So much for China supporting Biden. All our international rivals probably se the advantage to our country being run by a clueless, easily manipulated narcissistic idiot and would like to continue seeing that. Shit.
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This, of course, is not true. They still profit. Both Twitter, and that Trump persona. It is win-win for them. Always.
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September 11, 2020 (Friday)
Today is the nineteenth anniversary of the terrorist attack that killed almost 3000 of us on this date in 2001. It feels wrong to write about daily news today and yet, as we approach 200,000 dead from a mismanaged pandemic and face unprecedented assaults on our national government, it also feels wrong not to.
We are also currently facing another crisis that demands our attention. Wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington have consumed more than 3 million acres in CA, more than a million acres in Oregon, and nearly 627,000 in Washington. The fires have killed at least 17 people; many more are missing. In Oregon, more than 40,000 residents have been evacuated with half a million preparing to leave evacuation zones. Towns have been burned to the ground, and state officials warn that they are preparing for a “mass fatality incident.”
The danger from Oregon fires has been compounded by politics, as rumors spread that the fires had been set by left-wing mobs planning to ransack houses after forcing people to evacuate. The FBI and local officials urged people not to listen to rumors and insisted that extremists were not setting the fires. The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook: “Remember when we said to follow official sources only[?] Remember when we said rumors make this already difficult incident even harder? Rumors spread just like wildfire and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires in DOUGLAS COUNTY, OREGON. THIS IS NOT TRUE!.. STOP. SPREADING. RUMORS!”
Although one person has been arrested for setting one of the fires, officials said he was not politically motivated. They described him as “a local transient” with a criminal record who had frequently tangled with law enforcement officers.
While Trump talked in July and August about protecting lives in Oregon and sent in federal forces to engage with protesters in the streets of Portland, he has remained virtually silent about the fires now devastating the western states. (Last summer, he offered federal help to Russian leader Vladimir Putin and to Brazil leader Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, to contain wildfires burning in Siberia and the Amazon rain forest.) He has, though, issued an emergency declaration for California and Oregon, which opens up federal funding for those states.
How much money will go to help Americans through this year’s fires is unclear. The Iowa governor asked for close to $4 billion to rebuild after last month’s derecho storm; Trump approved $45 million (although he tweeted that he had approved “the FULL Emergency Declaration”). A month later Iowans have received $7.1 million in grants and small business loans.
It is also unclear how much money is available. At the end of July, the $600 federal weekly addition to state unemployment benefits ran out. The Senate refused to pass the House’s coronavirus relief bill and proved unable to write its own. Then talks between White House negotiators and Democratic House leaders about a new bill broke down. To replace some of the unemployment relief money-- $300 a week-- Trump redirected $54.2 billion from the Disaster Relief Fund administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), leaving $25 billion or so for emergencies. The money that went into unemployment benefits is now almost gone-- the extra payments will end for most recipients within a week or two. It’s unclear how far the remaining money will stretch.
Federal relief money was also in the news today as Michael McAuliff at the New York Daily News broke the story that, since 2016, the Trump administration has secretly siphoned off nearly $4 million from the New York City Fire Department’s 9/11 health fund, designed to treat New York firefighters and medics who suffer from illnesses related to their service on 9/11. The payments were authorized and sent, but the Treasury Department began keeping some of the money.
The administration had not responded to years of inquiries about the hold, but today, after the news story broke, a Treasury Department official emailed to say that it was “an unfortunate situation.” The department blamed an accounting error that docked money from the fund because the city owed money on a different account. Dr. David Preszant, the medical officer who oversees the program, rejected the explanation, noting that he had been asking for answers for years. “They are giving us craziness,” he told McAuliff and his colleague Chris Sommerfeldt. “If they’re talking money because the city owes them money, let them take it from where the city owes it. And if they’re taking money, they should tell people they’re taking money. This has been a clandestine operation.”
Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island who is retiring from Congress this year, agreed: “The initial blame has to go to Treasury. Whoever decided to target the FDNY 9/11 firefighters health fund — it’s just absolutely disgraceful, totally indefensible.”
The administration’s honesty on other issues was in the news, today, too. Nora R. Dannehy, a top aide in the Justice Department, unexpectedly stepped down. Dannehy worked for U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting an investigation into the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in 2016. Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to redo the work of the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, when it became clear Horowitz’ own look at the probe would not support the president’s accusations that it was a “witch hunt.” When it came out, Horowitz’s report found errors in the FBI’s application for surveillance clearance, but concluded that the investigation was opened legitimately and conducted without political bias.
Dannehy did not explain why she has resigned, but The Hartford Courant reported that, according to her colleagues, she was unhappy that Barr was putting pressure on the team to produce a report before the election. Barr has made it clear he is intending to ignore the Justice Department’s policy of avoiding public announcements within 60 days of an election if such an announcement could affect the vote. After the Horowitz report, Trump told reporters: “I look forward to the Durham report, which is coming out in the not-too-distant future. It’s got its own information, which is this information plus plus plus.”
Today, former Judge John Gleeson, tapped by the judge overseeing Michael Flynn’s sentencing to examine whether or not it was appropriate to drop the case at the sentencing stage, delivered his brief. Trump’s friend and former National Security Advisor, Flynn had pleaded guilty of lying to FBI officers about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in early January 2017 but, after cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for almost two years, Flynn tried to withdraw the guilty pleas and argue that he had been set up by the FBI. This May, the Justice Department tried to dismiss the case and set Flynn free. Judge Emmett Sullivan instead asked Gleeson to review the situation and scheduled a hearing on the issue. Flynn’s lawyer asked the court to order Sullivan to stop the prosecution immediately. A three-judge panel, headed by a Trump appointee, agreed, but the full bench overturned that ruling by a vote of 8-2.
And now we have Gleeson’s scathing review. He called the attempt to dismiss the case a plot to help a friend of the president evade the law. “There is clear evidence that this motion reflects a corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, the House investigation of the Department of Homeland Security, sparked by this week’s whistleblower complaint by Brian Murphy, is expanding. Murphy claims that acting Director of Homeland Security Chad Wolf (appointed illegally, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office), and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli (also appointed illegally) pressured intelligence officers to change their reports to benefit the president. Officers were instructed to downplay the real threats of white supremacist violence and Russian interference in the election, and instead bolster Trump’s narrative that left-wing groups are a threat and that China and Iran, rather than Russia, are attacking our election.
