an unprecedented third term as head of the Communist Party last month, and against the Communist Party itself. In Shanghai, protesters shouted, “Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!” In Beijing, university students called for “Democracy and rule of law! Freedom of expression!”
Observers appear to have been surprised both by the rapid spread of the protests and by the relatively restrained response of authorities, who usually crack down on political protest fast and hard. Those observers note that the country’s zero-Covid policy has meant seemingly unending lockdowns, causing extraordinary hardship for ordinary citizens with no end in sight, even as cases in the country are at an all-time high and rising.
China’s approach to Covid has also exacerbated a harsh downturn in the Chinese economy. Its government focused on mass testing and isolation facilities to keep the virus away rather than on effective vaccines and new hospitals to treat those infected, locking itself into a policy that now appears unsustainable.
Observers attribute the protests to frustration over the lockdowns, concern over the economy, and even the World Cup, which has given the Chinese audience a look at more open and free societies outside China.
While these protests are unusual because of the many different factions that are working together—workers, students, rural protesters, and so on—scholars of China say it is far too early to make predictions about what will come next.
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November 28, 2022 (Monday)
Four of twelve unions have rejected the deal the administration brokered in mid-September between rail carriers and union workers to avert a national strike. They remain concerned about their lack of paid sick days. More generally, though, they oppose a new staffing system implemented after 2018, which created record profits for the country’s main rail carriers but cost the industry 40,000 jobs, mainly among the people who actually operate the trains, leading to brutal schedules and dangerous working conditions.
The new system, called Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR), made trains far more efficient by keeping workers on very tight schedules that leave little time for anything but work. Any disruption in those schedules—a family emergency, for example—brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Although workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.
Union leaders and railroad management negotiated for more than two and a half years for new contracts without success.
In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences before the September 16 deadline by which the railway workers could legally strike. The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases and health care benefits but kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate,” but not all the unions did.
Now four of the unions are holding out for better sick leave provisions, and it is likely that the unions will all walk out together if they go.
This threatens supply chains and the economy in general—down to the safety of water systems, since trains carry the chemicals that purify water systems—right before the holidays and as we try to stave off a recession. The deadline for agreeing to the deal is December 9.
This evening, President Joe Biden issued a statement calling on Congress to pass legislation to put the agreement into force to avert a “potentially crippling” railway shutdown. “Let me be clear,” he said, “a rail shutdown would devastate our economy. Without freight rail, many U.S. industries would shut down…[and] as many as 765,000 Americans—many union workers themselves—could be put out of work in the first two weeks alone. Communities could lose access to chemicals necessary to ensure clean drinking water. Farms and ranches across the country could be unable to feed their livestock.”
“As a proud pro-labor President,” he continued, “I am reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement.” He wants laws to establish paid leave and stronger protections for workers, he said, “[b]ut at this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown.” “[I]n this case,” he said, “where the economic impact of a shutdown would hurt millions of other working people and families—I believe Congress must use its powers to adopt this deal.” He asked lawmakers to get a bill to his desk immediately, well before December 9.
Railway Age, a trade magazine for the rail transport agency, reported that neither side in the negotiations could find a way to avoid a work stoppage, but since neither side wanted one, they were eager to have Congress overrule the small percentage of workers who opposed the deal and impose the one most workers have accepted. That way, neither side would have to face criticism from those who oppose the deal, and they would not have to deal with a Republican House as they seek to find a solution.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that the House would take up a bill adopting the agreement this week. “It is my hope that this necessary, strike-averting legislation will earn a strongly bipartisan vote, giving America’s families confidence in our commitment to protecting their financial futures,” she said.
Meanwhile, former president Trump appears to be increasingly nervous about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigations of Trump’s theft of national security documents and incitement of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump is lashing out wildly, calling Smith, for example, “a hit man for Obama.”
Of perhaps more concern for his lawyers was his post on his social media network saying: “When will you invade the other Presidents’ homes in search of documents, which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?”
Meanwhile, a reporter for ABC News spotted Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway going into the offices of the January 6th Committee. A recent book by Jon Lemire cites Trump’s query of Conway how he could have lost “to f*cking Joe Biden,” indicating he did, in fact, understand that he had lost the election.
Committee member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said on November 20 that the committee will release to the public its report and all the evidence it has gathered “within a month.”
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the post contained a complete sentence, using the words “voluminous” and “transparently”, and only one miscapitalized word!?
i guess he’s been giving out his password again…
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November 29, 2022 (Tuesday)
Today, after an eight-week trial and three days of deliberations, a jury of five women and seven men found Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, 57, the founder and leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers gang, and Kelly Meggs, 53, who led the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, guilty of seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. It found Rhodes guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding and tampering with documents and proceedings, and found Meggs guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging duties, and tampering with documents or proceedings.
The jury also found three additional defendants from the organization—Kenneth Harrelson, 42; Jessica Watkins, 40; and Thomas Caldwell, 68—guilty of related felony charges.
