i don’t know. that goose in the middle looks pretty contemplative to me… beware the avian uprising
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March 20, 2023 (Monday)
As rumors swirl about what may be an upcoming indictment against former president Donald Trump from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Republican Party leaders are in a bit of a pickle.
For years now, they have gone along with—and some have fed—Trump’s insistence that the government is stacked against him and therefore against the right wing. Some have gone along out of conviction, undoubtedly, but others almost certainly were trying to keep the base voters without whom the Republicans cannot win an election.
Now, as it appears that some of the legal cases in which Trump is embroiled might be coming to the point of indictments, they are in a difficult position. Trump is blowing up his social media website with increasingly unhinged accusations and demanding that his supporters “take our nation back.” His language echoes that of the weeks before the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, during which Trump supporters tried to overturn the results of a presidential election. And few Republican leaders actually want to launch a war against the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
So far, at least, Trump’s demands for his supporters to rally around him again have produced anemic results, suggesting his power is waning. When senior reporter for HuffPost Christopher Mathias reported from outside the Manhattan DA’s office, he found that the media there far outnumbered the protesters. “So many reporters here I just saw a reporter start interviewing someone but they turned out to be a reporter too,” he tweeted.
As a number of people have pointed out, Trump rallied his supporters in late 2020 around the idea that a key election had been stolen. His supporters are likely to find the idea that he must be protected over financial crimes committed in New York, possibly related to a sexual encounter with an adult film actress, less compelling.
And then there is the issue that those who turned out to support him in January 2021 found themselves on the hook for crimes, all on their own, without his help. Just today, a jury found four more people affiliated with the Oath Keepers guilty of conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an official from doing their duty, destruction of government property, and civil disorder. The jury found two others guilty of entering and remaining on restricted grounds. Meanwhile, Trump spent the day “truthing” on social media.
So, if Trump’s influence is waning and he is perhaps facing indictments—remember, there are a number of investigations outstanding, and for all that Trump is talking about an indictment about his hush-money payment, we do not know what any of them will turn up—what direction should Republicans who signed on with Trump now jump?
Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, and Ryan Lizza of Politico reported this morning that House leadership has gathered for their annual three-day retreat at a luxury resort in Orlando, Florida. Led by House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), far-right representatives were preparing to demand that members of the Manhattan district attorney’s office testify about any such indictment.
Indeed, this afternoon, the chairs of three House committees—Jordan, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY), and House Administration Committee chair Bryan Steil (R-WI)—sent a letter to Bragg criticizing his investigation as an “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority,” even though there has been no announcement of any charges.
The chairs claim they want to know if federal money was used in the investigation, but Representative Daniel Goldman (D-NY) noted: “Defending Trump is not a legitimate legislative purpose for Congress to investigate a state district attorney. Congress has no jurisdiction to investigate the Manhattan DA, which receives no federal funding nor has any other federal nexus.”
Representative Glenn Ivey (D-MD), a former state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, went further, saying that he was “stunned” that the House Republicans were trying to obstruct a criminal investigation and intimidate an elected state law enforcement official.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says the chairs are just “asking questions.” He appears to be trying to prevent an attack on the legal system while also keeping his far-right extremists happy. He says that people should not protest if Trump is arrested, but also seems to be trying to keep his claim on Trump voters by claiming that Bragg’s investigation is politically motivated.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has his own problems with the whole situation. He wants Trump’s voters but does not want to be saddled with a scenario in which Trump tries to hole up at Mar-a-Lago to resist an indictment in New York. Today, DeSantis said he would not get involved in an extradition order, although Florida law allows him to intervene in a contested extradition.
His lack of support for the former president apparently outraged Trump, who promptly accused DeSantis of sexually assaulting a teenaged boy. The tension between the two Republican leaders has prompted speculation that Trump will fight extradition if only to force DeSantis to choose between alienating Trump’s supporters or kowtowing to the former president. Either would wound his presidential hopes, perhaps fatally.
Other Republicans are trying to deflect attention from the former president’s potentially criminal behavior and to focus instead on what they say is overreach by prosecutors. But when former vice president Mike Pence this weekend said he was “taken aback at the idea of indicting a former president of the United States,” former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele tweeted “Why the hell are you ‘taken aback by the idea of indicting a former President’ who has engaged in criminal behavior? Why continue to make excuses for Trump who would rather see you hanged & rancid behavior you decry in others?”
Other Republicans have apparently decided to stay out of this whole mess. It is notable that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) voice is missing right now, as he recovers from his fall.
