Yeah. Biden’s pretty much a straightup fan of capitalism, and HCR’s uncritical admiration for him can be annoying.
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Thank you for not blaming me for being an asshat.
Because I am today. I feel that either something is very wrong with world, or with me. And I’m taking it personally, either way.
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July 13, 2023 (Thursday)
Yesterday, Trump supporter James Ray Epps, Sr., sued the Fox News Network for having “destroyed” the lives of Epps and his wife. The suit blames the network for lying to its viewers that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, a lie that inspired Epps to travel from his home in Arizona to Washington, D.C., to protest on January 6, 2021.
In the aftermath of the riot, the suit says, “[h]aving promoted the lie that Joe Biden stole the election, having urged people to come to Washington, DC, and having helped light and then pour gasoline on a fire that resulted in an insurrection that interfered with the peaceful transition of power, Fox needed to mask its culpability. It also needed a narrative that did not alienate its viewers, who had grown distrustful of Fox because of its perceived lack of fealty to Trump.” And so, the suit says, the network—especially personality Tucker Carlson—turned on Epps, “promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol” even after federal officials had cleared him.
Epps is requesting compensatory and punitive damages, as well as court costs.
In April the Fox Corporation settled a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after Fox News personalities falsely claimed the voting machine system had switched votes meant for Trump. Fox paid $787.5 million. Fox and several of its on-air personalities are still facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit from another voting company, Smartmatic, for their disinformation campaign involving that company.
Both Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are also suing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who used his fortune to promote the idea that the election was stolen. Lindell vowed, “I’ll spend everything I have to save the country I love.” Tuesday, James Bickerton of Newsweek reported that Lindell claims he has lost $100 million and is selling off equipment after major retailers stopped carrying his products.
In Reliable Sources, CNN journalist Oliver Darcy reported today that three men associated with Rupert Murdoch in the early days of creating the Fox Corporation expressed their “deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company.” Preston Padden, Ken Solomon, and Bill Reyner wrote that they “never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become.”
In emails, Murdoch made it “very clear” to Padden “that he understood that the 2020 election had not been stolen,” but “Fox continued to perpetuate the ‘Big Lie’ and promote the Jan 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in D.C.” The men claimed that others who worked with them to establish Fox “share our resentment that the reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news.”
Padden told Darcy that he sees an "obvious connection between January 6 and Fox News.”
Despite the costs of their past false allegations, the Fox News Channel continues to be a conduit for Trump’s misinformation. As Judd Legum wrote today in Popular Information, some of the same figures who pushed the Big Lie are continuing to push the story that President Biden took money from China, despite the fact the “informant” who provided that story has now been indicted as a Chinese spy and is on the run from U.S. authorities.
“A responsible news organization would respond to the indictment of a key source with self-reflection and incorporate new facts into their reporting,” Legum writes. “But not Fox News. When facts arise that cut against their narrative, Fox News simply enlarges their conspiracy theory to accommodate them.” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have called for an investigation into whether the Republicans on the committee have been duped by Chinese operatives.
The upcoming election is in the news not only because of the role of disinformation in our elections, but also because of voting challenges. Today, Sam Levine and Andrew Witherspoon of The Guardian reported that Florida Republicans are cracking down on voter registration groups that focus on people of color, levying more than $100,000 in fines since September 2022 on 26 groups for errors like submitting an application to the wrong county. Voter registrations have dropped compared to 2019, the most recent year preceding a presidential election.
A study by Doug Bock Clark today in ProPublica showed that about 89,000 of close to 100,000 challenges to voter registrations in Georgia were filed by just six right-wing activists. Most of the rest of the challenges came from just twelve more people. Those making the challenges were helped by right-wing organizations, and they appeared to target those believed to vote for Democrats.
House Republicans traveled to Georgia on Monday to reveal what they call the “most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in over 20 years.” Four of the five Republicans on the House Administration Committee pushing the bill voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Committee markup on the bill began today.
Also today, in New York, the appellate division of the state Supreme Court has ordered the state to draw new congressional maps. In 2022 an independent redistricting commission deadlocked, and the state legislature, controlled by Democrats, drew districts that were so favorable to their party that Republican challenges won and the courts turned to a neutral expert to draw the districts. The resulting lines created highly competitive districts in which a number of Republicans won.
Now the court says that map was temporary and the commission should take another crack at redistricting. If it deadlocks again, Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo explained, the Democrat-dominated legislature can draw its own map and, so long as it stays within the court’s rules, might enable Democrats to pick up additional seats in New York to offset Republican gerrymanders elsewhere.
A rare bellwether for the election came from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a Washington Post op-ed on July 10, arguing that the Supreme Court is not, in fact, radical; it is, just as always, “a politically unpredictable center.” McConnell claims the Democrats want the court to “advance their party’s priorities” while instead it “weighs each case on its merits.”
Washington Post legal columnist Ruth Marcus sees McConnell’s attempt to minimize his own transformation of a center-right Supreme Court into a hard-right body as a sign that he recognizes the extremism of the court might well cost him the chance to regain the position of Senate majority leader. It was McConnell, after all, who blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in March 2016, arguing against all precedent that an appointment in March was too close to the 2016 presidential election. That stonewalling gave Trump the opportunity to nominate Neil Gorsuch. Then, in 2020, McConnell rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in late October when voting in the presidential election was already underway.
