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Right? It’s almost like … well, like the Democratic establishment is especially beholden to the big-donor class! 
/s
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December 6, 2022 (Tuesday)
Today, President Joe Biden traveled to Arizona to highlight how the CHIPS & Science Act is bringing innovation and jobs to the country. He visited a facility that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is building north of Phoenix, where he met with chief executive officers from several companies and with lawmakers. TSMC has recently committed to investing $40 billion in Arizona to produce advanced semiconductors, the very sort of investment the CHIPS & Science Act was designed to attract.
Biden noted that this investment will bring more than 10,000 construction jobs and 10,000 jobs in high tech, and he emphasized that the Democrats’ investment in the nation’s economy is paying off. The country has added jobs in every month of Biden’s administration—10.5 million of them—and exports are up, helping the economy to grow at 2.9% last quarter. And Walmart’s chief executive officer yesterday said that prices are coming down for toys, clothing, and sports equipment, while the chief executive officer of Kroger says prices for fresh food products are also easing.
But, Biden said, he is “most excited” about the fact that “people are starting to feel a sense of optimism as they see the impact of the achievements in their own lives. It’s going to accelerate in months ahead, and it’s part of the broad story about the economy we’re building that works for everyone: one…that positions Americans to win the economic competition of the 21st century.”
“Where is it written that America can’t lead the world once again in manufacturing?” Biden said. “We’re proving it can.”
Biden has apparently tried to undercut the radical right by ignoring its demands and demonstrating an America in which everyone works together to solve our biggest problems. His trip to Arizona was in keeping with that program, with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters that his trip was about “the American manufacturing boom we’re seeing all across the country thanks to, again, his economic policies… [and] in large part thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act the President signed into law—and a historic—let’s not forget—a bipartisan piece of legislation.”
But reporters immediately asked if President Biden would visit the border in Arizona, bowing to a right-wing talking point. Jean-Pierre responded that Biden would not engage in a political “stunt,” as the Republicans have been doing, and was instead going to Arizona “to talk about an important initiative that’s going to change Americans’ lives, specifically in Arizona.”
The follow-up? “If the President is not going to make time to visit the border during [this] trip…, will he do it…in the new year?”
The news from the right-wing faction in the nation often seems to steal the oxygen from the sober, stable politicians trying to address real issues and doing so with more than a little success.
Today, fewer eyes were on the $40 billion investment in Arizona than were on the verdict in the trial of the Trump Organization and the Trump Payroll Corporation. Late this afternoon, the jury found the two entities guilty on all counts for a range of crimes surrounding the company’s payments to its senior employees through apartments, school tuition, cars, and so on, to avoid taxes. The company was charged with scheming to defraud, criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records, and conspiracy. The key witness was Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud, grand larceny, and conspiracy last August and received a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against the company (but not against former president Trump or members of his family).
Trump promptly issued a statement. He blamed everything on Weisselberg and promised to appeal.
House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told reporters today the committee will make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. Those referrals, a source told Sara Murray, Annie Grayer, and Zachary Cohen of CNN, “will be focused on the main organizers and leaders of the attacks.” The Department of Justice is engaged in its own investigation, of course, but such a referral places a marker from a bipartisan group of lawmakers—many of whom are lawyers—indicating that they believe crimes have been committed.
Special counsel Jack Smith is now in charge of investigating the events surrounding January 6 as well as Trump’s theft of government documents, and news broke today that on November 22, just two days after he began work, he sent grand-jury subpoenas to officials in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, asking for all communications officials had with Trump, his campaign, or many individuals associated with the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration continues to govern. Tomorrow, Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff will convene a roundtable discussion with leaders from 13 Jewish groups from across the country to discuss the rise in antisemitism. Mr. Emhoff is the first Jewish individual married to a president or a vice president, and he has called out the escalating antisemitism as the former president elevates white supremacists.
“I do not see this just as a Jewish issue,” Emhoff said. “This is an issue for all of us. Because we’ve seen this before. This is how it started 70 years ago. So I don’t want it to feel normal. I don’t want people to think, ‘Well it’s just words, it’s just Kanye.’ No. This matters.”
And finally, tonight, as I finished up this letter, the news networks called the Georgia Senate runoff race for Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, giving the Democrats a 51–49 majority in the Senate. This means that the Democrats will have the power to issue subpoenas without getting Republicans to sign on to them. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post pointed out a few weeks ago that Democrats could use this power to demonstrate what actual congressional oversight should look like, compared to House Republicans’ threatened investigation of Hunter Biden, perhaps drowning out the Republicans’ tactic of endless “investigations” to tarnish their opponents.
After the results came out, Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser tweeted: “Huh, so Democrats managed to pick up a Senate seat in a cycle where they should have been crushed. Consider the possibility that Joe Biden is very good at his job.”