The Department of Justice proved that after President Joe Biden won the November 3, 2020, election, Rhodes, Meggs, and others began plotting to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power.
Beginning in late December 2020, they planned to travel to Washington, D.C., on or around January 6, 2021, to stop Congress from certifying the electoral college vote that would officially elect Biden. They recruited others, organized combat training sessions, and smuggled paramilitary gear to the area around the Capitol. They planned to take control of the Capitol grounds and buildings on January 6.
According to the Department of Justice, on that day, “Meggs, Harrelson, and Watkins, along with other Oath Keepers and affiliates—many wearing paramilitary clothing and patches with the Oath Keepers name, logo, and insignia—marched in a ‘stack’ formation up the east steps of the Capitol, joined a mob, and made their way into the Capitol. Rhodes and Caldwell remained outside the Capitol, where they coordinated activities” and stayed in touch with quick reaction force teams outside the city, which were ready to bring in firearms to stop the transfer of power.
That a jury has now found two people guilty of seditious conspiracy establishes that a conspiracy existed. Former federal prosecutor Randall D. Eliason, who teaches law at George Washington University, told reporters Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman, and Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post: “Now the only remaining question is how much higher did those plans go, and who else might be held criminally responsible.” While federal prosecutors sought only to tie Rhodes to the other Oath Keepers, both sides agreed that Rhodes communicated with Trump allies Roger Stone, Ali Alexander, and Michael Flynn after the election.
There are two more seditious conspiracy trials scheduled for December. One is for five other Oath Keepers; the other is against the leaders of the far-right gang the Proud Boys, led by Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio.
Yesterday, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election are not covered by presidential immunity as his lawyers argued. The judge noted that he was acting not as a president in defense of the Constitution, but rather in a different role as a candidate when he tried to overturn the election. Sullivan said: “Persuasive authority in this district specifically recognizes that there is no immunity defense for Former President Trump for ‘unofficial acts’ which ‘entirely concern his efforts to remain in office for a second term.’”
The South Carolina Supreme Court today unanimously ordered Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s last White House chief of staff, to testify before the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Meadows was on the phone call Trump made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on January 2 to demand he “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” making his testimony key to the investigation. Meadows lives in South Carolina, where he tried to argue that he could not testify because of executive privilege. Lower South Carolina courts disagreed, and now the state’s supreme Court has said that Meadows’s arguments are “manifestly without merit.”
In Washington, Trump advisor Stephen Miller testified today before the grand jury investigating the events of January 6, 2021. The Justice Department subpoenaed Miller in September. He also testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Also in Washington today, the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which provides federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages for the purposes of federal benefits like Social Security, and requires states to recognize such marriages, although it does not require them to perform such marriages. The law is an attempt to get out in front of the Supreme Court, whose right-wing members have suggested they would invalidate marriage equality after ending protections for reproductive rights. Thirty-six Republicans voted against the bill, with 12 Republicans joining the Democrats to pass it.
The Senate bill amends one passed in July by the House, which will now have to agree to the changed measure and is expected to do so. House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a vote for next week.
Today Pelosi also announced that Congress will take up the legislation Biden asked for yesterday: a law to put in place the deal between the railroad corporations and the railway unions. Four of 12 unions have rejected the deal because of its lack of paid sick days. In a letter to her colleagues, Pelosi expressed reluctance to bypass standard ratification procedures but said, “we must act to prevent a catastrophic strike that would touch the lives of nearly every family: erasing hundreds of thousands of jobs, including union jobs; keeping food and medicine off the shelves; and stopping small businesses from getting their goods to market.”
She promised to bring the measure up for a vote tomorrow.
But, in typical Pelosi fashion, she has found a way to demonstrate to union members and to lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who are angry at Biden’s determination to avoid a strike, that those standing in the way of paid leave for the unions are not the Democrats. After the vote on the agreement, she will hold a “separate, up-or-down vote to add seven days of paid sick leave for railroaders to the Tentative Agreement.” Such a measure is likely to pass the House and die under a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
While the jury was handing down its verdict in the case of Stewart Rhodes, who said on tape that he would “hang f*ckin’ Pelosi from the lamppost,” Speaker Pelosi was lighting the Capitol Christmas tree with fourth-grader Catcuce Micco Tiger, who is a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and has ancestry from the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Tiger won the role of youth tree lighter with an essay sharing the Cherokee origin story for evergreen trees. “After creating all plants and animals,” Pelosi explained, “our Creator asked them to fast, pray, and stay awake for seven nights. But at the end, only a few were awake. The trees that stayed awake were rewarded with the ability to keep their leaves yearlong and with special healing powers. It is a story of faith and gratitude—of hope enduring through the dark night.”
“And,” Pelosi added, “it is hope that we celebrate each holiday season—that through the cold and dark winter, spring will someday come.”
Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, who defended the Capitol against the Oath Keepers on January 6, heard the jury’s verdict, then watched the tree lighting.