“Two seats that should have gone to Democratic presidents were instead handed to Trump,” Marcus notes. “Thank you, Senator McConnell.” She continued: “And the new justices delivered. Abortion rights, gone. Affirmative action, gone. Gun rights, dramatically expanded. The administrative state, deconstruction underway. Religious liberties, triumphant; separation of church and state, not so much. Does this sound ‘ideologically unpredictable’ to you?”
Marcus notes that these decisions, particularly the overturning of abortion rights, are unpopular, perhaps sparking McConnell’s eagerness to downplay the significance of his remaking of the court. Indeed, in Iowa, the first state to hold a Republican caucus, the state legislature just rushed through a ban on abortions after six weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant.
In Iowa, more than 60% of adults say abortion should be legal, while just 35% say it should be illegal. Nationally, an AP/NORC poll conducted in late June showed that only about 23% of Americans support a full ban on abortions.
Today, in a move that should significantly expand access to contraception, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved over-the-counter birth control pills for the first time. Seventeen FDA advisors from different scientific disciplines voted unanimously in May to expand access, saying that this type of pill, which contains the hormone progestin, has been used safely in the U.S. for 50 years and that its 93% success rate offers the significant public health benefit of preventing unintended pregnancies. The pills are expected to become available sometime in 2024.
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July 14, 2023 (Friday)
Traditionally, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds the annual budget and appropriations of the Department of Defense, passes Congress on a bipartisan basis. Since 1961 it has been considered must-pass legislation, as it provides the funding for our national security. For all that there is grumbling on both sides over one thing or another in the measure, it is generally kept outside partisanship.
Late last night, House Republicans broke that tradition by loading the bill with a wish list from the far right. Republicans added amendments that eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the Defense Department; end the Defense Department program that reimburses military personnel who must travel for abortion services; bar healthcare for gender transition; prevent the military academies from using affirmative action in admissions (an exception the recent Supreme Court decision allowed); block the Pentagon from putting in place President Biden’s executive orders on climate change; prevent schools associated with the Defense Department from teaching that the United States of America is racist; and block military schools from having “pornographic and radical gender ideology books” in their libraries.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted: “We don’t want Disneyland to train our military. House Republicans just passed a bill that ENDS the wokism in the military and gives our troops their biggest pay raise in decades.”
In fact, the events of last night were a victory for right-wing extremists, demonstrating that they hold the upper hand in the House. Representatives Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), both military veterans, expressed shock that so many Republicans voted to strip abortion protections from military personnel. “[T]hey will say, ‘this is a really bad idea,’ ‘this is not where the party should be going,’ ‘this is a mistake,’” Sherill said. “[W]ell then why did everyone but two people in the Republican conference vote for this really bad amendment?”
The bill passed by a vote of 219 to 210, largely along partisan lines. This year’s budget is $886 billion as the U.S. modernizes the military to compete with new threats such as the rise of China, and it provides a 5.2% increase in pay for military personnel.
But Senate Democrats will not vote for it with the new partisan amendments and are working on their own measure. While there will be a conference committee to hammer out the differences between the two versions, McCarthy has offered a position on that committee to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), one of the extremists. This is an unusual offer, as she is not on the House Armed Services Committee.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said: “Extreme MAGA Republicans have hijacked a bipartisan bill that is essential to our national security and taken it over and weaponized it in order to jam their extreme right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”
“We are not going to relent, we are not going to back down, we’re not going to give up on the cause that is righteous,” Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) said.
Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) summed up the vote today on Twitter. “The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the bill that funds all of our military operations. It is typically bipartisan and is about as serious as Congress gets. What weapons of war we fund, which allies we share them with, how we recruit. National security is a BFD. We can have our political debates about any number of issues but it is generally understood that when Americans are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend us, it’s time to check the crazies at the door. But today, the crazies won.
“They won first because [McCarthy] put the crazies in positions of power. But second because none of the “moderate” Republicans had the courage to stay the hell out of KrazyTown…. Is every member of the [House Republican Conference] a homophobic, racist, science denying lunatic? No. But the lesson of today is that the ones who aren’t are massive cowards completely unfit for any position of leadership.
“There is space—and demand—for reasonable differences of opinion in our democracy. This isn’t about whether we agree. It’s about whether we can trust that—differences aside—we trust that we’ve got each other’s back if we ever find ourselves in a foxhole together. That’s usually a metaphor, conflating the horrors of war with the much lower-stakes lives that most of us are fortunate enough to lead. But today, the entire [House Republican Conference] told us—both literally and metaphorically—that they don’t give a damn about the rest of the unit.”
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When one group is actively supporting the enemy, being in a foxhole with them is asking for a Kabar in your back. That is the only sense in which MAGAts “have our backs.”
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July 15, 2023 (Saturday)
[Warning: the 13th paragraph of this piece, beginning “They did,” graphically describes racial violence.]
July 16 marks the 160th anniversary of the most destructive riot in U.S. history. On July 13, 1863, certain Democrats in New York City rose up against the Lincoln administration. Four days later, at least 119 people were dead, another 2,000 wounded. Rioters destroyed between $1 and $5 million in property including about fifty buildings, two churches, and an asylum for orphaned Black children. In today’s dollars, that would be between $20 million and about $96 million in damage.