Murphy will testify in private before the House Intelligence Committee on September 21.
The House Homeland Security Committee has subpoenaed Wolf to testify in a public hearing on September 17 after he refused to do so voluntarily. Trump yesterday submitted his name as an actual nominee for the post he has filled since last November and DHS says it is unprecedented for a department head to testify before his confirmation. It is, of course, unprecedented-- and likely illegal-- that Trump has kept an unconfirmed appointee in that position for so long.
In contrast to the apparent politicization of… well, everything… Biden today released his plans for combatting the coronavirus pandemic, should he be elected. Six months ago, he pulled together leaders from the George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama administrations to draft plans for ramping up testing, distributing protective equipment and vaccines, addressing health-care disparities, and reopening schools. Biden maintains that the economy cannot recover until the pandemic is addressed adequately.
His campaign also recognizes that, if he is elected, he will have to figure out how to both unify the country and restore the public’s faith in the federal government.
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September 12, 2020 (Saturday)
Last night, at about 10:30, reporter Dan Diamond posted another blockbuster story in Politico. Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have been altering the weekly scientific reports issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) following the course of the coronavirus pandemic. They believe the reports are undermining Trump’s cheery pronouncements about the disease, and claim there is a “deep state” at the CDC determined to hurt the president.
Since 1981, career scientists have compiled Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports to inform Americans about trends in disease. These records are not controversial. But in April, Trump passed over scientists to install one of his campaign advisers as assistant secretary of HHS for public affairs. Michael Caputo was a long-time Republican operative, an associate of Roger Stone who had worked for Russia’s Gasprom Media to improve the image of Vladimir Putin in the U.S.
Caputo promptly began trying to change the CDC reports on Covid. Although he has no background in medicine or science, he and his team claim that the scientists are exaggerating the dangers of Covid-19. An aide, Paul Alexander, wrote an email to CDC Director Robert Redfield calling for retroactive modifications to two reports, saying, “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration.” Alexander, recruited by Caputo from his position as an assistant professor of health research at Hamilton’s McMaster University in Canada, has demanded that the CDC stop issuing reports until he is given the right to review them before publication and to make line edits.
“Our intention is to make sure that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic—not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC," Caputo said.
The attack on transparency at the CDC echoes Trump’s attempt to protect acting director of Homeland Security Chad Wolf from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee. On Wednesday, a whistleblower filed a complaint that Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli have been pressuring intelligence officials to change their reports to bolster Trump’s campaign speeches. Rather than releasing the actual findings of intelligence experts that America’s chief threats come from white supremacists and Russian attacks on the 2020 election, Trump’s men want the intelligence reports altered to suggest that left-wing violence is equal to that of the right-wing thugs, and that Iran and China are as guilty of election interference as the Russians.
Since June, the House Homeland Security Committee has tried to get Wolf to testify before it about worldwide threats to the United States, and it had appeared that he had finally agreed to come on September 17. After Wednesday’s publication of the whistleblower complaint though, the administration did something sneaky to try to keep the House from being able to make him testify.
Trump never officially nominated Wolf for the position he holds, both because keeping his officials “acting” means they are beholden to him, and because Wolf would have a hard time winning confirmation because he had no experience with either law enforcement or intelligence, which the law requires in a Director of Homeland Security. But, thanks to a quirk in the law, Wolf could move into an acting position so long as he had been confirmed by the Senate for a different position. The day the Senate confirmed him as a DHS undersecretary, the resigning acting DHS director switched the line of succession in the department to let Wolf move into the directorship. But, according to the Government Accountability Office, the man who switched the line of succession was himself appointed illegally, and so therefore had no authority to install either Wolf or his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli. So they are both serving illegally.
I know. Clear as mud, right?
But here’s why this matters for transparency: As soon as the whistleblower story broke, Trump unexpectedly nominated Wolf for the actual job he has held illegally for more than ten months. Immediately, DHS told the House that Wolf could not testify in front of the committee, because “it is standard practice for nominated officials not to testify in their acting roles in front of a congressional committee before they have been confirmed.”
Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, promptly subpoenaed Wolf, saying “From the coronavirus pandemic to the rise of right-wing extremism to ongoing election interference, there are urgent threats requiring our attention. Mr. Wolf’s refusal to testify – thereby evading congressional oversight at this critical time – is especially troubling given the serious matters facing the Department and the Nation.”
Assistant DHS Secretary Beth Spivey responded: “The arguments in your letter are without merit.” She said that from the moment Trump nominated Wolf, he “became unavailable to testify before Congress on matters unrelated to his nomination.” This will become a protracted fight. It is unlikely we will hear from the Director of Homeland Security about attempts to bend intelligence reports to support the president’s reelection until after the election, if then.
The Justice Department, too, is being shaped to support Trump’s narrative. Yesterday, Nora R. Dannehy, the top aide to John Durham, resigned from the department, apparently because of pressure from Attorney General William Barr to complete a report that could bolster the president’s claims that the Obama administration improperly began an FBI investigation of his campaign in 2016. Both the inspector general of the Department of Justice and the Senate Intelligence Committee have already concluded that the investigation was begun legitimately and conducted without political bias.
And today, as western states continue to suffer from runaway wildfires, the South and East face unusually bad hurricanes, and Iowa tries to rebuild from a derecho, we learned that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has hired a climate-change denier. David Legate has spent his career casting doubt on climate science: in 2014, he told the Senate that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which identifies international consensus within the scientific community of 195 countries (no mean feat) is wrong. His work has been funded in part by grants from Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and the American Petroleum Institute. Neither he nor NOAA would tell NPR why he was hired.