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i am the world’s greatest business man. it’s not my fault my employees are stealing millions from me, and my company is completely out of control. 
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He needed a plaque on his desk like Truman, but instead
[The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here]
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December 7, 2022 (Wednesday)
In October, prosecutors told a court they did not believe Trump had turned over all the documents with classified markings in his possession, and they were particularly concerned that he carried documents with him on flights between Mar-a-Lago and his properties in New York and New Jersey. On the advice of his lawyers, Trump hired a team to search for more documents, and they have found at least two more items marked classified and have turned them over to the FBI.
A spokesperson for Trump said in a statement that Trump and his lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted attack against President Trump and his family by the weaponized Department of Justice.”
Trump’s lawyers are doubling down on the idea that presidential immunity protects Trump from anything he did in office, even “seeking to destroy our constitutional system.” Today, Trump lawyer Jesse Binnall argued before the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that the former president cannot be sued by police officers and members of Congress for inciting the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, that he is immune from lawsuits even if he had urged his followers to “burn Congress down.”
Such an argument is fingernails down a chalkboard to anyone who knows anything at all about how the Framers of our Constitution thought about unchecked power.
There is, though, ongoing congressional review of the Trump administration. Last night the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”
The letter outlines the timing of the 2018 financial bailout of the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) with more than $1 billion paid in advance from Qatar. Qatar had repeatedly refused to invest in the property, but after Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates imposed a blockade on Qatar—after Kushner discussed isolating Qatar with them without informing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after that, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.
Because of this case, and a number of others covered in the letter, the committees have asked the Defense Department to provide any correspondence it had with the Kushners during the Trump administration, or about the various dealings in which business and government appeared to overlap. They have asked for the information by January 13, 2023.
The ideas of the Framers on the nature of government was also in the news today thanks to arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Moore v. Harper, a crucially important case about whether state legislatures have exclusive control of federal elections in their states, or if state courts can override voting laws they believe violate state laws or the state constitution. Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig, who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in October called Moore v. Harper “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.”
The case comes from North Carolina, where the state supreme court in February declared that new congressional and state legislature maps so heavily favored Republicans as to be “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Republican-dominated legislature says that it alone has the power to determine state districts and cannot be checked by state courts or the state constitution.
The legislature claims this power thanks to the “independent state legislature” doctrine, a new legal theory based on the election clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reads that "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” Lawyers for the legislatures today claimed this clause means that the legislature alone can determine election laws in a state.
In October, Luttig published an article in The Atlantic with the unambiguous title: “There Is Absolutely Nothing to Support the ‘Independent State Legislature’ Theory.” The subtitle explained: “Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution.”
Politicians, voting rights advocates, state attorneys general, senators, former governors, military officers, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the American Bar Association, and so on, all offered their own briefs to the court sharing Luttig’s position, with historians of the Founding Era agreeing that “[n]othing in the records of the deliberations at Philadelphia or the public debates surrounding ratification” supports the idea that state legislatures have exclusive power to regulate congressional elections. “There is no evidence that anyone at the time expressed [this] view…. [T]he interpretation is also historically implausible in view of the framers’ general fear of unchecked power and their specific distrust of state legislatures. There is no plausible eighteenth-century argument” for the independent state legislature theory, they say.
The historians also observed that those embracing the theory ignore the ample documentary evidence and rely extensively on a document that scholars proved long ago was written ten years after the actual Constitutional Convention.
Ouch.
The independent state legislature theory would also permit legislators to choose their presidential electors however they wish. Had such a theory been in place in 2020, Trump’s scheme for throwing out Biden’s electors in favor of his own would have worked, and he would now be in the White House.
The potential for this case to upend our right to have a say in our government has had democratic advocates deeply concerned, but observers watching the court today seemed to think the right-wing justices would not embrace the theory fully. Perhaps this is in part because they know well that their legitimacy is fraying as they are increasingly perceived as partisan politicians, or perhaps the Supreme Court is wary of undermining the idea of judicial review. In any case, both Marc Elias of Democracy Docket and Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog analyzed the justices’ questions today and guessed they would find a middle ground that preserves some measure of state courts’ oversight of legislatures’ election shenanigans.
Their analysis is only a guess, of course. Elias suggested the court would likely hand down a decision in the case in June.
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…did someone say something about a coup? What? What? Anyone?
TBH: it is really easy to joke about this. But not taking neofascists simply is no option.
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December 8, 2022 (Thursday)
“Well, good morning, folks. And it is a good morning,” President Joe Biden said in remarks today at the White House. “Moments ago, standing together with her wife, Cherelle, in the Oval Office, I spoke with Brittney Griner. She’s safe. She’s on a plane. She’s on her way home.”
