there are four, err. three, err. two lights. there are two lights!!
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March 31, 2020 (Tuesday)
Our coronavirus numbers continue to climb. Today America has more than 185,000 known infections and Covid-19 has killed 3,768 people, more than those who died on 9/11. Coronavirus continues to weaken the economy as well. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 400 points today, ending the worst quarter in stock market history, despite more than $2 trillion in relief measures and actions by the Federal Reserve to inject money into the economy.
Today, the White House warned Americans to expect 100,000 to 240,000 deaths over the course of the pandemic; more—as many as 2.2 million-- if Americans do not strictly self-isolate.
This best case scenario is close to the numbers of US Army soldiers-- 235,000—who died in battle in World War Two.
Trump is trying to spin this appalling disaster as a victory. He has declared that if we are able to keep the deaths in the lower range “we all together have done a very good job.”
The president and his team are eager to absolve him of responsibility for America’s slow and erratic response to the pandemic, a response that will cost the lives of thousands more of our friends and family than the disease otherwise would have claimed. Trump has repeatedly said that it was “nobody’s fault,” just one of those “things that happened.” Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to the president, recently expanded on this line, saying Trump “is presiding over the country’s response to an unanticipated, unprecedented pandemic of global proportions, and he is getting credit for his handling of the pandemic … In due time, he will preside over the great American comeback, which is more likely to be in the summer or fall, depending on the effectiveness of mitigation and relief efforts and the uncertain path of the virus itself.”
This is gaslighting, designed to absolve the president of blame for this disaster and to pave the way for the crisis to be redefined as a victory before the 2020 election.
Who could possibly have known that a pandemic was coming? Every White House official. In preparation for taking over in January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials worked through a pandemic emergency with the incoming officials, but the administration did not make epidemic preparedness a priority. It cut more than two-thirds of the staff at the Centers for Disease Control in China, from about 47 people to 14. It cut the pandemic response team from the National Security Council in 2018, leaving no epidemic disease specialist on the NSC. It had a playbook for managing a pandemic, prepared in 2016 by officials in the Obama administration after the Ebola crisis; Trump’s people ignored it.
More specifically, after reports of the disease developing in China emerged at the end of December 2019, U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned Trump in January and February in classified briefings what was coming; he continued to downplay it. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) asked the administration to declare a public health emergency in late January to free up money to fight the coronavirus. But as late as February 24, Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this,” one official said, “but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it…. The system was blinking red.”
Today Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tried a different argument for Trump’s frittering away two months that would have protected us from the worst of the pandemic. McConnell told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the impeachment trial of Trump had distracted the president from paying adequate attention to the coronavirus.
This was too much for George Conway, founder of the anti-Trump super PAC the Lincoln Project. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, he called it “gaslighting of the highest order.” “Look at the calendar,” he wrote. Impeachment was pretty much over on January 31, when Senators killed the idea of testimony, although the final vote wasn’t until February 5. Trump went to Mar-a-Lago at least four times in the first two months of the year, held frequent campaign rallies, and repeatedly went golfing. And he commented often on the coronavirus, telling reporters and tweeting that “we have it totally under control.”
From a political standpoint, as well, this argument doesn’t hold water. If Trump and his advisors were focusing at all on the coronavirus in those crucial weeks, they would have deployed then the argument that impeachment was hurting their ability to respond adequately to the crisis. It was a winning political argument that would have played well across the country (in addition to promoting our ability to fight the epidemic).
For his part, Trump seemed torn between having an excuse and having to admit he hadn’t done a bang-up job. During today’s press briefing, he said: “Did it divert my attention? I think I’m getting A+'s for the way I handled myself during a phony impeachment, OK? … But certainly, I guess, I thought of it and I think I probably acted – I don’t think I would have done any better had I not been impeached, OK?”
I am belaboring this point tonight because this deliberate effort to change the public perception of what really happened is a profound attack on our democracy. While this disinformation is designed to absolve Trump of blame he deserves, it is far more than that. We are seeing government officials rewriting our history in real time. And in October, if campaign officials for the Republican candidate are telling voters that Trump was a hero for his handling of the unanticipated coronavirus despite Democrats’ impeachment witch hunt, I want to have laid down this marker so that there is a record of when that story began.
As late as February 26, Trump said, “This is a flu. This is like a flu.” “I mean, view this the same as the flu.” Today he said: “’A lot of people’” said “’ride it out. Don’t do anything, just ride it out and think of it as the flu.’ But it’s not the flu. It’s vicious.”
Today the editorial board of the Boston Globe wrote: “the president has blood on his hands.”
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Yeah well, every US president does. It’s just not usually so obvious that it’s the blood of US citizens who aren’t soldiers.
I do agree that it’s worrisome how well the Trumpkins manage, time and time again, to twist the narrative into an absurd lie that nevertheless convinces a lot of USians.