All of these stories dovetail neatly with the information shared this week from journalist Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book. Woodward reveals that Trump knew on January 28 just how bad the coronavirus was. He called Woodward on February 7 to tell him “this is deadly stuff,” and to detail for him that the virus was airborne and that it was five times more deadly than “even your strenuous flus.” But he continued to tell the American people that coronavirus was going to disappear, that they did not need to wear masks, and that those warning of its dangers were trying to advance a “hoax” to weaken his administration.
I write a lot about the philosophy of living in a fact-based reality, explaining the Enlightenment idea that we can move society forward only by evaluating fact-based arguments. Replacing facts with fiction means that as a society we cannot accurately evaluate new information and then shape policy according to solid evidence. But the Trump administration’s attempt to hide reality under their own narrative reveals a more immediate injury. You cannot make good decisions about your life or your future if someone keeps you in the dark about what is really going on, any more than you can make good business decisions if your partner is secretly cooking the books.
Knowledge truly is power.
As of today, we have lost more than 192,000 American lives to Covid-19.
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September 14, 2020 (Monday)
Today’s big story is the growing threat of violence on the part of Trump loyalists in the administration, including the president himself.
On September 10, Trump’s friend and adviser Roger Stone appeared on Infowars, the show run by the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses before they testified concerning the ties of the 2016 Trump campaign to Russia, Stone publicly asked Trump to commute his sentence and, in exchange, promised to campaign for him.
Stone was a political operative for Richard Nixon—he famously has a picture of Nixon tattooed on his back—and was a business partner of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, now also a convicted felon. Stone calls himself a “rat-f**ker”—a term used by Nixon insiders to describe electoral fraud and dirty tricks—and was an instigator of the “Brooks Brothers Riot” that shut down the recount of ballots in Florida in 2000.
In July, Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence, and now, apparently, Stone is holding up his end of the deal.
On Jones’s show, Stone said, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud meant that the only legitimate result of the election would be a Trump victory. (Remember: voter fraud is a myth.) He claimed that the ballots in Nevada were already “completely corrupted” and that they “should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state,” especially the ones in Clark County, which leans Democratic. He suggested that former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) should be arrested.
Stone said that Trump should form “an Election Day operation using the FBI, federal marshals, and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.” Trump should also, he said, consider declaring martial law and then using that power to arrest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, “the Clintons” and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”
On the next day, September 11, right-wing talk show host Mark Levin said that Trump “will have to… put down the enemy” after the election, using the Insurrection Act, which permits the president to use the military against citizens to stop civil disorder and rebellion. “The enemy is antifa, the enemy is Black Lives Matter, and the enemy is anybody that is going to use rioting, arson, looting, violence against our country to try to overthrow our country,” he said. “Those are traitors. That’s treasonous.” He continued, “It wouldn’t be hard to put down these punks…. They run around in masks because they’re frauds. They cover their faces because they’re frauds. They don’t want you to know what they are and who they are.”
On Saturday, in an interview with Jeanine Pirro on the Fox News Channel, Trump defended the police killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl, a man who identified himself as an anti-fascist and who is suspected of killing a pro-Trump far-right activist in Portland, Oregon. Reinoehl told a reporter for VICE that he acted in self-defense before the man stabbed him and a friend. Shortly after that interview, police shot and killed Reinoehl in a parking lot. The police maintained he pulled a gun on them, but a witness says Reinoehl was walking, holding a cell phone and eating a gummy worm, and the police fired without identifying themselves.
Trump, at least, seemed to think it was a deliberate killing in which officers took the law into their own hands, and he approves. He told Pirro: “This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something – that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.” Then he spoke approvingly of a backlash against alleged left-wing violence in the cities. “You will see a backlash the likes of which you haven’t seen in many, many years.”
Yesterday, Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has tried to dictate how the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on coronavirus, went on an unhinged rant in a video on Facebook, accusing the CDC of having a “resistance unit” of “seditious” scientists who were permitting Americans to die so they could harm Trump’s reelection campaign.
Caputo urged his listeners “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.” He said that Trump is on track to win in November, but that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will stoke violence rather than conceding. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. Caputo claimed that the Trump supporter killed in Portland, Oregon was “a drill” for what was to come. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing…. [T]here are hit squads being trained all over this country” to stop a second Trump term, and they were, he said, “going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going.”
Caputo noted that the pressure of his job had harmed his physical health, and his “mental health has definitely failed.” After his video had been viewed more than 850 times, Caputo shut down his account.
The escalating language of violence indicates that the Trump team thinks it is going to lose the election. Others appear to think that, too: Georgia Senator David Perdue has recently begun to distance himself from the president in his own reelection campaign.
For my part, it just makes me sad. This rhetorical pattern echoes the strategy of southern Democratic leaders in 1860, when they knew they did not have the numbers to win the upcoming election fairly. They kept opponents from the polls, jiggered the mechanics of state elections, and warned white voters that, if Abraham Lincoln were elected, he and his dangerous radicals would destroy America. As their calls for violence escalated, they promised supporters that if it came to a fight, weak and frightened northerners would run away.
Even so, when Lincoln won the 1860 election, most southern whites were content to see what he did before they picked up their guns. But southern leaders were unwilling to live in a country they did not control, and declared they were going to create their own country, based in human slavery, even before Lincoln took office. In the ensuing war, ordinary Confederate soldiers learned the hard way both that northerners would not run away, and that their leaders cared about protecting the economy, not them.
It sounds poignantly familiar.
But it is unlikely to come to armed conflict this time around. The economic interests of the country are not divided regionally, and for all the bluster at the national level, state governors are largely staying quiet. We are more likely to see sporadic violence from groups of unorganized thugs, spurred by leaders’ rhetoric and by Nazi-adjacent QAnon rumors of a Satanic cabal, exactly as the repressed threat assessment from the Department of Homeland Security said. This scenario played out in August in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly killed two people and wounded a third as he “policed” the city with a militia group.
But even this is not a given. We know that the Trump campaign plans to launch legal fights across each vital state to challenge votes for Biden, but Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times today explained that Biden has now also assembled a big new legal operation overseen by Dana Remus, Biden’s general counsel on the campaign, and the brilliant Bob Bauer, former White House counsel for President Obama. Their team plans not only to defend Biden’s voters, but also to restore trust in the country’s electoral system.