A star center for the Phoenix Mercury of the Women’s National Basketball Association, who played in Russia during the off-season, Griner was arrested by Russian officials in an airport near Moscow on February 17, 2022, for drug smuggling after they allegedly found less than a gram of cannabis oil in her luggage. Griner had a prescription for medical marijuana from her doctor, but cannabis is still illegal in Russia. The arrest was just a week before Russia invaded Ukraine, and in the aftermath of that invasion, the administration’s attempts to bring Griner home failed. In August a court sentenced her to 9 years in prison and a fine of a million rubles (about $16,000).
Today the administration exchanged Griner for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death,” who was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the U.S. in 2012 after agreeing to provide military weapons to a terrorist organization targeting Americans.
The negotiations have been long and complicated, involving not only federal officials but also former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and negotiators from the Richardson Center for Global Engagement.
While Biden and Cherelle Griner celebrated Griner’s release, they emphasized their ongoing concern for Paul Whelan, detained in Russia since December 2018. Russia accuses Whelan of spying and refused to free him together with Griner. Biden promised the Whelan family the administration would not give up and would keep negotiating for his release.
Whelan’s brother, David, supported the decision to bring Griner home without Whelan. He expressed the family’s disappointment but said: “It is so important to me that it is clear that we do not begrudge Ms. Griner her freedom. As I have often remarked, Brittney’s and Paul’s cases were never really intertwined. It has always been a strong possibility that one might be freed without the other.”
It is worth noting that Russian operatives work to sow division in the U.S., and permitting Biden to win the freedom of a Black married lesbian while keeping a white former Marine in prison is the sort of ploy that could turn the repatriation of an American into a cultural flashpoint. Impressively, both the Griner family and the Whelan family avoided that trap and kept a united front.
Former president Trump, however, played along, complaining bitterly about “a ‘stupid’ and unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA!!!” that had secured the release of “a basketball player who openly hates our Country” instead of “former Marine Paul Whelan,” who “would have been let out for the asking.” Other MAGA Republicans followed suit.
In fact, Whelan was taken during Trump’s administration. John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security advisor when Whelan was arrested, said tonight on the CBS News Streaming Network that “the possibility of a Bout for Whelan trade existed back then, and it wasn’t made, for very good reasons having to deal with Viktor Bout.”
Bolton called today’s exchange “a huge victory for Moscow over Washington” and warned that such a swap would put Americans in danger around the world as bad actors grab them as bargaining chips.
Possibly. But the Russia to which Bout is going back in 2022 is not the same as the Russia of 2019, and the Biden administration’s work to bring Griner home had a domestic effect: it demonstrated that the U.S. government cares about all of its citizens.
The Department of Justice appears to be picking up the pace of its investigations into the events surrounding former president Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, as well as into his theft of documents with classified markings when he left the White House. Both of those investigations are now being directed by special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland after Trump declared he is running for president in 2024.
Officials in the offices of the secretary of state for Michigan and Arizona have confirmed that they received grand jury subpoenas just days after Smith sent grand jury subpoenas to local officials in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. The secretary of states’ offices have not offered details about what the subpoenas request.
The documents also remain in the news. After yesterday’s revelation that a team hired by Trump found at least two more documents with classified markings, a Trump spokesperson issued a statement that Trump and his lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted attack against President Trump and his family by the weaponized Department of Justice.”
It felt as if they were trying to get ahead of a story, and it turns out they were.
According to Spencer S. Hsu, Josh Dawsey, Jacqueline Alemany, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman of the Washington Post, lawyers for the Department of Justice have recently asked U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell to hold Trump’s office in contempt of court. He and his lawyers have not complied with a subpoena from May requiring them to return all documents in his possession with classified markings on them (the subpoena specified documents bearing classified markings, as opposed to classified documents, thus avoiding Trump’s insistence that he declassified things without leaving a record).
The reporters have sources who tell them that Trump’s lawyers refuse to sign a document saying all the relevant documents have been returned. The lawyers say that requiring them to make such a claim, under oath, is unreasonable, but it is likely they’re remembering lawyer Christina Bobb, who signed such a document in June 2022 only to discover that it was a lie and that Trump continued to hold documents. The reporters’ sources say lawyers don’t want to sign such a document on Trump’s assurances alone, and the Justice Department wants to be certain there are no more documents bearing classified markings in Trump’s possession.
Los Angeles Times legal correspondent Harry Litman tweeted: “Wow. DOJ wants to hold Trump in contempt for violation of subpoena. A natural outgrowth of the trickling out of documents and failure to comply with subpoena from last May. But quite a strike across the bow.”
According to the Washington Post reporters, Judge Howell will hold a hearing on the matter tomorrow.
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December 9, 2022 (Friday)
On Wednesday, December 7, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III hosted the defense ministers of Australia and the United Kingdom at the Pentagon to discuss the Australia–United Kingdom–United States Security Partnership, called AUKUS.