Meanwhile, the Fox News Corporation’s troubles over the defamation lawsuit against it by Dominion Voting Systems have just gotten worse. Fox News producer Abby Grossberg has sued the company in New York and Delaware, saying company lawyers tried to coerce her into giving misleading testimony in the lawsuit to set up her and FNC personality Maria Bartiromo to take the blame for the airing of Trump’s conspiracy theories against Dominion.
Regardless of how that lawsuit proceeds, Grossberg’s quite graphic account of the misogyny at the network will not help its profile right now.
And what is most astonishing about all of today’s sordid news is that, so far, nothing has happened. If and when it does, it’s going to be quite a ride.
What did happen today, though, is that the Biden administration issued the president’s economic report—which I will cover in more depth in the next few days—and that American aid worker Jeff Woodke, who was taken prisoner more than six years ago in Niger and held captive by a terrorist group, has been released. Secretary of State Blinken told reporters, “As you know, I have no higher priority or focus than bringing home any unjustly detained American, wherever that is in the world.” He thanked the government of Niger, Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens, and “all of those who have been working at the department” to get Woodke released.
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March 21, 2023 (Tuesday)
As you know, I try to write this record of modern America from the perspective of what stories will matter in 150 years (about the span between the present and the Civil War).
So, for all the chop in the water about the former president facing indictments, the story that really seems uppermost to me today is the visit China’s president Xi Jinping made today to Moscow for a meeting with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters today that China and Russia would both like “to see the rest of the world play by their rules rather than the ones that…are enshrined in the U.N. Charter and what everybody else is…following.” Kirby said the White House sees the relationship of Xi and Putin as a “marriage of convenience.” He explained:
“In President Putin and Russia, President Xi sees a counterweight to American influence and NATO influence certainly on the continent and elsewhere around the world. In President Xi, President Putin sees a potential backer.” Putin needs Xi’s support because of his misadventure in Ukraine. There, Kirby said, Putin is “blowing through inventory. He’s blowing through manpower. His military is getting embarrassed constantly. They’ve lost greater than 50 percent of the territory that they took in the first few months of this war. He needs help from President Xi, and that’s what this visit was all about.”
“Now,” he added, “whether it results in anything, we’ll see.”
When a reporter asked Kirby if Xi would provide lethal aid to Russia, Kirby answered, “We don’t think that China is taking it off the table, but they haven’t moved in that direction. We’ve seen no indication that they’re about to or — or fixing to provide lethal weapons.”
The Institute for the Study of War concluded that the outcome of the meeting was likely less than Putin wanted. It noted that Putin represented the meeting as showing the two countries working together against an adversarial West, while Xi only said the two countries were working together. This is a significant step down from the stance China took before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, in which it declared it had a “no limits partnership” with Russia, suggesting China is not inclined to give Russia all the support it needs for that war.
Putin has been trying to rally states in Africa to his cause and likely hoped Xi would help that effort, but he did not.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia put out a statement deepening their cooperation, but Sam Greene, Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London, noted that the economic benefits of the statement all flowed from Russia to China, including Russia’s announcement that it will use yuan for foreign transactions with Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
“This summit…brings home exactly how much Putin has lost,” Greene wrote. “Prior to the war—even after 2014—Putin occupied a position of strategic maneuverability. He could arbitrage between east and west, reaping windfalls for his regime along the way. That’s all gone now. Putin tells his people he’s fighting for Russia’s sovereignty. In truth, he’s mortgaged the Kremlin to Beijing.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky today in a surprise trip to Ukraine at Zelensky’s invitation. It is the first visit of a Japanese prime minister to a country at war since World War II and demonstrates Japan’s growing international foreign policy presence. Last month, when Japan pledged $5.5 billion in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Kishida said: “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is not just a European matter, but a challenge to the rules and principles of the entire international community.” Today, he confirmed Japan’s “solidarity and unwavering support for Ukraine.”
The next most important issue of the day, to my mind, was President Joe Biden’s designation of two new national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906: Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada and Castner Range in Texas. These are Biden’s second and third new monument designations. Last fall he created the Camp Hale–Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado, and in 2021 he restored the protections to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase–Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments that Trump had removed. Both of the new monuments cover land sacred to Indigenous American tribes. Together, they protect nearly 514,000 acres.
Biden also directed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to start the process of designating a marine sanctuary in the Pacific covering 777,000 square miles.
Biden is advancing his promise to conserve American lands, but he is also answering criticism of his administration’s approval of the controversial Alaska Willow oil drilling project on March 13. ConocoPhillips had existing leases for the project, and it has bipartisan support in Alaska, where locals expect it will bring jobs and income, so after debate, the administration let the project move forward. But environmentalists and those who recognize the immediate need to address climate change vehemently opposed the project, launched lawsuits immediately, and criticized the president.