While the Republican and Democratic parties swapped ideologies almost exactly 100 years after the New York City draft riots, the questions of state and federal power, race, and political narratives, and how those things came together in the United States are still with us.
The story of the draft riots began years before 1863. As soon as South Carolina’s leaders announced in late December 1860 that the state was seceding from the Union, New York City’s Democratic leaders made it clear they sympathized with those white southerners who opposed the idea that the federal government had the power to stop the spread of enslavement. In early January 1861, just days after South Carolina announced it was leaving the Union, before any other state joined it, and months before Republican Abraham Lincoln took office, New York City Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that New York City should secede from the Union, too.
By 1858 the city was at the center of the cotton trade (the roots of the Lehman Brothers financial services firm, which collapsed spectacularly in 2008, were in pre–Civil War cotton trading), its harbor full of ships carrying cotton and the products it enabled enslavers to buy from Europe. Democrats, organized as Tammany Hall, controlled New York City thanks to the votes of workingmen, especially Irish immigrants.
By 1860, Democrats were losing ground to the Republicans, who rose rapidly to national power after 1854. Republicans believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the South but that Congress could stop the institution from moving to newly acquired lands in the West. Republicans controlled New York state.
In his address to the Common Council of the city calling for it to create a “Free City” of New York, Wood declared that “a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable” and claimed the city had “friendly relations and a common sympathy” with the “Slave States.” But his call was not only about the South. He complained bitterly about the government of New York state. He opposed the taxes the Republican legislature had levied, claiming it was plundering the city to “enrich their speculators, lobby agents, and Abolition politicians.” Wood claimed that New York City had lost the right of self-government. If it broke off from the United States, he argued, the city could “live free from taxes, and have cheap goods….”
Wood’s call didn’t get much traction on its own, but for the next two or three months it did prompt New Yorkers to argue about how much the federal government should offer to the southern states to induce them to return. That all changed when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard fired on federal Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. New Yorkers rushed to support the United States. In the largest public meeting held until that point in U.S. history, more than 100,000 people rallied in Union Square, a spot historian of Union Square Michael Shapiro notes they chose in part because of its name.
Growing Republican strength created a problem for Democrats. Republicans were attracting workingmen by promising to keep the West free for folks like them rather than hand it over to a few wealthy enslavers. And now the city was rallying behind the Republican war effort.
To hold on to their voters and thus to their power in New York City, Democratic leaders hammered on the idea that the Republicans intended to set Black Americans up over white men. In September 1862, Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation, issued at a time when Black men were prohibited from service in the army, enabled Democrats to argue that the Republicans were sending white men to their deaths for Black people.
Their racist argument worked: Lincoln’s Republicans got shellacked in the 1862 midterm elections, in part because of the Union’s terrible losses on the battlefields that year, but also because of the relentless racist campaign of the Democrats. Nonetheless, Lincoln went forward with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Furious, Democrats harped on the devastating news from the battlefields, where men were dying in firefights and of disease.
Then, in March, Congress passed a federal draft that took enrollment of soldiers away from the states and included all male citizens from ages 20 to 35 and all unmarried men between 35 and 45 in a lottery for military service. Because the Supreme Court had decided in 1857 that Black men were not citizens, they were not included in the draft. New York City’s Democratic leaders, led now by Mayor George Opdyke, railed against the federal government and its willingness to slaughter white men for Black people.
The Republican New York Times, in contrast, called the draft a “national blessing” that would settle, once and for all, whether the government was strong enough to compel men to fight for it. As for the Democrats threatening to stop the government’s enrollment of soldiers, the editor of the New York Times scoffed: “Let them do their worst.”
They did. The first lottery was held on July 11, and on the morning of July 13, Democrats attacked federal draft officers with rocks and clubs. Rioters then spread through the city, burning the homes and businesses of prominent Republicans. Storm clouds rolled up in the afternoon, mingling with the smoke to turn everything dark. Late in the day, the rioters turned their wrath onto the city’s Black residents. After burning the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children, they hunted down individual Black men, beating 12 to death before attacking a cart driver who stumbled into their path after putting up his horses. Symbolically killing him three times, several hundred men and boys beat him to death, then hanged him, then set fire to the body.
The rioters had thought they represented the will of the American people, only to find themselves confronted by U.S soldiers, including a number from New York. The soldiers had come straight from the battlefields to help put down the riots.
In fact, the tide of the war had abruptly turned just before the draft riots. At the Battle of Gettysburg in early July, U.S. soldiers wiped out a third of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s fighting force. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to General U.S. Grant, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and cutting the Confederacy in half, making it difficult for the Confederacy to move food, goods, and troops. The rioters seemed to be attacking the government just as it started to win.
And then, just two days after the draft riots ended, on July 18 the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment took heavy losses in an assault against Battery Wagner protecting Charleston Harbor. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was one of the nation’s first Black regiments, raised after the Emancipation Proclamation permitted Black men to join the army. It suffered 42% casualties in the battle, losing more than 270 of the 650 soldiers who fought there. “The splendid 54th is cut to pieces,” wrote Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis, a soldier of the regiment. “The grape and canister shell and Minnie swept us down like chaff…but still our men went on and on.”