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April 1, 2020 (Wednesday)
After a very long day of teaching on-line (which I find exhausting) and celebrating the new book’s publication date (woo hoo!) I fell deeply asleep on the couch early this evening and awoke hours later to read the news. In that quiet clarity of being newly rested in the middle of the night, reading the news felt very much like history research, when you are dropped into the sources and getting a sense of what the world looked like at a certain moment in time.
If I were looking back at today from the vantage point of a hundred years from now, I would write that the government, whose systems for handling a crisis have been dismantled, is faltering badly as inexperienced officials are trying to respond to a pandemic by relying on the private sector.
Hardly a novel interpretation, but it really jumps out when you spend a couple of hours reading the day’s news all at once.
Here’s what I saw:
The news broke that the United States has been sending medical supplies to other countries while our own health care workers don’t have masks or PPE (personal protective equipment). Politico revealed that an administration official called counterparts in Thailand to ask for PPE only to be told by a confused official on the other end who said that the U.S. was shipping those very supplies to Thailand. One shipment had already arrived, and another was on its way. Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the administration’s coronavirus task force, immediately halted the shipment. It appears that there has been no coordination between the administration and USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, so we have apparently been exporting the very supplies we need at home.
This created a furor over the fact that we also sent 17.8 tons of medical supplies, including masks, gowns, gauze, and respirators to China in February, after the severity of our own impending crisis was already clear. The administration has said these supplies were “donated,” but I have not been able to track down by whom.
Politico also broke the story that since March 12, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been in charge of his own coronavirus response team to get the private sector on board to fight the crisis. Trump has been reluctant to activate the Defense Production Act, a law that enables the government to encourage manufacturers to produce vital equipment and protects them from losses when they do. Bizarrely, the Trump administration—like all others since the law went into effect in the 1950s—uses this act all the time to respond to natural disasters, to move supplies around during emergencies, and so on, but refuses to do so now. Instead, it appears Trump has tapped Kushner to coordinate with private industry. In that capacity, he and his outside experts—including a number from the consulting firm McKinsey—are acting as a sort of independent cell without government oversight and are overruling the teams already in place.
We learned that the Obama administration tried five years ago to address what it perceived as a lack of ventilators in case of a pandemic, paying $13.8 million to a Pennsylvania manufacturer—a subsidiary of a huge Dutch appliance and technology corporation-- to create a cheap, easy ventilator to stockpile. The FDA cleared the device in September and the Department of Health and Human Services, which had provided the $13.8 million, ordered 10,000 of them for $3,280 each. Instead of providing those ventilators, the company instead hiked its prices and sold them overseas. Trump has declined to use the DPA to get the company to produce the ventilators it developed for the U.S. Instead, Kushner’s team is negotiating with it to build 43,000 more expensive hospital ventilators for the U.S.
Pence tried to suggest that the administration’s slow response was because China had been slow about admitting the full extent of the disease and that the Centers for Disease Control had initially mischaracterized the danger from it as low. (While China did try to quash information about the disease, the CDC was clear about it.) Pence continued: “I don’t believe the President has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus.” (There is overwhelming evidence Trump did exactly this.)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has not wanted to take the responsibility for closing down his state and has been trying to get Trump to do it. But Trump doesn’t want to do it either. So the two of them have been trying to get the other to do it as the infection and death rates in Florida climb. Finally, today, DeSantis made the call, but he exempted churches, synagogues, and houses of worship from its provisions, calling them essential businesses. This will permit religious leaders like Rodney Howard-Browne to keep his megachurch open. On Monday, sheriff’s deputies arrested Howard-Browne for unlawful assembly and a violation of health emergency rules.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has finally issued shelter-in-place order for Georgia, too, as the state reported 4,748 cases of Covid-19 and 56 deaths. He said a key change was the recent news that people could transmit the virus without showing symptoms, but of course that news is not recent; we have known it virtually since the beginning.
DeSantis has another crisis on his hands, too. A cruise ship with infected passengers is sitting off the coast of Florida, and he doesn’t want it to dock in the state. Trump is not taking responsibility for that, either. So DeSantis has finally announced he will take off the ship the 49 people on it who hail from Florida… but not the others, including those from other countries, who continue to float on a ship with disease on it. This situation needs an immediate solution.
The federal government had a similar problem aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier where Covid-19 was spreading. Tired of waiting for his superiors to get his people to safety, the ship’s commander wrote a scathing letter claiming that keeping the sailors on the ship was “an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care.” After the letter was made public, Navy officials agreed to offload sailors to quarantine in Guam to keep the disease at bay.
Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, appointed by Kemp and married to the CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, revealed more stock trades today that took place after she had attended a Senate briefing on the severity of the coming epidemic. She sold stock in retail stores and bought stock in a company that makes PPEs. She maintains she has done nothing wrong.
And Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and associate of indicted political operative Lev Parnas said on the Fox News Channel today he thought that closing schools was “way overkill” and that it was hurting the economy unnecessarily. California has more than 6,900 cases and at least 150 people there have died from it.
Finally, it appears that Trump will continue golfing despite the crisis. Although staying mum about who the “dignitary” they need to protect is, the Secret Service has signed a $45,000 contract to rent golf carts in Sterling, Virginia, where Trump has a golf course that remains open despite Virginia’s stay-at-home order.
It’s important to note that any of these stories might have good explanations. Maybe shoring up USAID was worth losing our PPEs, or there’s a good reason not to use the DPA to get more ventilators from the company who contracted to produce them. But if so, we are not hearing those explanations. Instead, what jumps out at this hodge-podge of stories is the lack of organization and expertise, and the apparent every-man-for-himself attitude at the highest levels of government.
That attitude sure doesn’t seem to be producing an effective response to the global pandemic that is threatening our lives.
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April 2, 2020 (Thursday)
Behind the confusion and foot-dragging as the White House confronts the global pandemic is the administration’s desire to dismantle the federal government and give power to businesspeople.
The Trump administration has been clear that it does not want the federal government to assume responsibility for American citizens any longer. Trump has refused to issue a stay at home order from the federal government, insisting instead that governors make their own calls. He has refused to use the Defense Production Act to mobilize industry to produce the masks and ventilators Americans so desperately need. He is refusing to tell manufacturers where to place their supplies. In place of government coordination, his administration officials are counting on business people to assume leadership.
Instead, the fifty states are trying to respond on their own. They are making their own decisions about what to shut down, when, and are bidding against each other for supplies. This piecemeal response to the pandemic crisis means we are not effectively cutting off the spread of the virus, or supporting the healthcare we will need.
Today Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) wrote to Trump to urge him to appoint a “senior military officer” as a “czar” to coordinate a federal response to the crisis and to use the DPA to increase production, procurement, and distribution of medical devices and equipment. “America cannot rely on a patchwork of uncoordinated voluntary efforts to combat the awful magnitude of this pandemic,” Schumer wrote. “The existing federal void has left America with an ugly spectacle in which States and cities are literally fending for themselves, often in conflict and competition with each other, when trying to procure precious medical supplies and equipment. The only way we will fix our PPE [personal protective equipment] and ventilator shortage is with a data-driven, organized and robust plan from the federal government. Anything short of that will inevitably mean this problem will remain unsolved and prolong this crisis.”
Trump responded with a letter that was remarkable, even by his standards. It began: “Thank you for your Democrat public relations letter and incorrect sound bites, which are wrong in every way.” Trump denied that there was anything wrong with his administration’s response to the crisis. “As you are aware, the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments. Unfortunately, your state needed far more of a back-up than most states.”
He went on: “If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been unprepared for the ‘invisible enemy.’” (Schumer called for a declaration of a public health emergency on January 26.) “I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for the state of New York, until I became President.”
Meanwhile, today Republican Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts gave a press conference in which he announced that the Kraft family, which owns the New England Patriots football team, had generously used the Patriots’ plane to transport more than 1 million masks the state had purchased in China, as well as picking up $2 million of the cost of the masks. While warmly complimenting the Kraft family’s generosity, state representative Katherine Clark said “this is not how it’s supposed to work…. What we need is a coordinated federal system.”
But there isn’t one. Instead, the White House is turning to private interests to manage the national response. It is a philosophical position embraced by those who would overturn the active government that has presided over the United States since the New Deal.
There was a remarkable moment tonight in the press conference tonight at the White House, flagged by Josh Marshall at TPM (Talking Points Memo). Countries have been sending supplies of masks, gowns, and so forth that our medical professionals so desperately need. But at the same time, ProPublica has reported that states are paying up to 15 times what medical supplies usually cost to get this equipment. So what’s going on?
At the press conference, Weijia Jiang of CBS News asked the official in charge of the shipments, Rear Admiral John P. Polowczyk, what was happening to them. He explained they are not going directly to the states or to FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency). Rather, they are going to the private sector, which has systems in place for distributing such materials. But the states are in a bidding war in the private sector to buy this equipment, which is driving prices up.
Shouldn’t the federal government step in to stop profiteering and make sure states get the supplies they need? “I’m not here to disrupt a [commercial] supply chain,” the admiral said.
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Also, the presidents are usually not so directly culpable, nor is the bloodshed so absolutely pointless and avoidable.
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This is like watching Cloverfield, but the giant space-baby monster is the President of the United States.
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Who knew the monster would turn out to have a name: John Galt!
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I can’t make up my mind. Is all this
- a coup in slow motion?
- a management buy-out?
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it’s disruption ( chaos ) to make a profit.
they think they’re geniuses. they don’t think the pandemic and associated deaths is that big a deal, and they wouldn’t really care if it was. they think it’s natural to take advantage of people, and take whatever money, leverage, power they can.
i think they’d be happy to have a republican dictator, but they don’t even really care that much. they’ve always “fallen up” by taking whatever they can when they can.
all the destruction is incidental i think. except when it makes them laugh at people they don’t like for “losing.”