“Our national wonders are literally the envy of the world,″ Biden said as he announced the new monuments. “They’ve always been and always will be central to our heritage as a people and essential to our identity as a nation.″
But while conservation groups and tribal members cheered the new designations, the new Republican governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo, said that the federal government was confiscating Nevada land—a red-hot issue in the home state of the Bundy ranchers who have engaged in armed standoffs with law enforcement officers over public land—and said the new Nevada monument is “a historic mistake that will cost Nevadans for generations to come.”
None of this is to say that Trump’s troubles are not important. Indeed, the indictment of a president is unprecedented, and there is good reason to watch it closely, not least because the Republican Party has tied itself to him so completely it is now responding to the growing tide of legal news by calling for the investigation or even the arrest of those handling Trump’s many lawsuits– an alarming development.
Right now, though, much of what we are seeing is being churned up by Trump himself, and it feels far less important than the fact it appears that neither the legal nor the political momentum is in his favor.
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March 22, 2023 (Wednesday)
This week, news has been focused on the former president’s possible indictment for paying $130,000 in hush money to adult film performer Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their 2006 affair before the 2016 election. The information currently being thrown about has been shaped by Trump himself and is obviously suspect (among other things, he has apparently raised $1.5 million since he claimed he would be arrested on Tuesday).
Although Republican lawmakers have no more idea than any of the rest of us do what the Manhattan grand jury might have seen, or what charges might be brought against Trump, they have tried to gloss over the scandal by claiming it is about a non-disclosure agreement or that it happened seven years ago or that its investigation is “a political witch hunt perpetrated by one of the far left radical socialist district attorneys,” as Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said. But as journalist Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky explained today in Public Notice, the payment was a big deal in the larger scheme of American democracy.
Trump bought Daniels’s silence because he was willing to break laws in order to get elected. Then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen paid Daniels for her story in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. Cohen testified that he paid her through a shell company to keep Trump’s connection to the payment hidden. Then Trump reimbursed Cohen for “legal fees.”
That’s a problem with regard to business filings and tax fraud. It is also a problem for the campaign finance laws intended to protect clean elections. Cohen’s payment was a contribution to the Trump campaign because it was made “in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.” The payment was intended to make sure voters didn’t hear another sex scandal in October 2016, just after the Access Hollywood tape came out in which Trump talked vulgarly about sexually assaulting women, when it might have hurt his chances at election. The $130,000 contribution was far above the individual limit of $2,700, and the Trump campaign did not disclose it.
This is not small potatoes. When the issue came to light, Cohen pleaded guilty for his role in the payments, and he was sentenced to three years in prison. Cohen testified that he made the payments at Trump’s direction.
This is also not an isolated incident. Trump has proved himself more than willing to cheat to win elections. In the 2020 presidential election season, before he tried to overthrow the election altogether, he tried to strong-arm Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the son of the Democratic candidate about whom he was most worried: Joe Biden. Trump knew that the media would run with an announcement of an investigation, wounding Biden’s candidacy by keeping the story in the news even without any real investigation behind it.
The Trump campaign had done much the same thing in 2016. According to the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated the ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, Trump’s people were willing at the very least to work alongside Russian operatives to weaken Trump’s Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign also boosted Trump’s standing in the 2016 election season with the recurring refrain of the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails, convincing voters—falsely—that she had committed crimes.
The pending issue of the hush-money payment is not just about 2016, and it is not just about Trump. That today’s Republican leaders have not condemned any of his attempts to cheat speaks volumes about the party. As Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) pointed out today, when “Cohen was arrested, indicted, convicted, and went to prison for participating in an illegal hush money payment scheme to Stormy Daniels, not a single Republican leader complaining now said a thing about what happened to Michael Cohen.” So why the rush to defend Trump in the same case?
It appears Republicans have gotten to the point that they don’t believe they can win a free and fair election, and in their conviction that Democrats will destroy the country, they believe cheating to win is justified. They cannot condemn Trump because he delivered what they wanted: a victory.
In a democracy, the way parties are supposed to win elections is by making a better case for being in power than their opponents do. Losing elections is supposed to make leaders think deeply about how better to appeal to voters. That system keeps all parties constantly honing their policies, thinking through problems, benefiting their constituents.
Our election laws are designed to try to hold the playing field level, and a party should want to keep the system fair in order to keep itself healthy. But if a party is willing to cheat to win, it no longer has to work on policies that appeal to voters; it can simply game the system to dismantle the competition on which democracy depends and instead create a one-party state.