AUKUS is a security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It was formally introduced on September 15, 2021, and commits the three partners to cooperate on a wide range of security issues, including cybersecurity. Because it focuses on military capabilities, it is separate from the older intelligence-sharing alliance that includes all three of the same countries, as well as New Zealand and Canada.
That intelligence-focused group is called Five Eyes and has its roots first in secret meetings of U.S. and British code breakers in 1941, and then in the more formal sharing of intelligence to streamline cooperation during World War II. The conviction that democracies needed to share information during the Cold War broadened the alliance to include Australia and New Zealand as countries who could see certain intelligence. The name came from a term used in the classification of secret documents: “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was easier to say as “Five Eyes.”
The organization of AUKUS is separate from Five Eyes. It is part of the Biden administration’s focus on the Indo-Pacific region, seeking to support a region that is “stable, prosperous, and respectful of sovereignty,” as Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong put it on Tuesday in a different forum. Wong added: “U.S. engagement in the Indo‑Pacific makes an indispensable contribution to such a region…and I want to commend the administration for its significant investments in the Indo‑Pacific” alongside increased efforts on the part of Australia.
The U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific is designed to counterbalance the power and influence of China in the region. That focus has included U.S. investment there, as well as high-profile interactions with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—a political and economic alliance that includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, informally known as the Quad, which is a strategic security dialogue including Japan, Australia, India, and the U.S.
Just today, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan welcomed the first 100 Quad Fellows, 25 from each Quad country, to study in fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to promote “innovation and collaboration among our four great democracies and an enthusiasm for building a better tomorrow for the Indo-Pacific and the world.”
The organization of AUKUS last year created significant tension between the U.S. and France when Australia abruptly canceled a contract for a number of submarines built by France but powered by technology that reflects France’s limits on nuclear technologies. In place of the French submarines, which were running late and over budget as well, the Australians announced they would buy nuclear-powered submarines built with American technology.
Macron had made the Indo-Pacific, where France holds island territories, one of his priorities. He was angry at his country’s exclusion from discussions about the region, blindsided by the loss of the lucrative submarine contracts, and facing an election in which his chief opponent was a staunch nationalist who backs Russian president Vladimir Putin over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
So, in the wake of the AUKUS announcement, French President Emmanuel Macron made a strong statement of outrage, and for the first time in our shared history, France recalled its ambassador to the U.S. for consultations—less serious than a permanent recall, but still a breach. It also recalled its ambassador to Australia for consultations, but in our case, it was an especially significant rebuke because we identify France as our oldest friend and ally because of its significant military aid during the Revolutionary War (although France-allied Morocco recognized American independence the year before French troops arrived).
It was likely in part to patch up that rift that when Biden finally held a full-scale official state visit, the first leader invited—the one given the pride of place—was Macron. The effusive reaffirmations of friendship between the countries reinforced Macron’s standing both in the U.S. and in Europe. (E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post observed that the two men “competed over who could say the nicest things about the alliance between the two countries—and about democracy, liberty and justice.”)
But there was plenty of discussion in meetings about French concerns that regulations in the Inflation Reduction Act that require electric vehicle parts to be made in the U.S. will hurt France and Germany. Biden indicated that those restrictions were an attempt to make car batteries in the U.S. rather than depending on batteries from China, and could be tweaked to make sure they did not hurt allies. He said: “We’re going to continue to create manufacturing jobs in America, but not at the expense of Europe.”
Macron agreed, saying: “We want to succeed together, not against each other.”
On Tuesday, after that official state visit, Australia and the U.S. announced they were inviting Japan to integrate forces with the two countries, as Japan, too, worries about the power of China. The U.S. also said it would help to increase Australia’s military readiness.
On Wednesday, the AUKUS defense secretaries said they believed that AUKUS would “make a positive contribution to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region by enhancing deterrence.” They called for increased surveillance technologies in the area and more work with defense and academic communities. They also promised “continued openness and transparency with international partners on AUKUS.”
Next week, from December 13 to December 15, President Biden will host the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, inviting 49 African heads of state as well as the chair commissioner of the African Union, an organization of 55 African member states launched in 2002 to promote peace on the continent, advocate for the interests of the people of the continent in global affairs, promote sustainable development, and raise standards of living on the continent.
Today, Yasmeen Abutaleb of the Washington Post reported that the president is expected to announce that the U.S. supports the African Union’s membership in the G-20, an intergovernmental forum that includes most of the world’s largest economies and addresses issues important to the global economy. Those issues include climate change, financial policies, and international trade. Right now, the only country on the continent that is a member of the G-20 is South Africa, and it and other African nations have pushed for the African Union’s inclusion in the G-20, pointing out that African nations often bear the burden of decisions they were not part of making.