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April 3, 2020 (Friday)
Quite the Friday night news dump today. At about ten o’clock tonight, Trump notified Congress he has fired the Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
In September 2019, Atkinson made sure Congress knew that then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was illegally withholding from the congressional intelligence committees a whistleblower complaint. Atkinson had examined the complaint, as required by law, and had determined it was “credible” and “urgent” and so sent it on to the acting DNI, who was supposed to send it to Congress. Instead, Maguire took it to the Department of Justice, where Attorney General Barr stopped the transmission by arguing that since it was a complaint about the president, and since the president was not a member of the intelligence community, the complaint shouldn’t go forward. And we know where it went from there.
Now Trump has fired Atkinson. The key paragraph in the letter informing Congress of his action reads as follows: “It is extremely important that we promote the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of Federal programs and activities. The Inspectors General have a critical role in the achievement of these goals. As is the case with regard to other positions where I, as President, have the power of appointment, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, it is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General. That is no longer the case with regard to this Inspector General.”
This paragraph is doing a lot of work. The reference to economy, efficiency, and effectiveness should be read with the knowledge that Trump fired Maguire, who was thought to be a Trump loyalist, in late February after the chief election security advisor in his Office of the Director of National Intelligence delivered a classified briefing to Congress warning that Russia was already interfering in the 2020 election to help Trump.
Trump replaced Maguire with a fierce partisan, another acting DNI because he will have trouble making it through the Senate because he has no experience in the intelligence sector, which the law requires the DNI have. This man, Richard A. Grenell, has not given up his other government position to take the DNI job; he is still the US Ambassador to Germany.
Grenell had been vocal about his belief that the idea of Russian interference in US elections is a hoax, and as soon as he took office, he requested intelligence information on Russia and began bringing in his own people, including a key staffer, Kashyap Patel, who had worked for Devin Nunes (R-CA) and insisted that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had attacked our 2016 election. (The intelligence community says this is false, and is Russian propaganda.)
Grenell immediately froze hiring at the ODNI, prompting accusations that he was purging the agency of career professionals and replacing them with Trump loyalists. While Grenell denied it saying he was simply promoting efficiency, the accusation seemed supported by a tweet from Don Jr., who wrote that “4 internal studies in the past 2 years have said the DNI needs to be reformed. No one has done it. [Grenell] is now starting to do it.”
On March 10 Grenell’s people briefed Congress with an assessment that said the opposite of the earlier one, claiming there was no proof Putin was working on behalf of Trump.
So the statement that Trump is simply streamlining the intelligence community has a subtext.
The sentence reminding Congress that Trump has the right to fire Atkinson is also working hard. The law requires 30 days notice to the congressional intelligence committees of such a removal, but Trump fired Atkinson abruptly and then immediately put him on administrative leave, so he is effectively removed. Thus Trump is circumventing the guardrail put into the law to make sure we do not have an abrupt change in our national intelligence without congressional input. And, of course, Congress is not in session because of the coronavirus, permitting Trump to act with impunity.
This is especially problematic right now, as the Supreme Court announced today it will not hold oral arguments in April because of the coronavirus, so the pending cases concerning whether investigators can access Trump’s finances to investigate crimes and his insistence that none of his advisors can be compelled to testify before Congress are all on hold. He is clearly feeling free to flirt with lawbreaking while the court is inactive.
The sentence announcing that he no longer has “the fullest confidence” in Atkinson is also working hard. Why has his confidence faded? Why now? Is there something that was about to come out and he wants to keep it hidden? It was the intelligence community that repeatedly tried to get him to take the coronavirus seriously; perhaps there is a whistleblower complaint over that. In the chaos over supplies it seems likely that there is profiteering going on; perhaps someone knows something about that.
Or perhaps this is part of Grenell’s longer strategy to stop any investigation of Russian attacks on the 2020 election.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not dropped his determination to end the US sanctions imposed on the country after Russia invaded Ukraine, sanctions that hit oligarchs, especially Putin, hard. These sanctions were at the heart of Putin preferring Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and have been key to much of our international affairs ever since.
One of the stories that has flown under the radar this week is that Russia is asking the United Nations to drop sanctions around the world to enable nations better to combat Covid-19. An initial resolution to that effect sponsored by Russia said “We are resolved to cooperate in addressing the disruptions to international trade and the market uncertainty due to the pandemic, mitigating the damage caused to the global economy by the spread of COVID-19, and promoting economic growth throughout the world, especially in developing countries.” The spokesman for Russia’s UN Mission, Fedor Strzhizhovskiy, said the Russian declaration was “result-oriented,” unlike the “general” one it sought to replace.