The contrast between white mobs railing against the government and murdering their Black neighbors while Black soldiers fought and died to defend the United States was stark. No fair-minded person could miss it.
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July 16, 2023 (Sunday)
It has rained, and rained, and rained, and rained here in Maine since mid-June, and when it wasn’t raining, we’ve been fogged in. The rain and fog beats the hideous heat in the Southwest, the smoke in the middle of the country, the fires in the West, and the floods in New England and upstate New York, but we’re all a little soggy.
We had a summer of rain and fog when I was about 10, and my overwhelming memory of it is sitting on the floor day after day as the rain tapped on the roof and the windows were white with fog, with the friend I had known since we met in a playpen, building with my grandmother’s sets of faded mahjong blocks. We didn’t play the game itself. We built cities and roads and towers all over the floor, and then we knocked them all down and put the blocks back into their box in sets exactly as my grandmother had left them before we were born.
To this day, I could put those blocks back in perfect order, even though I still don’t know what the symbols mean or how the game is played.
And now, fifty years later, my friend and I are managing another rainy summer together, this time without the mahjong blocks— so far, anyway, although I know just where they are— but with lots more watery walks.
Stopping by her house for just such a walk had me standing in my friend’s driveway a few days ago, where I caught this image in a puddle. I loved that it looked like a picture of a normal summer day… but it was reflected through rain.
It feels like this week is going to be busy. Going to take the night off and get a good night’s sleep to be ready for it.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
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The rain in Maine stays mostly in the plain?
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July 17, 2023 (Monday)
A story in the New York Times today by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman outlined how former president Donald Trump and his allies are planning to create a dictatorship if voters return him to power in 2024. The article talks about how Trump and his loyalists plan to “centralize more power in the Oval Office” by “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
They plan to take control over independent government agencies and get rid of the nonpartisan civil service, purging all but Trump loyalists from the U.S. intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Defense Department. They plan to start “impounding funds,” that is, ignoring programs Congress has funded if those programs aren’t in line with Trump’s policies.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and who now advises the right-wing House Freedom Caucus. They envision a “president” who cannot be checked by the Congress or the courts.
Trump’s desire to grab the mechanics of our government and become a dictator is not new; both scholars and journalists have called it out since the early years of his administration. What is new here is the willingness of so-called establishment Republicans to support this authoritarian power grab.
Behind this initiative is “Project 2025,” a coalition of more than 65 right-wing organizations putting in place personnel and policies to recommend not just to Trump, but to any Republican who may win in 2024. Project 2025 is led by the Heritage Foundation, once considered a conservative think tank, that helped to lead the Reagan revolution.
A piece by Alexander Bolton in The Hill today said that Republican senators are “worried” by the MAGAs, but they have been notably silent in public at a time when every elected leader should be speaking out against this plot. Their silence suggests they are on board with it, as Trump apparently hoped to establish.
The party appears to have fully embraced the antidemocratic ideology advanced by authoritarian leaders like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who argue that the post–World War II era, in which democracy seemed to triumph, is over. They claim that the tenets of democracy—equality before the law, free speech, academic freedom, a market-based economy, immigration, and so on—weaken a nation by destroying a “traditional” society based in patriarchy and Christianity.
Instead of democracy, they have called for “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy, which uses the government to enforce their beliefs in a Christian, patriarchal order. What that looks like has a clear blueprint in the actions of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has gathered extraordinary power into his own hands in the state and used that power to mirror Orbán’s destruction of democracy.
DeSantis has pushed through laws that ban abortion after six weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant; banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity (the “Don’t Say Gay” law); prevented recognition of transgender individuals; made it easier to sentence someone to death; allowed people to carry guns without training or permits; banned colleges and businesses from conversations about race; exerted control over state universities; made it harder for his opponents to vote, and tried to punish Disney World for speaking out against the Don’t Say Gay law. After rounding up migrants and sending them to other states, DeSantis recently has called for using “deadly force” on migrants crossing unlawfully.
Because all the institutions of our democracy are designed to support the tenets of democracy, right-wingers claim those institutions are weaponized against them. House Republicans are running hearings designed to prove that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are both “weaponized” against Republicans. It doesn’t matter that they don’t seem to have any evidence of bias: the very fact that those institutions support democracy mean they support a system that right-wing Republicans see as hostile.
“Our current executive branch,” Trump loyalist John McEntee, who is in charge of planning to pack the government with Trump loyalists, told the New York Times reporters, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
It has taken decades for the modern-day Republican Party to get to a place where it rejects democracy. The roots of that rejection lie all the way back in the 1930s, when Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. That system ushered in a period from 1933 to 1981 that economists call the “Great Compression,” when disparities of income and wealth were significantly reduced, especially after the government also began to protect civil rights.
Members of both parties embraced this modern government in this period, and Americans still like what it accomplished. But businessmen who hated regulation joined with racists who hated federal protection of civil rights and traditionalists who opposed women’s rights and set out to destroy that government.
In West Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend, at the Turning Points Action Conference, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) compared President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs, which invested in “education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and big labor and labor unions.” She noted that under Biden, the U.S. has made “the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.”