There are many legal problems in Trump’s front yard these days. Some, like his theft of documents with markings bearing the highest level of classification and his attempt to overturn the Georgia results for the 2020 presidential election, are heating up fast, and their significance is clear.
But for all that the case we are currently hearing so much about seems less serious on its face than the other things charged to Trump’s account, a hush-money payment to silence someone whose story might have affected the 2016 election is no laughing matter.
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Respectfully disagree with this part. I do not think they believe this for a second, it’s simply that Dems stand between them and dictatorial control, and therefore must be eliminated. They have set destroying this country, or at least it’s democratic foundation, as an openly stated goal.
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Yeah, that stuck in my craw too. It’s what they claim, but likely not what they believe. What I think they mostly believe is that rich people deserve to be as rich as possible, and that they deserve to use their political office to get as rich as possible too.
Not that it matters much just what they believe. They’re the ones whose policies, when they can enact them, are more effectively “destroying” the U.S.
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I think you’re right, but she’s a historian, and we’re trained to focus on what we can back up with documentation, and since that’s what they say, that’s what she’s going with…
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Sure, but she claims to know that Republicans have a “conviction” – that they’re convinced, and actually believe – that Democrats “will destroy the country.”
I mean yeah, report what people said or wrote, but it seems naive to also say that people always believe what they say. Especially with patent liars like today’s Republicans!
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True, but I’m guessing she’s basing it on whatever sources she’s employed in working on the newsletter long term. It is something they do regularly say, too.
I do agree. It’s a problem with some historians that some are never willing to speculate outside of what they see as “hard facts”… Inferences can be made based on their actions in private and public, not just what they’ve said on the official record. But of course, getting an alternative view from the GOP is difficult, because even the anti-Trumpers refuse to go on record about what’s actually happening behind the scenes with the party.
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I’m aware, and I’m saying they may have a lot of reasons for saying it as a lie. Some Republicans may well be convinced that Democrats are destroying this country, but she simply can’t know that, let alone that they all are convinced of that.
Anyway, it seems more useful to me to characterize such a statement as one among an arsenal of strategic Republican lies, rather than a sincere conviction.
I guess it becomes an almost philosophical issue; in many cases, we have to know someone really well to feel convinced that they’re actually, honestly convinced of something.
Yes, that’s interesting as a sometimes useful and even necessary method, and I think speculation can of course be useful to readers of apparently fact-based interpretation, when identified as speculation.
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I understand that. It’s the difference between being professional in your statements, and somebody like me who can be a bit more free in my mocking and less-than-unbiased interpretation of exactly what they are saying vs what they are doing. I respect HCR’s objectivity and professionalism, just not feeling bound by those principles for myself.
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Many of them do, and many more need additional ones…
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there’s maybe also the question of how do they conceive of the word “country.” their world view is patriarchal and white supremacist so a place where women can lead self determined lives ( for example ) would be anathema to them.
their country would be ( and america already sometimes is ) a horrible place to live - but that doesn’t mean they don’t honestly want it that way.
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March 23, 2023 (Thursday)
While the latest machinations from Trump are taking up oxygen, the debt ceiling crisis hasn’t gone away. Indeed, just as it is becoming more and more urgent, Republican far-right extremists are becoming more committed to using the opportunity to blow up the economy as a way to get their wishes.
The uncertainty that followed the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank illustrated just how quick and how dangerous even a relatively minor banking crisis could be, but far-right Republicans are not backing off on their threat to refuse to raise the debt ceiling without concessions from Democrats. Two months ago, in response to a question about “whether you think this debt ceiling is going to be used as a bargaining chip in some way that could turn dangerous?” the chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), said, “I believe it will and I believe it has to.”
Now, in the wake of the banking crisis, Arrington says the uncertainty after the banking instability means that “[t]his is the best time to do it.” Republicans are arguing that the inflation of the past year is the result of pandemic-era spending and that by threatening the debt ceiling, they can bring that spending under control.
But let’s be very clear on this: the debt ceiling is not about future spending. It is about the amount of money Congress authorizes the Treasury to borrow in order to pay obligations that already exist. It is not associated with any individual bill, and it is not an appropriation for any specific program. It enables the government to borrow money to pay for programs in bills already passed. If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling when necessary, the government will default on its debts, sparking a financial catastrophe.
Future spending is in the government’s annual budget. The budget process starts when the president submits a detailed budget request to Congress for the fiscal year that starts on October 1, usually by the first Monday in February, though sometimes that is delayed (as it was this year). The president’s budget shows what the administration thinks is important to fund and how much that will cost.