The European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Ukraine objected to the adoption of the Russian declaration, with Ukraine noting that the declaration was an attempt “to abuse humanitarian goals to plant a mine under international sanctions applied in response to gross violations of international law.”
But that is only Russia’s opening gambit. It is hard not to see the planeload of supplies Russia donated to New York this week after Trump and Putin spoke last Friday as an attempt to illustrate the benefits of lifting sanctions so Russia can work with other nations. The ventilators on the plane were produced by a company under US sanctions, meaning that US firms and people are barred from doing business with it; sending those ventilators to our eager hands was a propaganda victory for Putin. Further, it was unclear whether the payment for the supplies came from the US or from Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, also under sanction. A senior US official said that the United States had purchased the supplies outright, but also noted that sanctions did “not apply to transactions for the provision of medical equipment and supplies.”
The UN Security Council will meet to discuss the pandemic next week.
For me, the kicker of this entire post is that I already had a full list of things to write about before Trump fired Atkinson. While we are all focused on the pandemic, there is a lot going on.
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Both.
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April 4, 2020 (Saturday)
In an interview on the Fox News Channel on Monday, Trump explained his objection to Democrats’ efforts to appropriate billions of dollars for election security in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package. “The things they had in there were crazy,” he told the hosts. “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” On Wednesday, the Georgia House Speaker, Republican David Ralston, echoed Trump. He opposed sending absentee ballots to the state’s registered voters because the effort would lead to higher voter participation. That would “be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
They are saying out loud what scholars of politics have known for a long time: the Republicans are a minority party. They win by keeping their opponents from voting, or by making sure their votes are undercounted.
A democracy is in crisis if the majority of its people do not support the party in power. We can manage a glitch or two, but a systemic perversion of the government through manipulation by one group or another will destroy our faith that our government truly represents us.
Manipulating the vote has a long and shameful history in America, but modern media and computer modeling has enabled today’s Republican Party to carve out its voters with surgical precision.
The process of culling voters began in 1986, when Republicans who knew that Reagan’s budget cuts were unpopular began to talk of cutting down black voting. In a secret memo later made public by a judge, an official for the Republican National Committee explained that paring the voting rolls down in a call for “ballot integrity” “will eliminate at least 60-80,000 folks from the rolls.” Referring to a Senate race, the official noted, “If it’s a close race, which I’m assuming it is, this could keep the black vote down considerably.” (After the memo came out, the chair of the RNC stated “there has never been, nor is there now, any program at the Republican National Committee designed to intimidate or discourage any voter from exercising his or her right to vote…. [T]he purpose of the program was to help election officials make certain that no dead or fictitious persons vote.”)
When Democrats tried to expand voter registration in 1993 with the Motor-Voter Law, which permitted people to sign up to vote when at certain state offices-- including the Department of Motor Vehicles and welfare offices-- Republicans insisted that the Democrats were simply trying to register more of their own “special interest” voters and fought the law.
The next year, losing Republican candidates for office began to charge that they had lost because of “voter fraud,” and in 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched year-long investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, including the one that put Dianne Feinstein into the Senate from California. The loser in that contest, who had spent more than $28 million of his own money on his campaign, insisted on national television that there were serious voting irregularities. “I think, frankly, the fraud is overwhelming,” he said. Every study has shown that voter fraud is so rare as to be virtually nonexistent, but Republican leaders kept the case in front of the media for close to a year, helping to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters.
In 1998, the Florida legislature passed a law to prevent such voter fraud, and the law quickly became a purge of black voters, people presumed to vote Democratic. In the election of 2000, Republican George W. Bush won the state of Florida and thus the election by 537 votes. A later investigation by the United States Commission on Civil Rights revealed “an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement,” primarily of Democratic African American voters, in that election.
When Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Republicans set out to guarantee he had a hostile Congress to keep him from accomplishing anything. They raised money from corporate donors to elect Republicans to state legislatures in 2010, so Republicans would redistrict key states after the 2010 census, in a process called “gerrymandering.” They called the plan “REDMAP,” for Redistricting Majority Project. Republicans won control of the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they used computer modeling to redraw congressional maps to their advantage. In the 2012 election, Democrats won a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with 33 more seats than Democrats in the House of Representatives.
The next year, in 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act with the Shelby County v. Holder decision, by ruling that states could change their voting laws without preclearance by the Department of Justice, Republican state officials immediately began to introduce voter ID laws and bills restricting voter registration.
And now, as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the nation right before the 2020 election, Trump and the Republican National Committee have launched a multimillion-dollar legal fight to keep Democrats from changing voting rules to enable people under 65 to vote from home, rather than risking their health or violating stay-at-home policies by gathering at polling places to cast ballots. (Republicans are fine with permitting older Americans to vote by mail, recognizing that older voters skew toward them.)