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A good take on this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/29/respect-marriage-act-protections-insufficient/
Archive version: Opinion | The Respect for Marriage Act doesn't go far enough for LGBTQ rights - The Washington Post
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November 30, 2022 (Wednesday)
The Democrats in the House have voted in new leadership. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and who represents a district that includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, will replace Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker. A 52-year-old lawyer, Jeffries is known for playing a long game, listening to everyone, focusing on getting laws passed. He will be the first Black party leader in the House or the Senate.
Members elected Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts as the number 2 party leader: she will be the party whip, the person who makes sure there are votes to pass certain measures and keeps members behind the party’s program.
And they elected Representative Pete Aguilar of California as caucus chair, overseeing the weekly meetings of the Democratic caucus to discuss policy, legislation, and other issues.
The new Democratic leaders will start in the minority in the new Congress, where the Republicans have a slim majority, but are considered a strong team and hope to be in the majority after 2024.
In a sign that they represent a new era, CNN’s headline for a story about Jeffries’s rise read: “With Hakeem Jeffries’ rise, his members see ‘Democrats in total array.’”
For decades, it has been a stereotype that Democrats are in disarray, but after two years in which Democrats have managed with just a small House majority to pass an extraordinary slate of major laws, after a midterm election in which Democrats did far better than pundits expected, and now with a strong new team of leaders in place with party members standing behind them, “disarray” now belongs to the Republicans.
As if to illustrate the deep factions in the Republican Party that have made them unable to agree on much of anything except what—and whom—they hate, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) today, in response to a logical question, offered to Kristin Wilson, Paul LeBlanc, and Clare Foran of CNN something that sure sounded like word salad.
The House today did as President Joe Biden asked, and passed a bill to impose an agreement on railway corporations and railway employees to avoid a strike that economists say would cost the country $1 billion in its first week. The vote was bipartisan. Seventy-nine Republicans joined all but eight Democrats to pass the bill. McCarthy was one of 129 Republicans who voted no.
When the CNN reporters asked McCarthy why he voted no, he answered: “First Biden told us that inflation was transitory; it wasn’t. He told us immigration was seasonal and it wasn’t. He told us Afghanistan wouldn’t collapse to the Taliban. Then he told us in September that this deal was all worked out. Now he wants the government to go into this? I just think it’s another—it’s another sign of why the economy is weak under this Biden administration.”
Numbers released today show that, in fact, the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.9% in the third quarter—between July and September—lower than it has been, but higher than the growth in former president Trump’s first three years, which averaged 2.5%. Unemployment today is at a 50-year low. While inflation is still high, gas prices have dropped to an average of $3.50 a gallon, where they were in February before Russia invaded Ukraine.
When the reporters noted that McCarthy’s position would actually have hurt the economy by leading to a strike that tanked it, he responded: “If my position held out, we’d actually have it done by the private sector a long time ago and we’d have efficiency. We wouldn’t have inflation, we’d have a secure border.”
McCarthy is scrambling to find the votes he needs from the far right to make him House speaker, making him impossible to pin down as he tries to woo those extremists to his side.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, John Thune (R-SD), the second ranking Republican, has offered a plan, but it is one that is unlikely to make the party more popular. Yesterday, he said that Republicans plan to use the necessary increase in the debt limit to force cuts in the budget, including changes to Social Security and other programs.
In 2019, 57% of Americans said that Social Security was a “major” source of their income, and 74% of Americans said that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way.
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So that means Dems have two weeks to overturn the debt ceiling requirement or to make it so high that it won’t be an issue for the next few years. Maybe they should get on that…
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December 1, 2022 (Thursday)
Some stories wrapped up today:
In Atlanta the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit said that the district court had no jurisdiction to block the U.S. government from using the records it seized in the criminal investigation of former president Trump. That is, when U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon allowed Trump’s request for a special master to review the documents seized by the FBI in its search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, she assumed power the district court did not have. Special Master Raymond Dearie will be dismissed, and the criminal investigation of the former president will go forward.
The panel noted in their decision that they were unwilling to “carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents.” The judges acknowledged that “[i]t is indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president,” but “[t]o create a special exception here would defy our Nation’s foundational principle that our law applies ‘to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank.’”
It continued: “The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
All three judges on the panel were nominated by Republican presidents: Judge William H. Pryor by President George W. Bush; Judges Andrew L. Brasher and Britt C. Grant, by Trump.
Today, Ye, also known as Kanye West, appeared with right-wing white supremacist Nick Fuentes on Alex Jones’s show InfoWars, and was so vile even Jones began to push back. Eventually, Ye praised Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Then, and only then, did the Twitter account of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee delete their tweet of October 6, 2022, that read: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
Other stories began:
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) yesterday sent a letter to the chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol telling the committee to preserve their records in anticipation of an investigation in the committee once the Republicans take control of the House next year. Of course, House rules already require that preservation; the demand is simply a performance to convince the far-right MAGA Republicans that he is on their team. And, in fact, the committee has said it will release “all the evidence” to the public before the end of the year.