Well, yeah.
Greene incorrectly called this program “socialism,” which in fact means government ownership of production, as opposed to the government’s provision of benefits people cannot provide individually, a concept first put into practice in the United States by Abraham Lincoln and later expanded by leadership in both parties. The administration has stood firmly behind the idea—shared by LBJ and FDR, and also by Republicans Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others—that investing in programs that enable working people to prosper is the best way to strengthen the economy.
Certainly, Greene’s speech didn’t seem to be the “gotcha” that she apparently hoped. A March 2023 poll by independent health policy pollster KFF, for example, found that 80% of Americans like Social Security, 81% like Medicare, and 76% like Medicaid, a large majority of members of all political parties.
The White House Twitter account retweeted a clip of Greene’s speech, writing: “Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families.”
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The unholy Trinity, right there. 
I’ll never be able to think about the rise of Reagan in the same way after reading this.
They are all soaking in some version of this…
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July 18, 2023 (Tuesday)
“I approve this message.”
Joe Biden’s Twitter account put that line over an ad using the words of Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Turning Points Action Conference speech from last weekend, in which she set out to tear down the president’s policies but ended up making him sound terrific.
The description she intended to be derogatory—that Biden “had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on”—was such an argument in Biden’s favor that the Biden-Harris campaign used it to advertise what the Democratic administration stands for: “[p]rograms to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions.”
Generally, Biden and Harris have so far made the case for their reelection by meeting with voters in their home districts, emphasizing job growth and infrastructure investment in those districts, seemingly trying to demonstrate—without fanfare—that a well-run Democratic government can help ordinary Americans. But Greene’s misfire was just too good not to highlight. The programs she was denigrating are, in fact, enormously popular.
Biden has generally stayed out of the headlines that involve the 2024 election, giving Republicans free rein to define themselves for the American people.
That definition became clearer this morning, when former president Trump wrote on the right-wing Truth Social network that the Department of Justice’s special counsel Jack Smith has issued him a target letter associated with the investigation into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A target letter usually means that prosecutors have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime. It offered Trump four days to appear before the grand jury to tell his side of the story, an offer Trump is expected to refuse.
Then, it is likely that he will be indicted.
Trump reacted exactly as one would expect, called Smith “deranged,” and claiming his own legal troubles were political: an attempt on the part of President Biden to eliminate his chief 2024 rival. (There is no sign that Biden has touched the investigation, but of course Trump tried to eliminate Biden in 2020 by pushing Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s work with Ukrainian company Burisma.)
Trump harped on the idea that the investigation into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election is “A COMPLETE AND TOTAL WEAPONIZATION OF LAW ENFORCEMENT,” an accusation echoed by Trump loyalists Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom were also involved in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) also echoed the accusation that the target letter is a sign of political “weaponization” of government, prompting Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) to respond: “As Speaker, you are expected to uphold the rule of law. A target letter does not reveal what evidence the grand jury saw, nor what all the charges might be. Attacking a potential indictment before seeing the evidence and charges is irresponsible.”
But if Trump received the target letter on Sunday, why did he complain about it only today?
That delay might have had something to do with another legal issue: today’s hearing about the national security documents case, overseen by Judge Aileen Cannon. One of the issues to be discussed at that hearing was setting a date for the trial. The Department of Justice wants to go to trial in December; Trump wants to delay it until after the 2024 election.
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that today’s target letter changes the calculations for the documents trial because no matter what Cannon decides, it seems likely that Trump will face another federal trial in Washington, D.C., over the events surrounding January 6, 2021. The Washington, D.C., trials for those involved in the events of January 6, 2021, have moved forward with few delays.
This week’s bad legal news for Trump did not end there.
On Friday of last week, Trump’s lawyers tried to stop Georgia’s probe into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state. They asked the court to disqualify Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, who has been investigating that attempt, and to stop Willis from using any of the material gathered by the grand jury investigating the case. Yesterday, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously rejected his petition, allowing the probe to go forward.
Then, today, Michigan’s attorney general Dana Nessel charged sixteen fake electors who signed fake certificates claiming that Trump had won Michigan’s electoral votes in 2020 with felonies: forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, election law forgery, conspiracy to commit election law forgery, publishing a counterfeit record, and conspiring to publish a counterfeit record.
The sixteen Republicans met in the basement of the state Republican Party’s headquarters and signed fake documents claiming that they were the state’s legitimate electors and that Trump had won the state. Their actions were part of a plan to claim that the electoral votes of certain states were “contested,” allowing then–vice president Mike Pence to reject the votes of those states and throw the election to Trump.
The fake electors attested they were “the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president of the United States of America for the state of Michigan,” Nessel said. “That was a lie. They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it.” "The false electors’ actions undermine the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and not only violated the spirit of the laws enshrining and defending our democracy, but we believe also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan and peaceably transfer power in America,” Nessel said. “This plan, to reject the will of the voters and undermine democracy, was fraudulent and legally baseless.”
Text messages at the time show that the sixteen were “all asked to keep silent [so] as to not draw attention to what the other states were doing similar to ours!” One of those charged was former co-chair of the state Republican committee, Meshawn Maddock, who called the charges “political persecution.”