Judd Devermont, the White House National Security Council’s senior director for African Affairs, said in a statement: “It’s past time Africa has permanent seats at the table in international organizations and initiatives. We need more African voices in international conversations that concern the global economy, democracy and governance, climate change, health, and security.”
The administration’s determination to include all voices in global affairs is, in the short term, an effort to undermine China’s growing power in the Indo-Pacific region and Africa. But in the longer term, it should help our increasingly interconnected world to combat climate change and pandemic threats, while also reinforcing the idea that people have the right to consent to the government under which they live.
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Wow, that’s actually a big deal. Getting some different voices in there would be nice.
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So he’s still getting orders from Moscow?
It’s such a self-own. If Whelan could have been “let out for the asking” then why didn’t 45 ask?
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Only to those willing to see it as such (and thus, not to MAGAts).
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December 11, 2022 (Sunday)
The Keystone Pipeline ruptured Wednesday night near a creek in northern Kansas, spilling what its operator, TC Energy, says is about 14,000 barrels of oil. This is equivalent to about 588,000 gallons (an Olympic swimming pool holds about 666,000 gallons). TC Energy says the leak is now contained.
This is the largest land-based crude pipeline spill in nine years. Although the Keystone Pipeline has leaked 22 times before this, this week’s spill is bigger than all the others put together. A spill in July 2010 was more expensive because it affected the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.
The leak recalls arguments over the extension of the Keystone Pipeline, known as the XL Pipeline, that right-wing Republicans made a symbol of what they considered an antigrowth attack on U.S. energy production by Democrats.
A reminder: the Keystone Pipeline runs from oil sand fields in Alberta, Canada, into the United States and to Cushing, Oklahoma. It is fully operational. The XL Pipeline—the one that folks often confuse with the actual Keystone Pipeline—consists of two new additions to the original pipeline. As planned, they would have added up to 1700 new miles. One addition was designed to connect Cushing to oil refineries in Texas, on the Gulf Coast. That section was built and started operating in January 2014.
The second extension is the one that caused such a fuss. It was supposed to carry crude oil from Alberta to Kansas, traveling through Montana and North Dakota, where it would pick up U.S. crude oil to deliver it to the Gulf Coast of Texas. This leg crossed an international border, and thus the Canadian company building it needed approval from the State Department.
Frustrated by the U.S. government’s continuing focus on fossil fuels and worried that the Obama administration would approve the XL, climate change activists began to protest at the White House in August 2011. Likely recognizing the political danger of either approving or disapproving the permit, Obama tried to put it off until after the 2012 election, but congressional Republicans passed an order demanding a decision before it. Obama rejected the permit but let the company reapply.
Then–House speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) called Obama’s decision “sickening.” “By rejecting this pipeline, the president is rejecting tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. He is rejecting our largest trading partner and energy supplier. He is rejecting the will of the American people and a bipartisan majority of the Congress. If the president wants to spend the rest of his time in office catering to special interests, that’s his choice to make. But it’s just wrong. In the House, we are going to pursue a bold agenda of growth and opportunity for all.”
The XL was now a political football.
Climate activists continued to protest the extension of the pipeline, and in 2015, Obama rejected the XL. But, as Jamie Henn of 350.org, an organization dedicated to ending reliance on fossil fuels, recalled with irony, that was the same week that Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live on his road to the presidency. One of the first things Trump did in office was to speed up approval of the pipeline, which the State Department did in March 2017.
In the meantime, tensions were mounting over another pipeline that often got confused with the XL: the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP). The DAP was a 1,172-mile-long pipeline from North Dakota to southern Illinois, traveling through South Dakota and Iowa and crossing under the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, as well as under part of a lake near the Standing Rock Reservation of Lakotas, where Sitting Bull lived and was killed at the end of the nineteenth century.
Construction of the DAP began in June 2016, and at construction sites, protests escalated between workers and Indigenous Americans, especially the Lakotas, who had a long history of abuse at the hands of developers, whose water supplies were downstream from the pipeline, and whose sacred cultural lands were in its way. The pipeline was on private land, but Lakotas pointed to the potential of oil spills to destroy their water supply on the reservation downstream, as well as the destruction of their sacred lands. Calling themselves water protectors, they defended cultural preservation and the protection of the environment on which culture depends.
Conflicts between the Indigenous protesters and law enforcement officers protecting the construction sites escalated until in September 2016, workers on private land bulldozed an area Lakotas claimed as sacred. Security workers used attack dogs on the protesters who tried to protect the area, prompting the Departments of Justice and Interior to join the Army in issuing a joint statement to defend the right to protest and to ask the pipeline company to stop construction near Standing Rock until environmental impacts were clear.