Said Remus: “We can and will hold a free and fair election this fall and be able to trust the results.”
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Be careful what you wish for.
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September 15, 2020 (Tuesday)
Exactly a year ago, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:
“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I’m okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I’ve been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it’s very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today…”
In my roundup, I noted that we had just learned that a whistleblower from within the intelligence community had filed a complaint that the inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael K. Atkinson, deemed “credible” and "urgent.” This meant that it was supposed to go to the Director of National Intelligence to be cleared of anything that needed to be hidden, and then sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Trump’s then-acting Director of Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, had withheld it. On Friday, September 13, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, California Democrat Adam Schiff, had written a scathing letter to Maguire, telling Maguire he knew about the complaint—we now know that Atkinson had alerted him-- and that Maguire had better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.
Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and explaining the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace. Within a week, we had learned that the day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller had testified before Congress and seemed to shut down any further investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Trump had tried to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. On July 25, Trump suggested to the new Ukraine president that he would release funds Zelensky badly needed to continue Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions only after such an announcement. And people asked more questions, and I wrote another post…
And so these Letters from an American were born.
In the 365 days since then, we have lived through the Ukraine scandal, which revealed that the president was secretly running his own foreign policy team whose goal was to strong-arm Ukraine into helping the president’s reelection campaign. Their attempt to get Zelensky not to run an investigation but rather simply to announce one reflected backward onto the 2016 campaign. The 2016 Trump campaign hammered on the Clinton email “scandal,” and badly damaged her candidacy. But, in mid-October, the final report from the State Department concluded that there was no systematic mishandling of information, that people tried to follow the rules, and that none of the information that did get mishandled was classified at the time (some of it was retroactively classified by the Trump administration).
We lived through the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria in early October 2019, leaving our former Kurdish allies to be murdered by Turkish troops, just as experts had warned would happen if U.S. troops pulled back. ISIS freed compatriots from jails and launched new attacks, and Russian troops moved into the positions we had held in the region.
We have lived through the House impeachment hearings in October and November, when it became clear that the Republicans were not, in fact, interested in whether or not Trump had committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but rather in badgering witnesses to provide sound bites that could be stitched together into a fictional narrative on social media and the Fox News Channel. Then, on December 18, for the third time in history, the House voted to impeach a president. Driven by the Democratic majority, it impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
We lived through the Senate impeachment trial early in 2020, where Republican Senators refused to hear witnesses or subpoena documents. On February 5, the Senate acquitted the president of the charges. All but one Republican senator voted to acquit. Utah’s Mitt Romney voted to convict on abuse of power.
We lived through the purge of career government officials and their replacement with Trump loyalists that began two days after Trump’s acquittal. On February 7, Trump dismissed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from his position on the National Security Council, where he was an expert on Russia and Ukraine. Vindman had been on the July 25 call and testified before the House Intelligence Committee under subpoena, that White House officials had put the transcript of the call onto a high security server, where national security secrets are held. Vindman also explained that the readout Trump provided the public did not contain key parts of the conversation: Trump had explicitly mentioned both Burisma—the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat-- and the Bidens themselves. Trump also ordered the ouster of Vindman’s twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny (Eugene) Vindman, an Army officer on the NSC staff. Since then, Trump has continued to replace career officials with his own loyalists throughout the government everywhere from the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Postal Service through the CDC and the Voice of America.
On the same day he was retaliating against the Vindmans, Trump picked up the phone and called veteran journalist Bob Woodward to tell him there was a deadly new virus spreading around the world. It was airborne, he explained, and was five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” “This is deadly stuff,” he said. He would not share that information with other Americans, though, continuing to play down the virus in hopes of protecting the economy.
This, almost 200,000 of us have not lived through.
And now, as the coronavirus continues to ravage our country, our people, and our economy, the president is trying to win reelection by dividing us, convincing enough voters that “radical leftists” are destroying “Democrat cities” that he can emerge as a “law and order” president. He is suggesting that any result other than his own reelection will be illegitimate, and that he should get a third term because of how badly he has been treated in the first.
It has been quite a year. Those of us who are exhausted have earned it.
But from the chaos and crisis of this past year has emerged a renewed dedication to democracy. You see it in Lt. Col. Vindman telling his father that he would be all right if he testified before Congress against the president, because “this is America… and here, right matters.” You see it in the incredible work of the House impeachment managers and their constant invoking of our Constitution, our laws, and our principles. You see it in how Americans have come together to take care of each other when the federal government went AWOL during the pandemic, and in people of all ages and background mobilizing for Black lives.
You see it in people donating money to candidates and causes, organizing voter drives, and making sure their children and their parents and their cousins and their friends are registered to vote and have a plan to do so. You see it in people working for a cause that is important to them, calling their elected officials at all levels, writing letters to the editor, and pushing back on the false narratives that spread through social media and from there to our communities.
For me, though, I see it most of all right here. I see it in how many of you bother to read these long and complicated letters and who write to ask questions, send me news articles or personal stories, make corrections, and say how afraid you are that we might lose American democracy. I see it in your insistence on facts and accuracy, your constant questioning, your dismissal of trolls and bots, and your kindness to the community you have built. Most of all, though, I see it in your overwhelming support.
I am not exaggerating when I say I have come to see myself simply as a translator. I could not do this without you.
Thank you all for being along on this journey.
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September 16, 2020 (Wednesday)
Last night, Trump joined an ABC News “town hall” hosted by George Stephanopoulos in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. He faced ordinary Americans, who asked basic questions about health care, mask wearing, and so on, and delivered his usual litany of self-aggrandizement and lies. But he seemed cornered and unable to control the narrative the way he did in 2016. The White House has been doing damage control from the event all day.
The president promised to protect the ability of people with pre-existing conditions to get healthcare coverage and accused Democrats of trying to kill that rule. Of course, the opposite is true: the Trump administration is trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—that protects such people, while Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promises to expand and strengthen the law.
When Stephanopoulos fact checked him, Trump insisted that he is going to protect people with pre-existing conditions through his own forthcoming new health care plan. Stephanopoulos pointed out that he has promised such a plan repeatedly since he took office, but none has ever appeared. Today White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said there was a plan in the works but told reporters that if they wanted to know what it was and who was working on it, they should come work at the White House.