Congress is then supposed to consider the president’s budget, hold hearings to ask administration officials why they need certain items or have gotten rid of others, and then develop its own plan. This budget resolution, as it is called, sets amounts that Congress thinks are appropriate for different parts of the budget. Congress is supposed to pass that budget resolution by April 15 (even though it rarely does). Appropriations bills then fund the items in the budget.
President Biden introduced his detailed budget on March 9, deliberately using it as a way to signal his determination to use the government to help ordinary Americans rather than the wealthy and corporations. He is operating under the belief that the economy grows fastest and does better for most people when the government invests in jobs, education, and social services rather than when it tries to free up as much capital as possible for wealthy investors. This is the Republican plan, which is based on the idea that the wealthy will invest in the economy and create jobs. Biden called for funding programs—while also cutting the deficit—by rolling back the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, by imposing a 25% tax on billionaires, and by raising the tax on stock buybacks.
Republicans have attacked Biden’s budget, but they have not produced one of their own. They likely can’t produce one, because the only way for House Republicans to deliver the cost savings they have promised is to cut Social Security and Medicare, cuts they have advocated for years. But at his State of the Union address, when prominent Republicans yelled that he was a liar for suggesting they wanted to cut those popular programs, Biden backed them into vowing not to cut them.
Then, earlier this month, in response to a request from Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Congressional Budget Office wrote that if the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations stay in place as Republicans wish and defense spending, Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ programs are all protected—as Republicans now say they want to do—even zeroing out all other discretionary spending in the budget will not balance it by 2033.
Arrington and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) say they will release the Republican budget after April 15, blaming Biden’s own late budget for their delay. But because they have not launched an official plan, they have left an opening for the far-right House Freedom Caucus of around three dozen lawmakers to step into the gap.
On March 10, Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was in front as members of the Freedom Caucus issued a statement laying out the demands they want met before they will consider raising the debt ceiling. They want laws that cut current spending by stopping student loan relief, clawing back all unspent Covid-19 funds, and repealing the $80 billion in appropriations for the Internal Revenue Service and all the monies appropriated by the Inflation Reduction Act for addressing climate change. They want to cap future spending at 2022 levels, claiming a cap will cut “the wasteful, woke, and weaponized federal bureaucracy.” They demand further business deregulation and more work requirements on programs like Medicaid.
If all that gets written into law, Freedom Caucus members “will consider voting to raise the debt ceiling.” Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), whose 11-point plan to “rescue America” was the one Biden pointed to most frequently as a Republican plan to cut Social Security and Medicare because it called for every law to end in five years and have to be repassed, said he was “very optimistic” about the Freedom Caucus’s plan. Just this week, McCarthy added the idea of tying changes to the permitting process for oil and mining development to the debt ceiling.
But, in fact, the things the Republicans call for are not popular in the country, and the administration has been laying out piece by piece how the devastating cuts in the proposal would impact families, consumers, the elderly, and working Americans, all to increase tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
In any case, while it claims to be eager to negotiate over the budget, the Biden White House maintains it will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, especially as the current financial woes are attributable in large part to the explosion of the deficit and debt under Trump. Republicans seem hell-bent on doing so, expecting that the Democrats will ultimately back down rather than permit the Republicans to destroy the economy. In the past, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has managed to bring Republicans around, but now he is out of commission from his fall.
It is against this backdrop that Republicans have rushed to defend Trump, who is pretty clearly trying to whip up his supporters to violence. His antics have gotten so extreme that he posted an image today of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg beside an image of himself brandishing a baseball bat. Today, citing Trump’s apparent calls for violence, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered that the jurors in the case of E. Jean Carroll’s rape accusations against Trump be kept anonymous for their own safety. The case goes to trial next month.
Republicans seem to be working with Trump to keep him in the news, perhaps aware that he is drowning out both the debt ceiling crisis and their inability to produce a budget.
Three days ago, Jim Jordan (R-OH), James Comer (R-KY), and Bryan Steil (R-WI) demanded that Bragg deliver to them all information related to his investigation into Trump. Today the Manhattan DA’s general counsel Leslie B. Dubeck correctly called their demand an “unprecedented” federal intrusion into an independent local investigation that unlawfully undermined New York’s sovereignty. She added: “The Letter only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested the next day and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene. Neither fact is a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry.” She noted that Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, had written a letter to Jordan encouraging Congress to investigate Bragg.