But in October, law enforcement cleared the area. And on November 20, just four days after the other pipeline in the news—the Keystone Pipeline—leaked about 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota, police used water cannons on the protesters in freezing weather. On February 22, 2017, after newly elected president Trump had signed an executive order permitting the construction of both the XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, the National Guard and law enforcement officers cleared the last of the protesters.
Construction of the DAP was finished in April 2017.
But despite Trump’s support for the XL, judges slowed the construction of that pipeline, citing the need for more information about its environmental impact. Then, as soon as he took office, Biden revoked the permit for the construction and five months later, TC Energy halted the project. When oil prices skyrocketed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exacerbated the low oil production in place because of the pandemic, Republicans blamed Biden for killing the construction of the XL extension.
Now the U.S. has invested heavily in switching the United States to renewable energy with the Inflation Reduction Act, and a major oil spill resurrects concerns about the transportation of oil.
It is poetic timing. On Friday, as part of their yearlong investigation of the fossil fuel industry, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released documents from executives at major oil companies revealing that they recognize that their products are creating a climate emergency but that they have no real plans for changing course.
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December 12, 2022 (Monday)
Today the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) met virtually and reiterated their staunch support for Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. The G7 is a political organization of the world’s most advanced economies and liberal democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine joined the meeting.
The leaders issued a statement saying they would continue to back Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” That means continued military support for Ukraine as well as continuing sanctions against Russia, especially Russian oil, and aid to countries, especially those in Africa, suffering from the shortages caused by the war. They condemned Russia’s war crimes, including attacks on critical infrastructure, particularly energy and water facilities. They pledged to help civilians in Ukraine through the winter and promised to set up a donor program to funnel money to rebuild the country quickly.
But, they noted, Russia will have to pay to repair the damage it has done with its illegal war.
Also today, the foreign ministers of the European Union met in Brussels and pledged another 2 billion euros to Ukraine’s military support, signaling the E.U.’s continued support for Ukraine.
After reiterating their support for Ukraine, the G7 leaders reaffirmed their more general commitments to liberal democracy. They promised to take “urgent, ambitious, and inclusive climate action in this decade to limit global warming,” bolster biodiversity, realize gender equality, and improve “our capacity to prevent, prepare for and respond to future global health emergencies and to achieve universal health coverage.”
Taken together, the G7 and its international partners, the statement says, are demonstrating their resolve to work together to address both major systemic challenges and immediate crises. “Our commitments and actions,” they say, “pave the way for progress towards an equitable world…[and] a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable future for all.”
Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin has canceled his traditional end-of-the-year news conference in which reporters can ask him questions on live television. Despite his tight control of the media, it appears he is unwilling to risk questions about the war or the suffering economy in front of an audience.
Democracy is at risk in the U.S. as well as in Ukraine, of course, and as we wait for the report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, there have been some revealing developments.
On Saturday night, at the annual gala of the New York Young Republican Club in New York City, whose attendees included a number of far-right figures, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) deflected accusations that she and Trump ally Stephen Bannon were behind the events of January 6 by saying: “I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates condemned the statement, saying: “It goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of January 6th had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government.”
Greene then backed away from her statement, saying it was “sarcasm.”
We already know that Greene worked hard to get then–Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler on board with the attempt to challenge the legitimate electors for Biden, attended meetings about the challenges, and—according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows—asked for a presidential pardon.
Greene’s downplaying her statement after criticism from the White House suggests she is getting nervous about her role in the attack on the Capitol, or at least trying to distance herself from it.
She is not the only one. Today, Talking Points Memo began an explosive series covering texts to and from Meadows in the time around the 2020 election and its aftermath. These are texts Meadows voluntarily turned over to the January 6 committee, although we know they are not the entire catalog of communications because he stopped cooperating after an initial period.
The series, by Hunter Walker, Josh Kovensky, and Emine Yücel, examines texts not previously available to the public as well as some we have already seen. They show that 34 members of Congress wrote to Meadows as part of the attempt to install Trump back in the White House by counting out Biden’s legitimate electors.
The congress members identified in the texts include the ones we have come to expect to see leading the MAGA Republicans in the effort to steal the election: Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), for example, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), whom Trump advisor Jason Miller identified as “the ringleader on the Jan 6th deal.”
But those implicated either explained away their participation—unconvincingly—or refused to respond to inquiries from the Talking Points Memo reporters. Representative Brian Babin (R-TX) wrote to Meadows: “Mark, When we lose Trump we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship. Liberty!” Babin did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC), who wrote on January 17, three days before Biden’s inauguration: “Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall [sic] Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”
MAGA Republicans have hitched their political identity to Trump, and his star is falling after his candidates did so poorly in the 2022 election.
On Saturday the executive committee of the Texas Republican Party voted 62–0 for a resolution calling for the replacement of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, who has allied closely with Trump.