Trump has insisted without evidence since 2016 that he lost New Hampshire that year because of voter fraud, and that if you “deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he actually won the popular vote. (Once in office, he set up a voter fraud commission that disbanded in 2018 after finding no widespread voter fraud.) Trump has pointed to voter fraud again this week for his opposition to mail in ballots, and has called for voter ID, which tends to disfranchise Democrats far more than Republicans.
The attempt to suppress the majority in order to stay in power is more than partisanship. It is an illustration that the leaders of today’s Republican Party feel entitled to govern even though they are not popular, entitled to enforce policies they know voters would reject if they could. It also means that Republicans increasingly do not have to answer to the people; their seats are secure.
Opposition to this manipulation of our political system is not about electing Democrats; it is about protecting democracy, as Michael Waldman of the non-partisan Brennan Center wrote in USA Today on Tuesday. Using the Trump technique of accusing an opponent of his own tricks, though, a senior Trump campaign counsel, Justin Clark, says: “It is beyond disgusting that the Democrats are using this crisis to try to dismantle the integrity of our voting system…. The American people won’t stand for this, and the campaign and the party intend to fight with them for a free, fair, and open vote in November.”
Clark made the news late last year when a tape leaked from a private event in which he told Republican leaders in the key state of Wisconsin: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places…. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”
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April 5, 2020 (Sunday)
The storm is upon us. America has at least 337,274 coronavirus cases and at least 9,633 dead, and the numbers are climbing. The next two weeks will be a challenge.
There is much political news today, but it can wait. It seems inappropriate to scratch into the weeds of political machinations as we draw our breath for the great wave ahead of us.
As I read the news and your messages, I am struck by the great uncertainty with which we are facing what is to come. Some people are warning that this crisis will last for years; others that it will end quickly and painfully. Some are warning of the rise of fascism; others hope for a renewal of democracy. All of us are afraid; some of us are hopeful.
I would urge you to remember that calamity reveals who we truly are, and that, in our past, we have weathered great crises. More than that, those crises have produced a renewal of our vow that all of us are created equal and are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Great challenges have inspired us to try to create a government and a nation that really reflects, once and for all, the principle of human self-determination.
I am missing a friend tonight, a good man, a Jesuit who has chosen to weather this storm ministering to the poor in Nairobi rather than being evacuated home to the United States. In honor of him and of the many front-line workers who are shepherding us through this crisis, I offer the words that my friend’s spiritual leader Pope Francis spoke today in a nearly empty St. Peters Basilica in honor of Palm Sunday:
“Dear friends, look at the real heroes who come to light in these days: they are not famous, rich and successful people; rather, they are those who are giving themselves in order to serve others.”
We are surrounded by ordinary people who are giving themselves to serve others: bus drivers, delivery people, airline workers, grocery store clerks, post office workers, line cooks, police officers, food producers, teachers, social workers, janitorial staff, tradespeople, utility maintenance professionals, farm workers, child care providers, health care workers, servicemen and women, nurses, doctors. Their dedication deserves our profound thanks. It also proves that the great strength of America remains where it has always been: in ordinary Americans, setting their shoulders to accomplish the task before them.
Sleep well, everyone. We’ll go back to politics tomorrow.
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April 6, 2020 (Monday)
There is complicated news about voter suppression tonight out of Wisconsin. It has overridden today’s news of the extraordinary outburst of Trump’s acting Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, who flew almost 8000 miles to Guam to harangue the sailors from the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
I’ll cover the Mobly story later in the week, but for tonight, Wisconsin.
There is a crucial election there tomorrow that landed tonight at the US Supreme Court. The backstory is that in 2010, thanks to REDMAP, the Republican Redistricting Majority Project I wrote about on Saturday, the Wisconsin legislature was controlled by Republicans. They worked to guarantee their control, gerrymandering the state so effectively in 2011 that in the 2012 elections, Republicans lost a majority of voters, but took 60% of the seats in the legislature. (They won only 48.6% of the votes, but took 61% of the seats.)
With this power, they promptly passed a strict voter-ID law that reduced black and Latino voting, resulting in 200,000 fewer voters in 2016 than had voted in 2012. (Remember, Wisconsin is a key battleground state, and Trump won it in 2016 by fewer than 23,000 votes.)
Now, there is a move afoot to purge about 240,000 more voters from the rolls, thanks to the old system called “voter caging.” The state sent letters to registered voters, largely in districts that voted Democratic in 2016, and those who did not respond to the letters have been removed from the voter rolls on the argument that the fact they didn’t respond to the letters must mean they have moved. Initially, the purge was supposed to happen in 2021, after the election, but a conservative group sued to remove them earlier and a conservative state judge, Paul V. Malloy ordered it done. Malloy’s decision has been appealed to the Wisconsin state supreme court, which has deadlocked over the issue by a vote of 3-3.