Now a different case is suddenly imperiling Trump. Yesterday a federal appeals court ruled that Trump attorney Evan Corcoran must turn over records to Special Counsel Jack Smith and testify before the grand jury in the investigation into Trump’s theft of classified documents. Judge Beryl Howell said last week that Trump could not use attorney-client privilege to block Corcoran’s participation because prosecutors in Smith’s office had shown sufficient evidence to support the claim that Trump had committed a crime, triggering the “crime-fraud” exception to attorney-client privilege. Trump’s lawyers appealed, and the appeals court agreed with Howell.
A Trump spokesperson told ABC News: “There is no factual or legal basis or substance to any case against President Trump.”
Corcoran is testifying tomorrow.
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March 24, 2023 (Friday)
A follow-up to last night’s examination of the confusion among the Republicans about their budget plans: today when a reporter said to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) that the chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey Arrington (R-TX), had said that he and McCarthy were finalizing a list of proposals to give to President Biden about spending cuts, McCarthy answered: “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
Noise also continues from former president Donald Trump, who early this morning posted on social media that his indictment could lead to “potential death & destruction”; hours later, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg received a death threat in an envelope with white powder in it. For three days this week, Russian accounts have emailed bomb threats to the court buildings where the grand jury is meeting.
Tomorrow, Trump will hold a rally in Waco, Texas, where a 1993 government siege to extricate the leader of a religious cult who witnesses said was stockpiling weapons led to a gun battle and a fire that left seventy-six people dead.
Although a Republican investigation cited “overwhelming evidence” that exonerated the government of wrongdoing, right-wing talk radio hosts jumped on the events at Waco to attack the administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton. Rush Limbaugh stoked his listeners’ anger with talk of the government’s “murder” of citizens, and Alex Jones dropped out of community college to start a talk show on which he warned that the government had “murdered” the people at Waco and was about to impose martial law.
After the Waco siege the modern militia movement took off, and Trump is clearly using the anniversary to tap into domestic violence against the government to defend him in advance of possible indictments.
But will it work? His supporters turned out on January 6, 2021, when he was president and had the power—they thought—to command the army to back him. In the end, that didn’t happen. Since then, Trump’s foot soldiers have been going to prison while he dines at Mar-a-Lago and rails about how unfairly he has been treated.
Trump is also in more trouble today, as Judge Beryl Howell ruled last week that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, former top Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, former national security advisor Robert O’Brien, former top aide Stephen Miller, former deputy chief of staff and social media director Dan Scavino, and former Trump aides Nick Luna and John McEntee all have to testify before the federal grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Special counsel Jack Smith had subpoenaed these members of the Trump administration, and Trump had tried to stop their testimony by claiming it was covered by executive privilege. Howell rejected that claim. In the past, she rejected a similar claim by arguing that only the current president has the right to claim executive privilege and Biden had declined to do so. Meadows is the key witness to Trump’s involvement in the events of January 6.
Also today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal of so-called right-to-work legislation passed in 2012 by a Republican-controlled legislature, whose members pushed it through in a lame-duck session without hearings.
That legislation had a long history. U.S. employers had opposed workers’ unions since the organization of the National Labor Union in 1866, but the rise of international communism in the early twentieth century provoked a new level of violence against organized workers. In 1935, as part of the New Deal, Democrats passed the National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed it into law.
The Wagner Act confirmed workers’ right to organize and to bargain with employers collectively (although to appease southern Democrats, it exempted domestic and agricultural workers, who in the South were mostly Black). It also defined unfair labor practices and established a new National Labor Relations Board that could issue cease and desist orders if workers testified that employers were engaging in them.
The Wagner Act gave workers a unified voice in American politics and leveled the playing field between them and employers. But while most Americans of both parties liked the Wagner Act, right-wing Republicans hated it because it put large sums of money into the hands of labor officials, who used the money to influence politics. And organized workers had backed Democrats since the 1860s.
So, in 1947, a Republican-led Congress pushed back against the Wagner Act. The previous year, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had launched “Operation Dixie” to organize Black workers, which seemed a threat to segregation as well as white employers. Together, business Republicans and segregationist Democrats passed the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Ohio Senator Robert Taft (who was the son of President William Howard Taft) claimed that the Taft-Hartley Act would simply equalize power between workers and employers after the “completely one-sided” Wagner Act gave all the power to labor leaders.
The Taft-Hartley Act limited the ways in which workers could organize; it also went after unions’ money. Although the Wagner Act had established that if a majority of a company’s workers voted to join a union, that union would represent all the workers in the company, it didn’t require all the workers to join that union. That presented a problem: if workers were going to get the benefits of union representation without joining, why should they bother to pay dues?
So labor leaders began to require that everyone employed in a unionized company must pay into the union to cover the cost of bargaining, whether or not they joined the union.