The former president is also in trouble as the investigation of the stolen national security documents proceeds. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon formally dismissed the special master she allowed Trump to claim, after the Eleventh Circuit decided she had no jurisdiction to take on the case. Philip Rotner in The Bulwark cut to the chase in the title of an article about the documents: “It’s Time to Indict Donald Trump.”
And then there is the January 6th investigation. Special counsel Jack Smith has sent a grand jury subpoena to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. Smith took office just before Thanksgiving and has already sent requests for information to five states—all of which were 2020 battlegrounds– asking for any communications officials there had with Trump, his allies, and his campaign.
And the report of the January 6 committee is scheduled to go to the printer this week.
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Reached via cell phone on Monday morning, Norman asked TPM for a chance to review his messages before commenting. “It’s been two years,” Norman said. “Send that text to me and I’ll take a look at it.”
TPM forwarded Norman a copy of the message calling for “Marshall Law!!” We did not receive any further response from the congressman
edit: i’m sure he was referring to this kind of marshall law /s
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December 13, 2022 (Tuesday)
This afternoon, in front of a crowd of more than 5,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House, President Joe Biden signed H.R. 8404, the Respect for Marriage Act, into law. The new law protects same-sex and interracial marriages after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision brought their safety into question.
The new law overrides the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which said the federal government could not recognize marriages that were not between a woman and a man. It also requires states to recognize marriages performed in other states. The Supreme Court protected the right to interracial marriage in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and the right to same-sex marriage in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges.
The Loving case came from the marriage of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., to avoid their home state of Virginia’s so-called Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized interracial marriage. When they returned to Virginia, police raided their home, and when Mrs. Loving showed them their marriage certificate, the officers said it was invalid in Virginia. The Lovings were charged with violating the law and pleaded guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” In 1959 the court sentenced them to a year in prison, suspending it if they left Virginia for at least 25 years. They moved to Washington, D.C., where they asked the American Civil Liberties Union to defend their rights.
The Obergefell case, which was one of the many that made up the Supreme Court’s decision, revealed another danger of states refusing to recognize marriage. James Obergefell and John Arthur married in Maryland, but their home state of Ohio refused to recognize the marriage. Arthur was terminally ill and wanted Obergefell identified as his surviving spouse on his death certificate. In June 2015 a majority of the court decided that states must recognize marriages performed in other states. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito all dissented. Arthur died before the decision was handed down.
The present Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with three far-right justices, has backed away from permitting the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights. When its radical majority overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he thought the right to same-sex marriage should also be revisited. He did not mention Loving v. Virginia—he himself is in an interracial marriage—but others noted that the court protected it, as well as the other cases, under the same clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
And so, Congress has protected the right to have marriages recognized, although not the right for same-sex couples to marry in states that prohibit it. That limit is due in part to the need for Republican votes to break a filibuster. In the final vote, 39 Republicans in the House supported the new law and 12 Republican Senators joined the Democrats to pass the measure, while 36 Republican Senators opposed it. The willingness of the Republicans to sign on reflects the popularity of same-sex and interracial marriage in the country: a Gallup poll in June 2022 showed support for same-sex marriage at 71%, and a September 2021 poll showed support for interracial marriage at 94%.
In his remarks about the law, Biden emphasized its bipartisan support, apparently hoping to build consensus on other issues going forward.
In 2012, Biden got out ahead of the Barack Obama White House when he publicly supported gay marriage. Today he reiterated his sentiments of a decade ago as he signed the bill into law. “Marriage is a simple proposition: Who do you love, and will you be loyal to that person you love?” Biden said in the signing ceremony. “It’s not more complicated than that. We all recognize that everyone should have the right to answer those questions for themselves without…government interference.”
As if right on cue, Trump-appointed Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk last week handed down a decision claiming that Title X, a federal program that offers grants to family-planning services, which can treat minors, “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.” If upheld, according to Ian Millhiser of Vox, that decision would undermine a minor’s right to privacy, including the right to contraception. The plaintiff in the case says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage,” and while he doesn’t say they’ve used contraceptive services, he doesn’t want them to have that option.
Still, the mood was upbeat at the White House today. New numbers out this morning show that inflation is slowing faster than expected, hitting 7.1% in November—still high, but lower than the 7.3% economists predicted, and down significantly from October’s 7.7%. The moderation was not just in a single product—like gas, which is selling for less than it was a year ago, before Russia invaded Ukraine—but across the board.
The worst category is the price of eggs, which is high because of a virulent outbreak of bird flu in the U.S., affecting layers but not birds raised for meat. But everything transported with diesel is also costly, as diesel is still close to $5 a gallon.
In remarks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Biden noted that this was the fifth month in a row of good news about inflation. “Prices are still too high,” he said, “but things are getting better, headed in the right direction.” He reiterated that his economic plan is working: “We’re just getting started.”