Trump claimed there would be a coronavirus vaccine in three or four weeks, although scientists say the earliest possible date is early 2021. Today, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Congress that a vaccine will not be available until next spring or summer. When asked why his prediction was so different than that of the CDC, Trump said that Redfield had “misunderstood” the question and “made a mistake.” “Under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.”
Speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said, "I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump.” When Trump contradicted Redfield, Biden tweeted the video clip and added, “this is what I meant.”
This afternoon, a spokesperson for Redfield appeared to bring the doctor’s comments more in line with Trump’s statements, but then retracted the retraction.
Trump defended his own reluctance to wear a mask by saying that “a lot of people think that masks are not good,” and then, when asked which people think that way, he said “waiters.” He criticized Biden for not issuing a national mandate for wearing masks. Biden promptly tweeted a fundraising message: “Just to be clear: I am not currently president. But if you chip in now, we can change that in November.”
The president almost never leaves the bubble of friendly interviewers on the Fox News Channel, and it showed. He seemed confused, out of touch, unable to budge off his talking points, even when they have been thoroughly debunked. He insisted that, far from downplaying the dangers of coronavirus as he is on tape admitting, he had “up-played it,” and that his response had been so good there was nothing he would change about it. When Stephanopoulos reminded him that the U.S. has 4% of the world’s population and more than 20% of the Covid deaths, Trump nonsensically blamed the statistic on testing. Today, Trump praised his own response to the coronavirus by saying that “if you take the blue states out, we’re at a level I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.”
The town hall was bad enough that Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham tweeted it was an “ambush.”
Trump’s floundering seems to have hardened Attorney General William Barr’s determination to keep control of the government. Tonight, speaking at conservative Hillsdale College, Barr rejected criticism from career prosecutors in the Justice Department that he is skewing cases to benefit Trump. “What exactly am I interfering with?” he asked. “Under the law, all prosecutorial power is invested in the attorney general.” He compared prosecutors to preschoolers, and denied they should have freedom to handle their cases without his interference.
Barr railed against what he called the “criminalization of politics.” “Now you have to call your adversary a criminal, and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail,” Barr said, and he claimed that the United States was starting to resemble an Eastern European country.
But it was Barr who last week told federal prosecutors to think about prosecuting violent protesters for sedition—that is, for rebellion against the government. The attorneys who leaked the story did so anonymously, because they are afraid of retribution. Barr also asked prosecutors in the Justice Department to look into bringing criminal charges against Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan for letting protesters set up a “protest zone” in the city. Durkan is a former U.S. Attorney.
And today we learned that before federal officials cleared Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square of protesters last June at Barr’s order, they sought ammunition and a device that makes anyone within range feel like their skin is on fire. A whistleblower from the D.C. National Guard, Major Adam D. DeMarco, noted that this technology is considered too unpredictable to use in war zones and that the protesters were peaceful and likely unable to hear orders to disperse.
Today we also learned that the Justice Department’s investigation of whether former National Security Adviser John Bolton disclosed classified information in his book, which was highly critical of Trump and his administration, has reached a federal grand jury.
There is increasing pushback to the escalating partisanship of the Trump Republicans. After his own rant on Facebook accusing government scientists of sedition, Trump loyalist Michael Caputo is taking a two-month medical leave of absence from his position as the top spokesman for the CDC. So is his science adviser, Paul Alexander, who was trying to censor CDC reports. Caputo will be replaced by Ryan Murphy, who held the job before Caputo arrived on the scene.
Today, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, Maureen O’Connor, publicly condemned a statement yesterday by the Ohio Republican Party “in the strongest possible terms.” The statement accused a Democratic judge of colluding with Ohio Democrats to cheat in the upcoming election “to elect radical liberals to fulfill their agenda, including judge with unmistakable partisan interests.” O’Connor called the statement “disgraceful,” and “deceitful.” “The Republican Party’s statement should be seen for what it is: part of a continuing string of attacks against any [court] decision that doesn’t favor a political end, regardless of party, even if that decision may be legally correct and indeed legally required,” she said. The former Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, O’Connor is a Republican.
For the first time in its 175-year history, Scientific American has endorsed a presidential candidate. The editors wrote: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment. These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.”
It is an enviable endorsement, but for his part, Biden seems aware that Americans are just tired of the constant drama and chaos of the Trump presidency. Tonight he tweeted simply: “We’re going to get this virus under control and get your life back on track.”
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This sounds like what Paul Ryan did for years - until he decided not to run for re-election and retired.
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Says the guy who is carrying water for the President who has apparent ties to Eastern European countries! 
If that’s not pure fucking projection, I don’t know what is.
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Always, every time. Absolutely unbelievable.
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September 17, 2020 (Thursday)
It feels like power is slipping away from Trump and his administration, and they are trying desperately to claw it back. Meanwhile, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his team are trying to criticize the president without getting sucked into his orbit, so they can focus on moving the country forward.
Today began with Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warning in a New York Times op-ed that the 2020 election will determine “whether the American democratic experiment, one of the boldest political innovations in human history, will survive.” Our enemies, both “foreign and domestic,” are trying to destroy our faith in the upcoming election.
Calling for a bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election, Coats said, “We must firmly, unambiguously reassure all Americans that their vote will be counted, that it will matter, that the people’s will expressed through their votes will not be questioned and will be respected and accepted.” He warned that if instead we accept “Total destruction and sowing salt in the earth of American democracy,” the only winners would be Vladimir Putin, [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping and [Iranian leader] Ali Khamenei.”
Coats did not mention Trump by name, but it was clear the president and his supporters were uppermost in Coats’s mind. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the mail-in voting means the election will be tainted, and that the only acceptable outcome is his own reelection. Today he tweeted: “Because of the new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to “voters”, or wherever, this year, the Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want. Another election disaster yesterday. Stop Ballot Madness!” This is entirely inaccurate, and Twitter flagged it.