Legal analyst Renato Mariotti noted that the charges against the sixteen fake electors send a powerful message for those at the state level who might consider abetting Trump in the future. Those fake electors aren’t part of Trump’s inner circle who might get some kind of a reward for their trouble. They are just party operatives who are facing an expensive, stressful, and humiliating experience that could lead to hefty fines or imprisonment. Their example might well make others think carefully before they sign on to similar plans.
Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today that the lines of the 2024 election are coming clearer. Trump’s many legal troubles simply strengthen the loyalty of his base, making his nomination for the Republican presidential candidacy even more likely. But voters in the general election are unlikely to rally to someone facing multiple indictments in several different cases, especially ones related to the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, which horrified most Americans.
The Republican Party is now “handcuffed to Donald Trump,” Marshall writes.
President Biden’s policy of focusing on his job while letting the Republicans define themselves might be a smart strategy.
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Now’s the time to push him into a river. Or off a cliff.
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July 19, 2023 (Wednesday)
A little more than two years ago, on July 9, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order to promote competition in the U.S. economy. Echoing the language of his predecessors, he said, “competition keeps the economy moving and keeps it growing. Fair competition is why capitalism has been the world’s greatest force for prosperity and growth…. But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back.”
In that speech, Biden deliberately positioned himself in our country’s long history of opposing economic consolidation. Calling out both Roosevelt presidents—Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw part of the Progressive Era, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who oversaw the New Deal—Biden celebrated their attempt to rein in the power of big business, first by focusing on the abuses of those businesses, and then by championing competition.
Biden promised to enforce antitrust laws, interpreting them in the way they had been understood traditionally. Like his progressive predecessors, he believed antitrust laws should prevent large entities from swallowing up markets, consolidating their power so they could raise prices and undercut workers’ rights. Traditionally, those advocating antitrust legislation wanted to protect economic competition, believing that such competition would promote innovation, protect workers, and keep consumer prices down.
In the 1980s, government officials threw out that understanding and replaced it with a new line of thinking advanced by former solicitor general of the United States Robert Bork. He claimed that the traditional understanding of antitrust legislation was economically inefficient because it restricted the ways businesses could operate. Instead, he said, consolidation of industries was fine so long as it promoted economic efficiencies that, at least in the short term, cut costs for consumers. While antitrust legislation remained on the books, the understanding of what it meant changed dramatically.
Reagan and his people advanced Bork’s position, abandoning the idea that capitalism fundamentally depends on competition. Industries consolidated, and by the time Biden took office his people estimated the lack of competition was costing a median U.S. household as much as $5000 a year. Two years ago, Biden called the turn toward Bork’s ideas “the wrong path,” and vowed to restore competition in an increasingly consolidated marketplace. With his executive order in July 2021, he established a White House Competition Council to direct a whole-of-government approach to promoting competition in the economy.
This shift gained momentum in part because of what appeared to be price gouging as the shutdowns of the pandemic eased. The five largest ocean container shipping companies, for example, made $300 billion in profits in 2022, compared to $64 billion the year before, which itself was a higher number than in the past. Those higher prices helped to drive inflation.
The baby formula shortage that began in February 2022 also highlighted the problems of concentration in an industry. Just four companies controlled 90% of the baby formula market in the U.S., and when one of them shut down production at a plant that appeared to be contaminated, supplies fell dramatically across the country. The administration had to start flying millions of bottles of formula in from other countries under Operation Fly Formula, a solution that suggested something was badly out of whack.
The administration’s focus on restoring competition had some immediate effects. It worked to get a bipartisan reform to ocean shipping through Congress, permitting greater oversight of the shipping industry by the Federal Maritime Commission. That law was part of the solution that brought ocean-going shipping prices down 80% from their peak. It worked with the Food and Drug Administration to make hearing aids available over the counter, cutting costs for American families. It also has worked to get rid of the non-compete clauses which made it hard for about 30 million workers to change jobs. And it began cracking down on junk fees, add-ons to rental car contracts, ticket sales, banking services, and so on, getting those fees down an estimated $5 billion a year.
“Folks are tired of being played for suckers,” Biden said. “[I]t’s about basic fairness.”
Today, the administration announced new measures to promote competition in the economy. The Department of Agriculture will work with attorneys general in 31 states and Washington, D.C. to enforce antitrust and consumer protection laws in food and agriculture. They will make sure that large corporations can’t fix food prices or price gouge in stores in areas where they have a monopoly. They will work to expand the nation’s processing capacity for meat and poultry, and are also promoting better access to markets for all agricultural producers and keeping seeds open-source.
Having cracked down on junk fees in consumer products, the administration is now turning to junk fees in rental housing, fees like those required just to file a rental application or fees to be able to pay your rent online.
The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission today released new merger guidelines to protect the country from mass layoffs, higher prices, and fewer options for consumers and workers. Biden used the example of hospital mergers, which have led to extraordinary price hikes, to explain why new guidelines are necessary.
The agencies reached out for public comment to construct 13 guidelines that seek to prevent mergers that threaten competition or tend to create monopolies. They declare that agencies must address the effect of proposed mergers on “all market participants and any dimension of competition, including for workers.”
Now that the guidelines are proposed, officials are asking the public to provide comments on them. The comment period will end on September 18.