Republican representative Ralph Norman (R-SC), who opposes electing McCarthy speaker, told right-wing media that those opposing McCarthy have a different candidate for the position. That candidate is not a House member, and Norman said: “It will be apparent in the coming weeks who that person will be. I will tell you, it will be interesting.”
And still other stories showed their enduring power through centuries:
Today, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden hosted French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, for the first state visit of Biden’s presidency.
In a lunch today at the State Department, hosted by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Vice President Kamala Harris along with their respective spouses Ms. Evan Ryan and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Blinken emphasized the close ties between France and the United States throughout our shared history. He recalled that France was the first international ally of the United States, recognizing the fledgling nation’s independence from England and providing both military and economic assistance after the two countries contracted a formal alliance in 1778.
Vice President Harris reminded the audience that the close alliance between France and the United States has continued ever since, with the troops of both countries fighting together, and dying together, on the battlefields of the two world wars, and with ties of culture, art, and science. Harris recalled that her mother, Dr. Shyamala Harris, worked at the Institut Pasteur with the legendary French professor Étienne-Émile Baulieu.
The leaders reaffirmed that France and the United States have a historic past and emphasized that our shared past is the basis for shaping a joint future in which the old allies work to defend the rules-based international order now under attack from autocrats who hope to dominate their neighbors with force.
Not only are they defending the rules-based order, but also they are working to make it reflect the realities of the present. In his remarks at the arrival ceremony this morning, Macron explained: “This spirit of fraternity must enable us to build an agenda of ambition and hope, as our two countries share the same faith in freedom, in democratic values, in empowerment through education and work, and in progress through science and knowledge.”
"The post-Cold War era is over,” Blinken said today, “and we face a global competition to define what comes next.” Macron and Biden, as well as Blinken and Harris, all emphasized that the defense of Ukraine as it resists the attempt of Russian president Vladimir Putin to “redraw the borders of a sovereign, independent nation by force” is key to that definition of the future.
They emphasized that those defending a rules-based order are “working together to strengthen European security and advance a free and open Indo-Pacific,” “taking urgent steps to save our planet for future generations,” and “making investments in global health to stamp out diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS, to build greater capacity to prevent and respond to future health emergencies.”
Vice President Harris quoted from Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat who fought in the American Revolutionary War, who wrote to his wife in 1778 from Valley Forge, where the ragtag Continental Army encamped in the bitter winter of 1777-1778. “My heart has always been completely convinced that in serving the cause of humanity and America," he wrote, "I was fighting in the interests of France.”
Macron responded: “And when your soldiers came during the First and the Second World War in our country, they had exactly the same feeling. And we will never forget that a lot of your families lost children on the soils they never knew before just because they were fighting for liberty and for universal values.”
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So the House Speaker can be someone who’s not a current elected member of the house? Wow. I seem to remember Trump considering becoming a congresscritter at one point, so he could then become Speaker, as a pathway back to the presidency-- which made it seem like he had to be a member of the House in order to become Speaker.
I wonder who they have in mind. Maybe Liz Cheney, who will no longer be an elected politician?
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I will lay very good odds he is thinking of Il Douche. That idea has been floated a number of times. I can’t see it happening, but seeing Repub house members put in a position where they have to directly oppose TFG would be fun.
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I think Norman is a MAGAT. He was one of the reps voting to overturn the election results (voting to support the objections to certification) and has said the insurrectionists weren’t trump supporters. So Cheney is probably not who he is thinking of
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When a blank sheet of paper says everything.
(source: NYT)
Good morning. The unrest that has swept across China is a rare public challenge to the world’s most powerful authoritarian government.
Protesters in Beijing.Thomas Peter/Reuters
Rare demonstrations
The dissent was nearly unimaginable until a few days ago.
Protests against Covid lockdowns have rippled across China, among the most widespread there in decades. Some Chinese people, many of them young, are fed up with the government’s lockdowns, mandatory quarantines and mass testing, all part of the zero-Covid strategy intended to limit transmission of the virus. But few demonstrators shouted their frustration — they held up white pieces of paper instead.
These blank sheets illuminate the limits of criticism in China. In democracies, booming crowds and brazen signs are hallmarks of protest. But Chinese citizens risk being prosecuted for criticizing the government. The Communist Party under Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has cracked down on dissent, making even subtle acts of opposition perilous.
“These protests are absolutely extraordinary, especially in the era of Xi Jinping, who has really tightened controls on speech,” said Vivian Wang, a Times correspondent in Beijing who is covering the demonstrations there. “The white paper is an implicit criticism of that censorship.”
Standing at night in the dark, faces covered by masks, the protesters risk imprisonment by gathering at all. The empty paper serves as plausible deniability, a test to see how far they can go before being punished.
Today, I want to share photos and videos that illustrate how protesters are deploying unusual tactics to challenge the authorities.