Trump followed this tweet with one urging people to vote in person and another claiming: "There is a group of people (largely Radical Left Democrats) that want ELECTION MAYHEM. States must end this CRAZY mass sending of Ballots. Also, a GIFT to foreign interference into our election!!! Stop it now, before it is too late.”
(Trump seems eager not just to stop mail-in voting but also to get people to vote in person, even urging North Carolinians to vote in person a second time after filling out a mail-in ballot. It’s happened enough that I’m curious about why he seems to want people to cast their ballots in person, especially since voting machines in North Carolina notoriously malfunctioned in 2016.)
Midday, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned the House Homeland Security Committee that “the intelligence community consensus is that Russia continues to try to influence our elections” by spreading disinformation through social media, online journals, and so on. Russians are “very active” in their attempts to undermine Biden’s campaign. They are trying to “sow divisiveness and discord” and “primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden and what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.” Russians are spreading the idea that mail-in ballots are insecure, and that Biden is slipping mentally—both stories Trump echoes.
Trump took to Twitter to argue with his FBI director. “But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia. They will both, plus others, be able to interfere in our 2020 Election with our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam. Check it out!”
The president’s attempt to deflect attention from Russia while putting it on China is more disinformation. Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Brian Murphy last week said that DHS acting Director Chad Wolf told him “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.”
Today the administration lost two more employees to the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR), launched a week ago by former DHS officials Miles Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann. The group is made up of current and former Trump officials who oppose his reelection. Josh Venable, the former chief of staff to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Olivia Troye, the former top homeland security aide to Vice President Mike Pence, who played a key role on his coronavirus task force, both joined REPAIR today. Troye says she supports Biden because she thinks the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis, and “at this point it’s country over party.” Troye recorded a scathing video about Trump for the coalition “Republican Voters Against Trump.”
Late this afternoon, a federal judge in Washington state temporarily blocked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s changes in the United States Postal Service in response to complaints from 14 states. Judge Stanley Bastian agreed “The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service. They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.” It’s not clear what the injunction will do, though, since most of the changes have already been made.
To reassure his base, Trump today announced he will create a national commission to promote “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.” He claims that U.S. schools are indoctrinating children with a left-wing agenda that teaches them to hate America. This announcement was solely an attempt to rally his base; the federal government has no authority over school curriculum.
Tonight Biden participated in a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania with host Anderson Cooper, where he tried both to critique Trump’s administration and to demonstrate why he would be a good replacement for the president. The first difference between the two candidates was apparent immediately: while Trump sat during his town hall, Biden stood for the full hour and fifteen minutes. He was extremely well prepared for the live, unscripted comments from voters. Like the questions for Trump two days ago, the questions Biden fielded were pretty obvious ones.
He both answered the questions in detail and used them to criticize Trump. He took the president to task for his “close to criminal,” “totally irresponsible” response to the coronavirus and said that, if elected, he would increase testing and promote wearing masks. In response to Attorney General William Barr’s statement this week that lockdowns to combat the virus were the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in U.S. History “other than slavery,” Biden said, "What takes away your freedom is not being able to see your kid; not being able to go to a football game or a baseball game; not being able to see your mom or dad, sick in the hospital.”
Biden pointed out that he and President Obama had never had to send troops into a city, and that crime had declined on their watch while it is ticking up under Trump. He criticized Trump’s attack on the peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., for a photo op, (although he incorrectly said Trump held the Bible upside down). He called for more accountability within police departments while defending “the vast majority” of law enforcement officers as “decent, honorable people,” who were eager to get rid of the “bad cops” in their midst. As president, he would bring law enforcement officers, unions, and communities of color to "sit at the table and agree on the fundamental things that need to be done” to move the country past the crisis it is in.
Crucially, Biden addressed the vast income inequality in America, casting himself as a voice for ordinary Americans. He reached back to his own youth as the son of a salesman in Scranton, Pennsylvania to contrast himself with Trump, who was born into great wealth. “I view this campaign as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue,” Biden said. “All Trump can see from Park Avenue is Wall Street. All he thinks about is the stock market.” He called for a raise for health care workers to more than $15 an hour.
When asked how he would make sure that future elections are not marred by this year’s great fight over mail-in ballots, Biden told voters, “Firstly, I would not try to throw into question the legitimacy of the election.”
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I will take this as my good news jolt for the day! I need those now and then.
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September 18, 2020 (Friday)
Tonight, flowers are strewn on the steps of the Supreme Court, where “Equal Justice Under Law” is carved in stone. More than a thousand people gathered there tonight to mourn the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died today from cancer at age 87.
Justice Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933, in an era when laws, as well as the customs they protected, treated women differently than men. Ginsburg would grow up to challenge the laws that barred women from jobs and denied them rights, eventually setting the country on a path to extend equal justice under law to women and LGBTQ Americans.
Joan Ruth Bader, who went by her middle name, was the second daughter in a middle-class family. She went to public schools, where she excelled, and won a full scholarship to Cornell. There, she met Martin Ginsburg, and they married after she graduated. “What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain,” she later explained. Relocating to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for her husband’s army service, Ginsburg scored high on the civil service exam but could find work only as a typist. When she got pregnant with their daughter Jane, she lost her job.
Two years later, the couple moved back east where Marty had been admitted to Harvard Law School. Ginsburg was admitted the next year, one of 9 women in her class of more than 500 students; a dean asked her why she was “taking the place of a man.” She excelled, becoming the first woman on the prestigious Harvard Law Review. When her husband underwent surgery and radiation treatments for testicular cancer, she cared for him and their daughter, while managing her studies and helping Marty with his. She rarely slept.
After he graduated, Martin Ginsburg got a job in New York, and Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she graduated at the top of her class. But in 1959, law firms weren’t hiring women, and judges didn’t want women—especially mothers, who might be distracted by their “familial obligations”–as clerks. Finally, her mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, got her a clerkship by threatening Judge Edmund Palmieri that if he did not take her, Gunther would never send him a clerk again.
After her clerkship and two years in Sweden, where laws about gender equality were far more advanced than in America, Ginsburg became one of America’s first female law professors. She worked first at Rutgers University-- where she hid her pregnancy with her second child, James, until her contract was renewed—and then at Columbia Law School, where she was the first woman the school tenured.