One of the reporters on the press call about the new initiatives noted that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has accused the Biden administration of regulatory overreach, exactly as Bork outlined in a famous 1978 book introducing his revision of U.S. antitrust policy. An answer by a senior administration official highlighted a key element of the struggle over business consolidation that is rarely discussed and has been key to demands to end such consolidation since the 1870s.
The official noted that small businesses, especially those in rural areas, are quite happy to see consolidation broken up, because it gives them an opportunity to get into fields that previously had been closed to them. In fact, small businesses have boomed under this administration; there were 10.5 million small business applications in its first two years and those numbers continue strong.
This is the same pattern the U.S. saw during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century and during the New Deal of the 1930s. In both of those eras, established business leaders insisted that government regulation was bad for the economy and that any attempts to limit their power came from workers who were at least flirting with socialism. But in fact entrepreneurs and small businesses were always part of the coalition that wanted such regulation. They needed it to level the playing field enough to let them participate.
The effects of this turnaround in the government’s approach to economic consolidation is a big deal. It is already having real effects on our lives, and offers to do more: saving consumers money, protecting workers’ wages and safety, and promoting small businesses, especially in rural areas. It’s another part of this administration’s rejection of the top-down economy that has shaped the country since 1981.
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July 20, 2023 (Thursday)
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision not to attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, illustrates how fully his 2022 invasion of Ukraine has made him an international pariah. BRICS is an organization made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, all considered fast-growing economies that would dominate the global economy by 2050 at the time it began to organize in 2006.
A lot has changed since then.
Because the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes, specifically his regime’s deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, he was at risk of arrest and extradition if he went to South Africa. Although that country has maintained neutrality in the war, it signed on to the treaty governing the ICC and thus has an obligation to arrest and surrender those under indictment by the ICC.
After much speculation about whether he would attend the summit while he pressured South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to agree not to arrest him, yesterday Putin announced that by “mutual agreement” with Ramaphosa, he will not attend and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will go in his place. Alexandra Sharp of Foreign Policy noted that his inability to attend the summit shows how his position as an accused war criminal has isolated Putin and “highlights just how much the Russian leader’s global standing has changed thanks to his war on Ukraine.”
Also yesterday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced another security assistance package for Ukraine, worth $1.3 billion and including surface to air missile systems, mine-clearing equipment, fuel trucks, and tactical vehicles to tow, haul, and recover equipment. That matériel will take time to provide, but much of it signals an army retaking territory.
As if to demonstrate what power he has left, Putin’s forces attacked the key Ukrainian shipping ports of Mykolaiv and Odesa, destroying 60,000 tons of grain that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said was destined for Africa and Asia, including China. Then Putin announced that he was ending Russian participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative as of July 20 and would consider any ships that sailed to or from Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea a “Hostile Military Transport.” Putin’s declaration that he might target the civilian ships of foreign powers threatened to escalate the war, but he quickly backed down on that threat today. Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. said Russia is not preparing to attack civilian ships.
The Black Sea grain deal, which facilitates the export of Ukrainian grain to the world market so long as the ships travel in certain channels, already gave Russia more influence over international shipping than its 10% of the Black Sea coastline warranted. And, to maintain that control, Russia planted sea mines in the waters around Ukrainian ports outside the safe channels.
Now the White House has warned that U.S. officials have information that Russia has added more mines in those waters with the intention of blaming Ukraine if those mines cause damage to foreign ships.
There are (at least) three key aspects of this announcement. First, Putin is threatening vulnerable countries with starvation and trying to jack up grain prices around the world, which will hit all countries but primarily poorer ones. The United Kingdom’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Barbara Woodward, pointed out that 33 million tons of grain have been exported under the grain deal, and that the primary beneficiaries have been Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia.
Second, he was daring the other countries on the Black Sea, three of which belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to call his bluff.
Third, he is trying to destroy Ukrainian shipping infrastructure to hamstring its post-war future. Odesa is a historic and fabled city; it is also the key to shipping grain out of Ukraine. Capturing it, with its symbolic and practical value, was likely Putin’s primary goal in the first place. His willingness to destroy the city seems to indicate that he has given up on claiming it.
In response, Ukrainian forces began to use the so-called cluster munitions the U.S. provided earlier this month, firing the weapons at the Russian troops in Ukraine. Cluster munitions explode over a target, blanketing a large area with deadly smaller munitions. They are banned in more than 120 countries because those smaller munitions often hit the ground unexploded and lie there until civilians run across them, with deadly results.
Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. have not banned the weapons, and Ukraine asked the U.S. to provide them for use within Ukraine, against Russian troops. Biden did so, after months of debate within the White House and strong disagreement from those who want the weapons banned altogether. President Biden eventually decided to send the cluster munitions, apparently in part because the areas of Ukraine where they would be deployed are already uninhabitable because of Russian mines and in part because Ukrainians themselves requested the weapons to throw out the Russian invaders, who have been using cluster munitions against Ukrainian civilians.
“Of course it’s a tragedy, but everything right now is a tragedy,” former defense minister of Ukraine Andriy Zagorodnyuk told Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo about using the munitions. “So the question is how to end the tragedy and, unfortunately, the only way so far to get peace is to win the peace.”