Images of defiance
The protests started after a building fire in the far western city of Urumqi killed at least 10 people, a tragedy many attributed to strict Covid lockdowns that confined people to their homes. People gathered in cities across the country to mourn the victims, including on Urumqi Road in Shanghai:
CHINATOPIX, via Associated Press
As anger spread across the country, the vigils morphed into protests against China’s zero-Covid policies. One gathering in Beijing began at an altar adorned in tribute to the fire’s victims and evolved into this demonstration:
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
At the shifting, often leaderless scenes, even the demonstrators were uncertain about what to label the events, and some used blank signs to lean into the ambiguity. One Shanghai resident said that the initial purpose of the papers on Saturday was to signal to the police that those gathered were mourning silently. (White is a common color at Chinese funerals.)
“Chinese people are used to seeing their speech censored online, but you can’t censor people if they don’t say anything,” Vivian said. “They also don’t need to say anything. People know what they mean.”
The seemingly innocuous papers have forced government officials to determine what might be grounds for arrest, and some protesters used the sheets to mock the Communist Party’s predicament. Below, one paper on a wall at a gathering in Shanghai reads “I didn’t say anything” in Mandarin:
Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some protests were more direct. Crowds of people in Beijing and Shanghai, mainly in their 20s and 30s, marched and chanted for an end to the country’s three years of draconian Covid restrictions and demanded more rights. “We don’t want lockdowns, we want freedom!” they shouted. “Freedom of the press! Freedom of publishing!” Some in Shanghai went so far as to even call for Xi to step down, a rare and bold challenge.
Late Friday, videos circulated widely on the Chinese internet showing throngs of residents in Urumqi marching to a government building and chanting, “End lockdowns”:
Video Obtained By Reuters
As the protests continued into this week, Communist Party officials escalated their response, blanketing gathering sites with security personnel and vehicles. Here, you can see the police confronting a man as they tried to block a street in Shanghai:
Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The authorities also went to homes to warn people against protesting and took some of them away for questioning. The specter of more aggressive crackdown is often enough to keep people from uniting to protest.
Censors scrubbed protest symbols and slogans from social media, and Chinese spam flooded Twitter to obscure news of the unrest. Some protest images slipped through, going viral outside the Chinese mainland. The hashtag “A4Revolution” — A4 is a reference to the size of the white pieces of paper — trended on Twitter over the weekend. At a vigil in Hong Kong, demonstrators held up blank paper in solidarity:
Anthony Kwan/Getty Images
What happens next remains uncertain. What is clear is that the protests have united many Chinese people in a rare display of civil unrest. Xi has remained silent, but the demonstrations have fractured the perception abroad that he exacts ironclad control over China’s citizens. Outside a university in Seoul, South Korea, hand-drawn posters criticized the Chinese government and begged for the world’s help — in the form of attention:
Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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December 2, 2022 (Friday)
On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows.
Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon, the sheriff swung a hatchet at the rope supporting the trap door below Brown’s feet. The door snapped open and the man who had tried to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry two months before dangled, as one observer said, “between heaven and earth.”
That same observer, John T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, went on to explain that the “grand point” of the spectacle was its moral: that it was fatal to take up arms against the government.
John Brown was the first American to be executed for treason.
Before 1859 the punishment for treason in America had not been clear. In the early years of independence, as colonies tried to stamp out loyalty to the King, some colonies had broadened the definition of treason to include “preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, or printing,” and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, twelve of the thirteen states had written their own laws against treason.
The Framers of the Constitution recognized the danger that leaders in the new nation might expand the definition of treason to sweep in political opposition, and after all, they had been “traitors” themselves just eleven years before. So the Framers specified in the Constitution a very limited definition of treason against the United States, saying that only levying war against the United States or “adhering to their enemies” or giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy could be considered treason. But they did not define a penalty for treason, leaving that to be determined by Congress.
They also voted to leave open the possibility for states to define treason as they wished. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, most state constitutional conventions defined treason as a crime in their fundamental state law.
As men jockeyed for control of the government in the chaotic early years of the Republic, several men ran afoul of the federal and state treason clauses, but they did not pay the ultimate price for their missteps. Two men were convicted of treason against the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; President Washington pardoned them both. In 1838, Joseph Smith and five other Mormon leaders were charged with treason against Missouri for their part in the violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state; they escaped before trial. Thomas Wilson Dorr was convicted of treason against Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s and was sentenced to hard labor for life, but a popular protest won him amnesty after he had served a year.
Then, on October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 18 men to attack the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—it became West Virginia in 1863—in order to seize guns from the armory, distribute them to local enslaved men, and lead them to freedom and self-government. As they cut the telegraph wires in the town in the dead of night, a free Black man, a baggage handler, stumbled upon them and they shot him. The sound attracted the attention of a local physician, who roused his neighbors. As they started to come awake, Brown’s men took the armory, which was defended by a single watchman who turned over the keys to the raiders.