At Rutgers, she began her bid to level the legal playing field between men and women, extending equal protection under the law to include gender. Knowing she had to appeal to male judges, she often picked male plaintiffs to establish the principle of gender equality. In 1971, she wrote the brief for Sally Reed in the case of Reed vs. Reed, when the Supreme Court decided that an Idaho law specifying that “males must be preferred to females” in appointing administrators of estates was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who had been appointed by Richard Nixon, wrote: “To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other… is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” to the Constitution.
In 1972, Ginsburg won the case of Moritz v. Commissioner. She argued that a law preventing a bachelor, Charles Moritz, from claiming a tax deduction for the care of his aged mother because the deduction could be claimed only by women, or by widowed or divorced men, was discriminatory. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit agreed, citing Reed v. Reed when it decided that discrimination on the basis of sex violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
In that year, Ginsburg founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Between 1973 and 1976, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court. She won five. The first time she appeared before the court, she quoted nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sarah Grimke: “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
Nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3. Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law.”
In her 27 years on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg championed equal rights both from the majority and in dissent (which she would mark by wearing a sequined collar), including her angry dissent in 2006 in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber when the plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter, was denied decades of missing wages because the statute of limitations had already passed when she discovered she had been paid far less than the men with whom she worked. “The court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” Ginsburg wrote. Congress went on to change the law, and the first bill President Barack Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
In 2013, Ginsburg famously dissented from the majority in Shelby County v. Holder, the case that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The majority decided to remove the provision of the law that required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval before changing election laws, arguing that such preclearance was no longer necessary. Ginsburg wrote: “[t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” As she predicted, after the decision, many states immediately began to restrict voting.
Her dissent made her a cultural icon. Admirers called her “The Notorious R.B.G.” after the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., wore clothing with her image on it, dressed as her for Halloween, and bought RBG dolls and coloring books. In 2018, the hit documentary “RBG” told the story of her life, and as she aged, she became a fitness influencer for her relentless strength-training regimen. She was also known for her plain speaking. When asked how many women on the Supreme Court would be enough, for example, she answered “nine.”
Ginsburg’s death has brought widespread mourning among those who saw her as a champion for equal rights for women, LGBTQ Americans, minorities, and those who believe the role of the government is to make sure that all Americans enjoy equal justice under law. Upon her passing, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Justice Ginsburg paved the way for so many women, including me. There will never be another like her. Thank you RBG.”
For many, she seemed to be the last defender of an equality they fear is slipping away. Robyn Walsh, a University of Miami religion professor, watched the outpouring of grief after Ginsburg’s death and wrote “It says a lot about us that the loss of one voice leaves women and their allies feeling so helpless. I am grateful for RBG, her advocacy, and her strength. I’m enraged that we find ourselves here.”
That rage, prompted by the prospect of a Trump appointee in Ginsburg’s seat, led donors to pour money into Democratic coffers tonight. Democratic donors gave more than $12.5 million in two hours to the ActBlue donation processing site, a rate of more than $100,000 a minute. The effect of the loss of her voice and vote on the court will become clear quickly. On November 10, just a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is scheduled to hear a Republican challenge to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. In 2012, the court upheld the law by a 5-4 vote.
Ginsburg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line: “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people “to fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” Setting an example for how to advance the principle of equality, she told the directors of the documentary “RBG” that she wanted to be remembered “Just as someone who did whatever she could, with whatever limited talent she had, to move society along in the direction I would like it to be for my children and grandchildren.”
Upon hearing of Ginsburg’s death, former U.S. Attorney and law professor Joyce Vance tweeted, “We should honor the life of RBG, American hero, by refusing to give in, refusing to back down, fighting for the civil rights of all people & demanding our leaders honor the rule of law. This is our fight now.”
Rest in power, Justice Ginsburg.
May her memory be a blessing.
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September 20, 2020 (Sunday)
The big story today is big indeed: how and when the seat on the Supreme Court, now open because of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, will be filled. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced within an hour of the announcement of Ginsburg’s passing that he would move to replace her immediately. Trump says he will announce his pick for the seat as early as Tuesday.
Democrats are crying foul. Their immediate complaint is that after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016, McConnell refused even to meet with President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, on the grounds that it was inappropriate to confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year. He insisted voters should get to decide on who got to nominate the new justice. This “rule” was invented for the moment: in our history, at least 14 Supreme Court justices have been nominated and confirmed during an election year. (Three more were nominated in December, after an election.)
There is a longer history behind this fight that explains just why it is so heated… and what is at stake.
World War Two forced an American reckoning with our long history of racism and sexism. Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, all gender identities, and all levels of wealth had helped to defeat fascism and save democracy, and they demanded a voice in the postwar government. Recognizing both the justice of such claims and the fact that communist leaders used America’s discriminatory laws to insist that democracy was a sham, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower set out to make equal justice under law a reality.
Over the course of his eight years in office, from 1953-1961, Eisenhower appointed five justices to the Supreme Court, beginning with Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican Governor of California, in October 1953. In 1954, the Warren Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision, requiring the desegregation of public schools. The decision was unanimous.
From then until Warren retired in 1969, the “Warren Court” worked to change the legal structures of the nation to promote equality. It required state voting districts to be roughly equal in population, so that, for example, Nevada could no longer have one district of 568 people and another of 127,000. It required law enforcement officers to read suspects their rights. It banned laws criminalizing interracial marriage. It ended laws against contraceptives.
Warren resigned during President Richard Nixon’s term, and Nixon chose Chief Justice Warren Burger to replace him. Burger was less interested than Warren in using the Supreme Court to redefine equal rights in the nation; nonetheless, he presided over the court when it handed down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision striking down restrictive state abortion laws. The case was decided by a vote of 7-2, and the majority opinion was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Republican nominated, like Burger, by Richard Nixon. All the justices were men.
Americans opposed to the Supreme Court’s expansion of rights complained bitterly that the court was engaging in what came to be called “judicial activism,” changing the country by decree rather than letting voters decide how their communities would treat the people who lived in them. Rather than simply interpreting existing laws, they said, the Supreme Court was itself creating law.