The Taft-Hartley Act undermined this workaround by permitting states to get rid of the requirement that employees who didn’t join a union that represented them must pay fees to the union.
Immediately, states began to pass so-called right-to-work laws. Their supporters argued that every man should have the right to bargain for his work on whatever terms he wanted, without oversight by a union. But lawmakers like Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who pushed a right-to-work law in his own state, were clear that they were intent on breaking the power of organized workers. He was determined to destroy the political power of unions because, he said, their leaders were stealing American freedom. They were, he said, “more dangerous than Soviet Russia.”
Michigan had been known as a pro-union state, but in 2012, Republicans there pushed through two right-to-work laws over waves of protest. Repealing the laws has been a priority for Democrats, and now that they are in control of state government, they have made it happen.
Joey Cappelletti of the Associated Press notes that twenty-six states currently have right to work laws, and although Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work law in 2017, it has been 58 years since a state repealed one. Indiana voters repealed theirs in 1965; Republicans put it back into place in 2012.
Republicans say that since the neighboring states of Indiana and Wisconsin have right-to-work laws—although there were huge protests when those laws went into place in 2012 and 2015—Michigan’s repeal of right to work will make that state less attractive to employers.
But after signing the law today, Governor Whitmer embraced a different vision for the state, saying: “Today, we are coming together to restore workers’ rights, protect Michiganders on the job, and grow Michigan’s middle class.”
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March 25, 2023 (Saturday)
On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was visiting with a friend who lived near Washington Square in New York City when they heard fire engines and screams. They rushed out to the street to see what the trouble was. A fire had broken out in a garment factory on the upper floors of a building on Washington Square, and the blaze ripped through the lint in the air. The only way out was down the elevator, which had been abandoned at the base of its shaft, or through an exit to the roof. But the factory owner had locked the roof exit that day because, he later testified, he was worried some of his workers might steal some of the blouses they were making.
“The people had just begun to jump when we got there,” Perkins later recalled. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump, the[y] were trying to get that out and they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump. The…weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”
By the time the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was out, 147 young people were dead, either from their fall from the factory windows or from smoke inhalation.
Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25.
By the next day, New Yorkers were gathering to talk about what had happened on their watch. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” Perkins said. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”
The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith—who would a few years later go on to four terms as New York governor and become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928—went to visit the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief. “It was a human, decent, natural thing to do,” Perkins said, “and it was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”
“This was the kind of shock that we all had,” Perkins remembered.
The next Sunday, concerned New Yorkers met at the Metropolitan Opera House with the conviction that “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action….” One man contributed $25,000 to fund citizens’ action to “make sure that this kind of thing can never happen again.”
The gathering appointed a committee, which asked the legislature to create a bipartisan commission to figure out how to improve fire safety in factories. For four years, Frances Perkins was their chief investigator.
She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission 'till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”
And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.
Perkins later mused that perhaps the new legislation to protect workers had in some way paid the debt society owed to the young people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”
But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state’s labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his “misleading statements” were “cruel and irresponsible.” She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.
In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
Frances Perkins, and all those who worked with her, transformed the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire into the heart of our nation’s basic social safety net.
“There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done,” Perkins said. “It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”
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March 26, 2023 (Sunday)
Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff landed midday today in Accra, the capital of Ghana, a country of about 33 million people slightly larger than Michigan on Africa’s west coast.
The 54 countries in Africa vary widely in language, religion, and culture, and Harris will visit three countries which initially seem unrelated. During her week on the African continent, in addition to Ghana, Harris will also visit Tanzania, a country bigger than Texas of about 62 million people on the east coast that is known for its natural wonders—Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti plain are both on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List. She will then visit neighboring Zambia, a landlocked country slightly larger than Texas with about 20 million people, where about one third of the country is game management areas or national parks, including one that protects the famous waterfall Mosi-oa-Tunya, or Smoke that Thunders—also known as Victoria Falls.
Harris’s visit is part of the Biden administration’s plan to counter Chinese and Russian influence on the African continent. That continent is rich in natural resources, and other countries want access to them. Between 2000 and 2016, China invested heavily in a number of African nations, sometimes in exchange for resources, sometimes for political alliances. It has become Africa’s second most important trading partner with about $250 billion in trade in 2021, just slightly behind the European Union, while U.S.-Africa trade in 2021 was about $64 billion.
Russia’s interests in Africa have tended toward support for authoritarian regimes. Russia focused on Africa after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate it from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources.