The U.S. Treasury and the U.S. State Department today announced additional sanctions on companies that have given Russia access to products that feed the war, provide revenue from minerals and mining, give it access to the international financial system, or provide military technology.
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I have to ask: is that why everything seems so borked up in US politics?
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July 21, 2023 (Friday)
On June 8 the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a lower court blocking the congressional districting map Alabama put into place after the 2020 census, agreeing that the map likely violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and ordering Alabama to redraw the map to include two majority-Black congressional districts.
Today the Alabama legislature passed a new congressional map that openly violates the Supreme Court’s order. By a vote of 75–28 in the House and 24–6 in the Senate, the legislature approved a map that includes only one Black-majority district.
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and many of the other members of Alabama’s congressional delegation had spoken to the Republicans in the state legislature about the map. Editor of the Alabama Reflector Brian Lyman reported that the map’s sponsor said he had spoken to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) too: “It was quite simple,” the sponsor said. McCarthy “said ‘I’m interested in keeping my majority.’ That was basically his conversation.”
Alabama governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed the bill into law.
Today, assistant U.S. attorney general Todd Kim and U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas Jaime Esparza wrote to Texas governor Greg Abbott and Texas interim attorney general Angela Colmenero warning that the actions of Texas in constructing a barrier in the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico “violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties.”
The floating barrier violates the Rivers and Harbors Act, which prohibits the construction of any obstructions to navigation in U.S. waters and requires permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before constructing any structure in such waters. Abbott ignored that law to construct a barrier that includes inflatable buoys and razor wire.
Mexico has also noted that barrier buoys that block the flow of water violate treaties between the U.S. and Mexico dating from 1944 and 1970, and has asked for the barriers to be removed. So has the owner of a Texas canoe and kayaking company, who says the buoys prevent him from conducting his business. And so have more than 80 House Democrats, who have noted Abbott’s “complete disregard for federal authority over immigration enforcement.”
Unless Texas promises by 2:00 Tuesday afternoon to remove the barrier immediately, the U.S. will sue.
Abbott has made fear of immigration central to his political messaging. He is now faced with the reality that Biden’s parole process for migrants at the southern border has dropped unlawful entries by almost 70% since it went into effect in early May, meaning that border agents have more time to patrol and are making it harder to enter the U.S. unlawfully.
Abbott’s barrier seems designed to keep his messaging amped up, accompanied as it is by allegations that troops from the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety have been ordered to push migrants, including children, back into the river and to withhold water from those suffering in the heat. There are also reports that migrants have been hurt by razor wire installed along the barrier.
Abbott responded to the DOJ’s letter: “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.”
Yesterday, on the same day that Shawn Boburg, Emma Brown, and Ann E. Marimow added to all the recent stories of Supreme Court corruption an exclusive story showing how then-leader of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo funded a “a coordinated and sophisticated public relations campaign to defend and celebrate” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to advance a bill that would require the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of ethics.
“We wouldn’t tolerate this [behavior] from a city council member or an alderman," committee chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) said. “It falls short of ethical standards we expect of any public servant in America. And yet the Supreme Court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.” “The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act,” Durbin said, “would bring the Supreme Court Justices’ ethics requirement in line with every other federal judge and restore confidence in the Court.”
Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) disagreed that Congress could force the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” he said, although he agreed that the justices need “to get their house in order.”
Today, Dahlia Lithwick and Anat Shenker-Osorio noted in Slate that voters of both parties strongly support cleaning up the Supreme Court.
As signs of an indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election grow stronger, Trump has taken to threats . When asked about incarceration, Trump said earlier this week: “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters, much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016. I think it would be very dangerous.”
His loyalists are working to undermine the law enforcement agencies that are supporting the rule of law. On July 11, 2023, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to chair of the Committee on Appropriations Kay Granger (R-TX) asking her to defund Biden’s immigration policies as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which investigates crime.
It is notable that, for all their talk about law and order, the Republican-dominated legislature of Alabama and the state’s Republican governor have just openly defied the U.S. Supreme Court, which is hardly an ideological enemy after Trump stacked it to swing to the far right.
The Republican governor of Texas is defying both federal law and international treaties. After rampant scandals, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court refuses to adopt an ethics system that might restore some confidence in their decisions. And, aided by his loyalists, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is threatening mob violence if he is held legally accountable for his behavior.
The genius of the American rebels in 1776 was their belief that a nation could be based not in the hereditary rights of a king but in a body of laws. “Where…is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. “I’ll tell you Friend…that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
Democracy is based on the rule of law. Undermining the rule of law destroys the central feature of democracy and replaces that system of government with something else.
In Florida today, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set May 20, 2024, as the date for Trump’s trial for hiding and refusing to give up classified national security documents.
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July 22, 2023 (Saturday)
The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.
But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.
Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p.154).
The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.
In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.
This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.
Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.
Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.
Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).
It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p.104).
That’s quite a tall order.
But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp.116–117).
Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extend rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p.109).
All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”
The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.
And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.
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the other thing that sentence does is pretend that rights can be granted and taken away. in a practical sense, of course they can. but really it wasn’t giving people something, it was restraining government and society from curtailing people’s innate rights
i wonder what it will take to stop florida’s government from doing all this…
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