At dawn the next day, a train came through the town, and its operators alerted authorities to the trouble in Harpers Ferry as soon as they got to a working telegraph. Meanwhile, Brown’s people captured Armory employees coming to work, and as news of the hostages spread, local militia converged on the site. As firing from the militia pinned Brown’s men down, they moved to a small brick building near the armory’s door. Intermittent shooting over the course of the day killed a number of Brown’s men as well as local militia before federal troops arrived on the morning of the next day, October 18.
Officers, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, promised to spare the lives of Brown and his men if they surrendered, but Brown refused. Within minutes, soldiers had broken down the doors to their shelter and taken prisoner Brown and the seven of his men still alive.
On October 27 the state of Virginia began the trial of the still-wounded Brown for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyers argued that he could not have committed treason because he was not a resident of the state and so owed it no allegiance.
But the Virginia jury deliberated for only 45 minutes before they convicted John Brown of treason, agreeing with the prosecution that one did not have to reside in a state to be guilty of taking up arms against its government. On November 2 the judge sentenced Brown to death by hanging, a sentence that would be carried out after a legally required one-month delay.
Virginians like Preston applauded the decision. “Law had been violated by actual murder and attempted treason,” Preston wrote to his wife in a letter reprinted in the local newspaper, “and that gibbet was erected by law, and to uphold law was this military force assembled…. So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
The execution of John Brown for treason set a precedent.
And in just over a year, Virginians themselves would take up arms against the federal government. Men like Preston, who became an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson, had to wonder if the precedent of hanging John Brown for treason might come back to haunt them.
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December 3, 2022 (Saturday)
Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral.
In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.”
Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator.
This outrageous statement seems to reflect desperation from the former president as his political star fades and the many legal suits proceeding against him get closer and closer to their end dates.
The midterm elections, in which the high-profile candidates he backed lost, prompted some members of his party to suggest it’s time to move on to new candidates. At the same time, lawsuits are heating up. The Department of Justice continues to investigate Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, an attempt that led to the events of January 6, 2021.
Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the Washington, D.C., District Court recently rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege and ordered Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and deputy counsel, Patrick Philbin, to provide additional testimony to a federal grand jury. On Friday, they each testified for several hours. On November 29, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who worked with Trump on his speech at the Ellipse, also testified before the grand jury,
The Department of Justice is also investigating Trump’s theft of documents when he left the White House. The December 1 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declaring that Judge Aileen Cannon had no authority to allow Trump a special master to review the materials the FBI took when they searched Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, had a very clear, concise rundown of what the government has so far recovered from the former president, and the list was damning.
In the first group of documents Trump returned to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), after significant pressure to do so, included “184 documents marked at varying levels of classification, including twenty-five marked top secret.” After a subpoena, Trump’s lawyers returned another 38 classified documents, seventeen of which were marked top secret. Trump’s team declared that a “diligent search” had turned up only these items, and there were no more left.
But the FBI learned that there were, in fact, more documents still at Mar-a-Lago and obtained a search warrant. On August 8, FBI agents retrieved about “13,000 documents and a number of other items, totaling more than 22,000 pages of material…. [F]ifteen of the thirty-three seized boxes, containers, or groups of papers contained documents with classification markings, including three such documents found in desks” in Trump’s office. Agents found more than 100 documents marked confidential, secret, or top secret.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to oversee these two investigations after Trump announced an early candidacy for president in 2024. Smith got down to work immediately, sending out a letter on Thanksgiving Day itself. It seems likely there is good reason for Trump to be concerned.
Meanwhile, Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and South Carolina’s Supreme Court has ordered Trump’s White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify to that grand jury, another reason for the former president to be concerned.
And the Trump Organization’s trial for tax evasion is reaching a verdict, while the House Ways and Means Committee has finally received six years of Trump’s tax returns after years of attempts by the former president to keep them out of Congress’s hands. At Lawfare, Daniel J. Hemel says that as a matter of law, the committee can make the returns public. He counsels against it for a number of reasons (although he says they should be made public) but notes that the Senate Finance Committee, which will remain in Democratic hands, can now get access to the material easily and will be able to release it. If his attempt to hide his taxes was anything other than principled, there is reason for Trump to be concerned about this as well.
So, the former president has reason to try to grab headlines with an outrageous statement about overthrowing the Constitution.
But the real story here is not Trump’s panic about his fading relevance and his legal exposure; it’s that Trump remains the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party in 2024. The leader of the Republican Party has just called for the overthrow of our fundamental law and the installation of a dictator.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement: “The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country. The Constitution brings the American people together—regardless of party—and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It’s the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights. Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned. You cannot only love America when you win.”
But Republicans, so far, are silent on Trump’s profound attack on the Constitution, the basis of our democratic government.
That is the story, and it is earth shattering.
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it’s surprising that he’s running again, under the very system he wants thrown out. and does he really think the democrat fraudsters (/s) are going to let him win this time? what good is a fraudulent election if you can’t win them all?
mainly because they said they wanted the taxes in order to audit them, but they don’t have time to audit them, so it would look like they only wanted them inorder to damage ■■■■■. ( which actually seems like a good goal to me. but the left does seem to like to play by the rules, even if the right doesn’t )
https://www.lawfareblog.com/house-democrats-can-release-trumps-tax-returns-should-they
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December 4, 2022 (Sunday)
On Friday, November 25, 2022, just over a week ago, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced, “On the very first day of the new Republican-led Congress, we will “read every single word of the Constitution aloud from the floor of the House—something that hasn’t been done in years.”