The Wagner Group has supported anti-democratic movements across the semi-arid Sahel region, which stretches across the northern part of the continent in a band above Ghana. After recent failures in Ukraine, the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, says he will turn his attention back to Africa, although it is unclear that he will be able to raise the necessary forces to make a major push.
African nations have historical reasons to be leery of European governments, who have tended to want to exploit the continent’s resources for themselves at the expense—often the deadly expense—of Africa’s inhabitants. They are also leery of the U.S., for when African nations began to throw off colonial rule, the Soviet Union tended to support those movements while the U.S. tended instead to support right-wing forces. More recently, the Trump years continued to weaken ties between the U.S and Africa as the United States withdrew from engagement with what the former president allegedly called “sh*thole countries.”
The Biden administration has worked to repair relations between the U.S. and Africa on the stated principle that Africans must have control over their own countries and their own future. The administration hosted the U.S.-Africa leaders summit in December 2022, where it announced that it backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20, welcoming the 55 member states of the African Union to the intergovernmental forum that focuses on global issues. The African Union has wanted admission to the G20 for years, noting that they are currently left out of discussions that affect them—most recently, the plans to address the coronavirus—and the administration’s promise that it would back the African Union’s admission was an important sign of the administration’s focus on strengthening ties between the continent and the U.S.
Since then, the Biden administration has pledged more than $6.5 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent.
Harris is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit and will emphasize the deep connections between Africa and the spread of Africans around the world, a process known as the African diaspora. In Ghana, Harris will visit the Cape Coast slave castle, used to hold enslaved Africans before they were shipped across the Atlantic for sale, primarily in the Caribbean. But the connections between Africa and the Americas reach far beyond the legacy of enslavement: Accra is the burial place of early twentieth-century U.S. writer and intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, for example. Harris will also visit Lusaka, Zambia, where as a child she visited her maternal grandfather when he worked there as a civil engineer.
The administration’s outreach to Africa is not simply a way to counter China and Russia on the continent. The White House explained that Harris is visiting these three countries specifically because their governments are investing in their democracies at a time when democracies around the globe are under siege.
Harris will launch her meeting with Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo. When the two leaders met before, in September 2021, Akufo-Addo identified the key issue facing Africa and the world, saying: “[O]ur big challenge—and it is a challenge of all those who want to develop democratic institutions on our continent—is to ensure and reassure our people that democratic institutions can be a vehicle for the resolution of their big problem—that is economic development as the means to eradicate poverty on the continent.”
This is a great summary of the central issue for democracy today.
In Africa the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, alongside a rise in interest rates, has made it hard for a number of nations to pay their international debts, which quintupled between 2000 and 2020. At the same time, the Russian blockade of Ukraine has cut food supplies while international sanctions against Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine has cut fertilizer supplies to the continent, increasing food shortages.
Those crises offer possibilities for international cooperation to invest in the African continent, especially as the new African Continental Free Trade Area agreement smooths trade across the continent and, with luck, brings rural regions into better contact with more urban areas.
But those same crises also open the way for strongmen to take over by promising to solve their country’s shortages. Russian disinformation in Africa drives pro-Russian and anti-European sentiment; a new Russian social media network launched on the continent in February 2022. Last week, Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed to have written off $20 billion of African debt and blamed the West for his inability to deliver the fertilizer he had promised.
But while democracy is under siege around the world, Freedom House, the non-profit organization that tracks the health of democracy worldwide, noted last September that African countries have shown important efforts to expand the rule of law and strong democratic institutions. Ghana, for example, has become more democratic but is threatened by the instability to its north.
Still, in August, the pan-African, nonpartisan research network Afrobarometer found that African voters want democratic institutions. According to a report from Chatham House that reviewed the polling, Africans “believe that the military should stay out of politics, that political parties should freely compete for power, that elections are an imperfect but essential tool for choosing their leaders, and that it is time for the old men who cling to power to step aside.” Seventy percent of Africans say they prefer democracy to any other form of government, 82% reject “strongman” rule, 77% reject one-party rule, and 75% reject military rule (even in countries that have recently experienced military coups).
Those impressive numbers in a continent of very young people—the median age is just 19—are an obvious reason for the U.S. to want better relations at a time when both President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have been very clear that they believe democracy at home depends at least in part on democracy overseas.
And the danger to democracy at home was crystal clear last night, as former president Trump held a rally in Waco, Texas, where in 1993 a 51-day government siege of the headquarters of a religious cult gave birth to the modern anti-government militia movement. Since then, Waco has been a touchstone for violent attacks on the government. There, last night, Trump stood on stage with his hand over his heart while loudspeakers played not the national anthem but a song recorded by January 6 insurrectionists. Footage from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol played on a screen behind him.
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