On tomorrow’s ballot is a contest for a seat on that court. The Republicans desperately want to reelect their candidate, Justice Daniel Kelly, who recused himself from the voter purge vote pending the election. Trump has endorsed Kelly, who will uphold the purge if he is reelected. Before the pandemic, observers thought Kelly’s opponent had a good chance of unseating him because of expected high turnout among Democrats. But now, of course, all bets are off, especially since the Democratic strongholds in the state are in the cities, where the residents are hunkered down.
The election was originally scheduled for tomorrow, but the pandemic has gummed up the works. A stay-at-home order went into effect in the state on March 25, and more than a million voters have requested absentee ballots. But this huge surge means the state is running behind and hasn’t been able to deliver the ballots. Meanwhile, roughly 7000 poll workers, who are volunteers and often elderly, have said they would not come manage the election, so a large number of polls can’t open. The city of Milwaukee, whose 600,000 people normally would have 180 polling places, will have five. Milwaukee tends to vote Democratic.
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, tried to get the Republican-dominated legislature to postpone the election or to mail ballots to all voters for a May 26 election deadline, but it refused. Over the weekend, the mayors of Wisconsin’s ten biggest cities urged the state’s top health official, Andrea Palm, to “step up” and use her emergency powers to replace in-person voting with mail-in voting, as Ohio did when faced with a similar problem. On Monday, Evers signed an executive order postponing the election until June 9—something even he was unsure he had the power to do, but he said he felt he had to try to keep people safe-- but Republicans challenged the order and the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court blocked it.
Last Thursday, a federal judge permitted absentee ballots to be counted in the election so long as they arrived back to election officials by April 13, but Republicans immediately challenged the decision. Tonight, in a 5-4 decision, the US. Supreme Court refused to permit this extension of time for the state to receive absentee ballots, arguing (apparently without any self-awareness) that the federal judge made a mistake by changing the rules of an election so close to its date. This means that absentee ballots have to be postmarked tomorrow, even if the voter hasn’t gotten one by then.
The court insisted that the issue in the decision was quite narrow, and had nothing to do with the larger question of the right to vote. The four dissenting justices cried foul.
Writing for the four other judges in dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote that “the court’s order, I fear, will result in massive disenfranchisement.” “The majority of this Court declares that this case presents a “narrow, technical question”…. That is wrong. The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic. Under the District Court’s order, they would be able to do so. Even if they receive their absentee ballot in the days immediately following election day, they could return it. With the majority’s stay in place, that will not be possible. Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety, or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own. That is a matter of utmost importance—to the constitutional rights of Wisconsin’s citizens, the integrity of the State’s election process, and in this most extraordinary time, the health of the Nation.”
The New York Times editorial board echoed Ginsburg, warning that what is happening in Wisconsin, where Republicans are trying to use the pandemic to steal an election, could happen nationally in 2020. This is why Democrats tried to get robust election funding in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus bill to bolster mail-in ballots, and why Trump said: “The things they had in there were crazy, they had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have another Republican elected in this country again.”
This crisis in Wisconsin has national implications. The reelection of Kelly will likely mean Wisconsin loses another 240,000 voters, most of them Democrats. This will increase Trump’s chances of winning the state in 2020, and Wisconsin is likely key to a victory in the Electoral College.
This is why I watch the minutia of politics so carefully. It’s hard to imagine that the election of a state judge in Wisconsin matters to our nation of fifty states and 330 million people, but it does. Oh, boy, does it.
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April 7, 2020 (Tuesday)
First a correction to last night’s post. I wrote that Judge Daniel Kelly was up for reelection in Wisconsin. In fact, he was never elected; he was appointed by Republican Governor Scott Walker. Today’s election will determine if he joins the Wisconsin supreme court as an elected member.
Aside from the Wisconsin election, today’s political machinations felt like they were about psychology, about narcissistic traits and when and how they dominate others… and when they don’t work.
Today the acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly resigned. He did so after he appeared Monday at the USS Theodore Roosevelt, now in Guam where the sailors are being quarantined because of the Covid-19 outbreak on their ship. Modly is a political appointee who, after seven years as helicopter pilot in the Navy, left the service and became a businessman. He was appointed as acting Secretary of the Navy in November 2019 after Trump removed the previous Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer. Spencer had incurred Trump’s wrath by opposing the president’s interference in the military justice proceedings against Eddie Gallagher, convicted of posing for a photograph with the corpse of a dead teenaged ISIS fighter.
Modly removed Captain Brett Crozier from the command of the Roosevelt after a memo in which Crozier took his superiors to task for leaving the sailors of his ship to the mercy of the coronavirus spreading through it leaked to the press. The removal of the captain before an investigation was unusual, and Modly apparently told a colleague “Breaking news: Trump wants him fired.” The removal caused an uproar, especially after the videos circulated of the sailors cheering Crozier as he left the ship.