Yesterday, on Saturday, December 3, 2022, former president Donald Trump, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party, mischaracterized a Twitter thread to claim that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign had successfully pressured Twitter to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop—the thread actually said something else entirely—and called for overthrowing the Constitution. Trump wrote:
“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential election results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
In case anyone didn’t get the point, Trump followed that post up with another: “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!”
On Sunday, December 4, all but one Republican lawmaker who expects to stay in office for the next two years stayed resolutely silent about Trump’s open attack on the U.S. Constitution, this nation’s founding document, the basis for our government.
That one lawmaker was Representative Michael Turner (R-OH), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, who this morning on CBS’s “Face the Nation” condemned Trump’s attack on the Constitution. But Turner would not say he would not support Trump if he were the party’s nominee in 2024.
Even at that, Turner’s was a lone voice. When George Stephanopoulos, host of “This Week” on ABC News, asked Representative David Joyce (R-OH) if he would support Trump in 2024 after the former president had called for “suspending the Constitution” (to be clear, Trump had called for “terminating” it), Joyce tried to avoid the question but finally said, “I’ll support whoever the Republican nominee is." Joyce is the chair of the Republican Governance Group, whose members claim they are the party’s centrists.
Not all Republicans reacted to Trump’s truly astonishing statement with such easy acceptance. Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was removed from party leadership for holding Trump responsible for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and who has lost her seat in Congress to a Trump supporter, responded to Trump’s statement by saying: “Donald Trump believes we should terminate ‘all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution’ to overturn the 2020 election. That was his view on 1/6 and remains his view today. No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution.”
Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who, like Cheney, took a seat on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and will also be leaving Congress, tweeted: “With the former President calling to throw aside the constitution, not a single conservative can legitimately support him, and not a single supporter can be called a conservative. This is insane. Trump hates the constitution.” Kinzinger tagged McCarthy, third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Jim Jordan (R-OH), who is expected to take over the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over issues involving the Constitution.
None of them commented.
Conservative Bill Kristol made his questioning broader: “The Federalist Society claims to defend the Constitution,” he tweeted. “Donald Trump, the ex-president with whom the Society worked so closely, has just attacked the Constitution in an incendiary way. Do the Federalist Society or its members have a word to say in defense of our Constitution?”
Crickets.
McCarthy’s statement a week ago that the whole Constitution hadn’t been read on the floor of Congress “in years” was technically true, but it was misleading. It sounded as if McCarthy was promising to do something novel to demonstrate the Republicans’ loyalty to the Constitution.
In fact, Republicans demanded a reading of the Constitution in the House for the first time in its history in 2011 to try to demonstrate that the government had gone beyond the Framers’ intent, although they also cut out all the parts the Framers wrote that have been amended since the document was written. (That meant they cut out the infamous three-fifths clause counting enslaved African Americans as three fifths of a white person for purposes of representation, leading to accusations that they were cherry-picking the Framers’ words.)
Since then, the House has read the Constitution at least twice more, in 2015 and 2017, to promote the idea that Republicans, and Republicans alone, are standing on the U.S. Constitution, while Democrats are abusing it.
The leader of the Republican Party has called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and party leaders are silent.
Representatives had not taken the time to read the entirety of the U.S. Constitution on the floor of the House before 2011 because they were presumed to know it. What they did have to say aloud was something far more important for each individual to have on record: their oath of office.
It reads: “I…do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
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December 5, 2022 (Monday)
On Friday, December 2, President Joe Biden signed into law House Joint Resolution 100, “which provides for a resolution with respect to the unresolved disputes between certain railroads represented by the National Carriers’ Conference Committee of the National Railway Labor Conference and certain of their employees.”
What that long title means is that the U.S. government has overridden the usual union ratification procedures of a tentative agreement to hammer out differences between employers and the 115,000 workers covered by the agreement. Eight of the 12 involved unions had agreed to the deal, which provides 24% wage increases but no sick days, and four had not.
Their refusal to agree seemed almost certain to lead to a strike in which all the unions would participate, shutting down key supply chains and badly hurting the U.S. economy. Some estimated the costs of a strike would be about $2 billion a day, freezing almost 30% of freight shipments by weight, and causing a crisis in all economic sectors—including retail, just before the holidays. It would also disrupt travel for up to 7 million commuters a day and stop about 6300 carloads of food every day from moving. So the government stepped in.
Biden asked Congress on Monday, November 28, to act to prevent a rail strike, but there was a long history behind this particular measure, and an even longer one behind the government’s pressure on railroad workers.