Finally, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility formally announced the first nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create the reaction. This is a huge deal. If it can be recreated at scale, it would provide limitless, carbon-free energy. While that application is still decades away, today’s announcement is the culmination of decades of work to get to this point. Heartfelt congratulation s* to the scientists.
So it has been a day that looks to the future. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person and the first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the position, opened today’s press briefing by calling this “an extremely historic day, a proud day for me and so many of us here at the White House and so many Americans…across the country.”
A reporter asked her whether the president had shared with her his reflections on this historic day, or if she had any thoughts. Uncharacteristically, she answered not for him, but for herself.
“This is a big day for me, but not just me; there are many colleagues that I work with here who are allies, who are also part of the community, who are very incredibly proud…. And the thing that I remember was, 10 years ago…[Biden] said something that, really, no other national elected official was saying at the time: that marriage is a proposition…about…who you love, but also about if you’re going to be loyal to that person. And I think that’s important.”
Jean-Pierre continued: “[Biden] has always been an ally. I think I speak for many of us at the White House today that we could not be prouder to be working for this administration, to be working for this particular President, and to working on all the issues that are going to change Americans’ lives….”
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- I separated this word to avoid the annoying balloons.
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December 14, 2022 (Wednesday)
Today, survivors of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Club Q is an LGBTQ club in the city of about 500,000 people. The shooter opened fire there on the night of November 19-20, during a dance party. He used an AR-15 style rifle, murdering five people and wounding 19 more. Six others were hurt in the chaos.
Pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that calls LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and abusers,” survivors of the mass shooting said that Republican rhetoric was “the direct cause” of the massacre. Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drew a wider lens: “The attack on Club Q and the LGBTQI community is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader trend of violence and intimidation across our country.”
James Comer (R-KY), who will likely chair the committee in the upcoming Republican-controlled House, disagreed. Blaming Democratic policies that he claims are soft on crime, he said that “Republicans condemn violence in all forms,” and that the survivors have his “thoughts and prayers.”
But Comer’s insistence that Republicans do not celebrate guns is not entirely honest. Just last year, four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Michigan that killed four students and wounded seven other people, Comer’s colleague Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on Twitter a Christmas photo of him, his wife, and five children holding assault weapons in front of a Christmas tree. The caption read: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) immediately posted her own family photo with her four sons all posing with firearms.
In 2020, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.”
Democrats do not do this. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 but, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, that was the last time a Democrat used a gun in an ad.
The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan.
Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.
In the 1960s, leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. They emphasized individualism, the idea that a man should take care of his own family, defending it with weapons, if need be, and fighting off a dangerous government and those who wanted to use the government for “socialism” or “Marxism.”
In 1972, the Republicans still embraced the idea that the government had a role to play in making the country safer for everyone, and their platform called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns.” But in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun safety. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms.
In 1980 the National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan. This was the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate, and showed an abrupt change in what had, until 1977, been a sporting organization that emphasized gun safety and rejected the idea of working with manufacturers of guns and ammunition.
In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.
But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”
Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.
After a gunman trying to kill Reagan in 1981 paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases.
The NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike the law down, and in 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.
Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shootings as one in which four people are shot, not including the shooter: in 2021 alone, we had 692 of them.
While gun ownership has actually declined since the 1970s, there are far more guns in fewer hands: a study in 2017 showed that about half of US guns are owned by about 3% of the population, and that was before Americans launched a new gun-buying spree after 2020.
Ten years ago today, a 20-year-old in Newtown, Connecticut, shot and killed 20 children between the ages of six and seven, and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the wake of those horrific murders, Congress tried to pass a bipartisan bill requiring background checks for gun purchases, but even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—supported background checks, and even though 55 senators voted for the measure, it died with a filibuster.
Dave Cullen, who writes about school shootings, argued yesterday in a New York Times op-ed that there is reason to hope we will finally address our gun problem. The Sandy Hook Massacre galvanized Americans into pushing back to reclaim our safety, as Shannon Watts and congressional representative Gabrielle Giffords—herself a survivor of gun violence–—organized the gun safety movement. That movement, in turn, got a dramatic boost from the activism of the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which a 19-year-old gunman murdered 17 people and injured 17 others.
This June, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to acknowledge that support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was “off the charts, overwhelming,” and 15 Republican senators bucked the NRA to vote for basic gun safety legislation.
But, also in June, the Supreme Court handed down the sweeping New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision requiring those trying to place restrictions on gun ownership to prove similar restrictions were in place when the Framers wrote the Constitution. Already, a Texas judge has struck down a rule preventing domestic abusers from possessing firearms on the grounds that domestic violence was permissible in the 1700s.
The decision is being appealed.
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i don’t think i remember hearing about that before. i guess that happened last month:
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That might be the most depressing thing i will read today.
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then you get to this part:
fucking hells.
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