So Modly traveled 8000 miles to Guam to speak to the sailors of the Roosevelt, but he was clearly speaking to an audience of one. In the ten-minute, profanity-laced harangue, Modly defended his action in firing Crozier, then called this high-ranking naval officer either “too naïve or too stupid to be the commanding officer of a ship like this.” (Prompting a sailor on the tape to exclaim: “What the [expletive]!”) He went on to accuse Crozier of “betrayal” for his memo, and warned the sailors that they should never go to the media because it had an agenda and wanted to embarrass the Navy. He emphasized that Crozier had compromised the mission of the ship by calling attention to the plight of the sailors, and that could not be tolerated. He complained at how badly he and his family had been treated over his treatment of Crozier, “But it doesn’t matter. It’s not about me,” he said. He attacked Joe Biden, and he promised the sailors that he would answer the questions they had sent him later, “whether you hate me or not.”
It was an extraordinary performance that showed just how ill equipped Modly was for the high office he occupied. Modly’s behavior echoed that of Trump and of those who share his personality, although his performance sounded juvenile and pathetic compared to that of Trump. Like him or hate him, Trump dominates an audience, and Modly did not, sounding defensive rather than dominant.
Key to both Modly’s speech and Trump’s behavior is the attitude of “you’re not the boss of me!” and the belief that they can behave without restraint. In Modly’s case, that attitude did not work. After first standing by his speech, he issued an apology. But it wasn’t enough to save him.
He will be replaced by Under Secretary of the Army, James McPherson.
While Modly’s attempt to show his dominance backfired, Trump himself is also trying to demonstrate that no one can boss him around. Last Friday, he fired the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, the man who had told Congress that the acting Director of National Intelligence was withholding the whistleblower complaint over Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymr Zelensky last July.
Today, Trump removed the Pentagon official tapped to head the group monitoring the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package, known as the CARES Act. Glenn Fine, a career official who was serving as the acting Pentagon inspector general, had been selected by a number of his fellow inspectors to head the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee established to oversee CARES. Trump removed him from his position as the Pentagon inspector general, thus making him ineligible to oversee the CARES Act.
Tonight, Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics tweeted that Trump was planning to fire 7 Inspectors General in one fell swoop, planning to put his own people into those positions. Such a sweeping purge remains to be seen, but Trump is clearly culling all but his own people, demonstrating that he can behave as he wishes. Democrats are pushing back of course, but so did Paul Rosenzweig, a political appointee in George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security. Rosenzweig called Trump’s removal of Fine “an affront to independence and oversight.” “Frankly,” he said, “if the House of Representatives does not condition all further covid aid on the restriction of the president’s removal authority, they will have made a mistake.”
Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning organization, warned, “This is a giant step towards a corrupt aristocracy. And not a word from his enablers in Congress….”
Not a word from his enablers, but Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, announced today that the committee will investigate Trump’s firing of Atkinson. His letter to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell on the subject asked Grenell to confirm in writing whether he had ever prohibited Atkinson from doing his job, “initiating, carrying out, or completing any investigation, inspection, audit, or review.”
Schiff’s letter does more than that, though. It accuses Grenell of politicizing his office and thus undermining critical intelligence functions. It notes that “Congress has neither authorized organizational changes at ODNI, nor appropriated funds for that purpose” and that the committee “is concerned… by the removal or departure of every Senate-confirmed official at ODNI.” The letter warns Grenell against purging career officials in favor of Trump cronies and demands that he provide by April 16 “a written certification from the Acting General Counsel of ODNI that officials, yourself included, will not permit retaliation or reprisals against anyone who has made, or in the future makes, protected disclosures of misconduct to Congress or Inspectors General.”
If Grenell refuses to stipulate that he will not permit retaliation, he is admitting that, so far as he is concerned, Trump can purge the intelligence community of career officials and replace them with his own people. Remember, the intelligence community has uniformly warned that Russia is already interfering in our upcoming election, while Trump, Grenell, and a former staffer for Devin Nunes (R-CA), now working with Grenell, all deny that finding and assert that it was Ukraine, rather than Russia, that attacked us in 2016. (There is no evidence of this, and intelligence officers say it is Russian propaganda.)
Schiff also warned that “reports indicate that one or more members of your staff may be inappropriately interfering with the production and briefing of intelligence information on election security to Congress, including information that was briefed to all Members on March 10.” He requested “any and all communications” about that briefing.
So here we are. Modly didn’t get away with declaring he could do as he wished. Will Trump, especially when it involves our national security and the upcoming election?
I wouldn’t take a bet. The last time Schiff wrote a letter like this to an acting Director of National Intelligence, Trump got impeached.
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Shouldn’t that say “dead teenaged ISIS fighter whose throat he’d just slit”? (I should look it up, but don’t wanna.)
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While said teenager was lying in a hospital bed being treated by a US Navy medic for injuries, and was sedated.
We should always remind people what a brave solider Eddie Gallagher was.
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ah. two trillion dollars at the whim of a self-dealing white supremacist man baby what could possibly go wrong.
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