The story behind today’s crisis started in 2017 when former president Trump’s trade war hammered agriculture and manufacturing, leading railroad companies to fire workers—more than 20,000 of them in 2019 alone, dropping the number of railroad workers in the U.S. below 200,000 for the first time since the Department of Labor began to keep track of such statistics in the 1940s. By December 2020, the industry had lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains.
Those jobs did not come back even after the economy did, though, as railroad companies implemented a system called precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. “We fundamentally changed the way we operate over the last 2½ years,” Bryan Tucker, vice president of communications at railroad corporation CSX told Heather Long of the Washington Post in January 2020. “It’s a different way of running a railroad.”
PSR made trains longer and operated them with a skeleton crew that was held to a strict schedule. This dramatically improved on-time delivery rates but sometimes left just two people in charge of a train two to three miles long, with no back-up and no option for sick days, family emergencies, or any of the normal interruptions that life brings, because the staffing was so lean it depended on everyone being in place. Any disruption in schedules brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, but the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.
PSR helped the railroad corporations make record profits. In 2021, revenue for the two largest railroad corporations in the U.S., the Union Pacific and BNSF (owned by Warren Buffett), jumped 12% to $21.8 billion and 11.6% to $22.5 billion, respectively.
About three years ago, union leaders and railroad management began negotiating new contracts but had little luck. In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences. The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases but largely kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate”; not all of the involved unions did.
And here is the deeper historical background to this issue: the government has no final power to force railroad owners to meet workers’ demands. In 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, believing that steel companies were being unreasonable in their unwillingness to bargain with workers, President Harry S. Truman seized control of steel production facilities to prevent a strike that would stop the production of steel defense contractors needed. But, in the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer decision, the Supreme Court said that the president could not seize private property unless Congress explicitly authorized it to do so. This means that the government has very little leverage over corporations to force them to meet workers’ demands.
But, thanks to the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Congress can force railroad workers to stay on the job. The 1926 law was one of the first laws on the books to try to stop strikes by providing a mechanism for negotiations between workers and employers. But if the two sides cannot agree after a long pattern of negotiations and cooling off periods, Congress can impose a deal that both sides have to honor.
The idea was to force both sides to bargain, but a key player in this policy was the American consumer, who had turned harshly against railroad workers when the two-month 1894 Pullman Strike, after drastic wage cuts, shut down the country. For the most part, Americans turned against the strikers as travel became diabolically difficult and goods stopped moving. Even reformer Jane Addams, who generally sympathized with workers, worried that the economic crisis had made forgiving the strikers “well-nigh impossible.”
While management generally likes the current system, workers point out that it removes their most effective leverage. Employers can always count on Congress to step in to avoid a railroad strike that would bring the country’s economy to its knees. On November 28, CNN Business reported that more than 400 business groups were asking Congress to enforce the tentative deal in order to prevent a strike. At the same time, the Supreme Court in 1952 took away the main leverage the government had against companies.
And so the House passed the measure forcing the unions to accept the tentative deal on Wednesday, November 30, by a vote of 290 to 137. Two hundred and eleven (211) Democrats voted yes; 8 voted no. Seventy-nine (79) Republicans voted yes; 129 voted no.
But then the House promptly took up a measure, House Concurrent Resolution 119, to correct the bill by providing a minimum of 7 paid sick days for the employees covered by the agreement. That, too, passed, by a vote of 221 to 207, with three Republicans joining all the Democrats to vote yes. Those three Republicans were Don Bacon (R-NE), who has gotten attention lately for trying to carve a space for himself away from the rest of the party as someone concerned about practical matters; Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA); and John Katko (R-NY).
It was a neat way for Congress to impose its will on the companies under the terms of the Railway Labor Act.
The Senate approved the bill on Thursday by a vote of 80 to 15, with Rand Paul (R-KY) voting “present” and four others not voting. The 80 yes votes were bipartisan and so were the 15 no votes. Five Democrats—Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT)—joined ten Republicans to oppose the measure.
Then the Senate took up the concurrent resolution, which it rejected by a vote of 52 yes votes to 43 no votes, with five not voting. That is, the measure won a majority—52 votes—but because of the current understanding of the filibuster rule, the Senate cannot pass a measure without a supermajority of 60 votes. The yes votes for the sick leave addition were nearly all Democrats, along with six Republicans. The no votes were all Republicans, with the addition of one Democrat: Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Biden maintains he supports paid sick leave for all workers, not just railroad workers, and promises to continue to work for it.
But the railway struggle was about more than sick leave. It was about a system that has historically made it harder for workers than for employers to get what they want. And it is about consumers, who—in the past at any rate—have blamed strikers rather than management when the trains stopped running.
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It seems like the Biden administration has some levers they can pull to fix the situation for workers. I believe there are elements of the Defense Production Act that allow the executive to fine or impose tax penalties on businesses for price gouging during a crisis? Impose those penalties on the railroad companies under the condition that the penalties are halved if they provide a minimum of 7 days of paid sick leave on a temporary basis and waived if they make them permanent.
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