When President Ronald Reagan took office, he attacked the idea of “activist judges” and promised to roll back the process of “legislating from the bench.” In his eight years, he packed the courts with judges who believed in “a strict interpretation of the Constitution” and “family values” and said they would not make law but simply follow it. Reagan appointed more judges than any other president in history: three Supreme Court associate justices and one chief justice, as well as 368 district and appeals court judges. Older members of the Justice Department who believed that the enforcement of the law should not be politicized were outraged when Reagan appointees at the Justice Department quizzed candidates for judgeships about their views on abortion and affirmative action. Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese said that the idea was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”
George H. W. Bush followed Reagan, and his first nominee for the Supreme Court, David Souter, was confirmed easily, by a vote of 90-9. But his next nominee, for the seat of the legendary Thurgood Marshall, was a harder sell.
Clarence Thomas fit the Republican bill by believing in a strict interpretation of the Constitution. But he was rated poorly by the American Bar Association and had criticized affirmative action, making people leery of his support for the civil rights legislation Marshall had championed. Most damaging, though, was that an FBI interview with Anita Hill, a lawyer whom Thomas had supervised at the Department of Education, leaked to the press. In the private interview, Hill said that Thomas had sexually harassed her. The Senate called her to testify (but did not call the other women who had similar stories). One of the first in-depth public discussions of sexual harassment, Hill’s calm testimony revealed what sexual advances, often accepted by men, looked like to professional women. For his part, Thomas called it “a circus… a national disgrace… a high-tech lynching.”
The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52 to 48 in October 1991.
In the context of national anger over the hearing and the outcome, then-Senator Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on June 25, 1992, suggested that, if a Supreme Court vacancy were to occur, the Senate should wait until after the upcoming election to fill it.
“Politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date,” he noted. "Should a justice resign this summer and the president move to name a successor, actions that will occur just days before the Democratic Presidential Convention and weeks before the Republican Convention meets, a process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all. Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself.”
This is the “Biden Rule” that McConnell cited as the reason he would not hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s appointment. There was no vacancy, no nominee, and no vote on any rule, not least because Biden didn’t call for one. He wanted to protect the Supreme Court from being further politicized.
So what is really going on? Republicans recognize that their program is increasingly unpopular, and the only way they can protect it is by packing the courts. By holding the seat open in 2016, McConnell could motivate Republican voters to show up for Trump even if they weren’t thrilled with his candidacy.
It worked. McConnell had held not just the Supreme Court seat open but other appointments as well, meaning that Trump has nominated, and under McConnell the Senate has confirmed, a raft of new federal judges. “You know what Mitch’s biggest thing is in the whole world? His judges,” Trump told journalist Bob Woodward. Faced with a choice between getting 10 ambassadors or a single judge, “he will absolutely ask me, ‘Please, let’s get the judge approved instead of 10 ambassadors.’ ” Trump has already appointed two right-wing Supreme Court justices and now, apparently, plans to nominate a third.
The 2016 McConnell rule that the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year should now stop the Senate from confirming a replacement for Justice Ginsburg, but McConnell now says his rule only holds when the Senate and the president are from different parties. All but two of the many Republicans senators who insisted in 2016 that the Senate absolutely should not confirm a nominee in an election year have suddenly changed their minds and say they will proceed with Trump’s nomination.
This abrupt about-face reveals a naked power grab to cement minority rule.
Both of the last two Republican presidents—Bush and Trump-- have lost the popular vote, and yet each nominated two Supreme Court justices, who have been confirmed by the votes of senators who represent a minority of the American people. The confirmation of a fifth justice in this way will create a solid majority on the court, which can then unwind the legal framework that a majority of Americans still supports.
It’s not just the issue of abortion, for all that that’s what gets most press. On the agenda just a week after the election, for example, is the Affordable Care Act.
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September 21, 2020 (Monday)
Today started off with Attorney General William Barr designating New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, as “Jurisdictions Permitting Violence and Destruction of Property.” His statement responded to Trump’s September 2 memorandum calling for a review of funding to “state and local governments that are permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction in American cities.”
The idea of defunding cities is vague and it is also odd, considering how many Americans actually live in cities. The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrote to Trump on September 7 to ask him to rescind his memorandum, noting that “attacks on America’s cities are attacks on America itself. America’s cities represent 86 percent of the Nation’s population and 91 percent of real gross domestic product (GDP)…. Cities are the Nation’s incubators of talent: people flock to cities to take advantage of their accessibility, diversity, inclusiveness, vibrancy, infrastructure and innovation,” they wrote. They warned that if he tried to enforce a restriction on funding, they would sue, and would almost certainly win. They reminded him: “This is a time our Nation needs unity, not division, among all levels of government.”
This new declaration is little more than a distraction, meant to try to resurrect the old “law and order” ploy and take our eyes off… what?
There are several things the administration would rather keep off the table.
The first, of course, is the coronavirus. More than 200,000 Americans have now died of Covid-19 and almost 7 million have been infected. A study conducted by Pennsylvania State associate sociology professor Ashton Verdery and other researchers concluded that every Covid-19 death leaves an average of nine survivors who have lost a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse or child. That’s close to 2 million Americans in mourning for a close relative. And while early deaths from the pandemic centered in Democratic cities, the weight of the deaths has now shifted to red states, places where members of Trump’s base live.
The administration remains eager to cover up just how bad the pandemic is. At a rally tonight, Trump falsely claimed that coronavirus “affects virtually nobody” younger than 18 and that it is dangerous mainly to elderly people with heart disease and other medical issues—a statement that is both false and contradicted by his own statements to journalist Bob Woodward on tape on February 7.
Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed a statement it had posted Friday saying that Covid-19 spreads through “small particles, such as those in aerosols,” and that “there is growing evidence that droplets and airborne particles can remain suspended in the air and be breathed in by others, and travel distances beyond 6 feet (for example, during choir practice, in restaurants, or in fitness classes.) In general, indoor environments without good ventilation increase this risk.” Trump acknowledged this information in the February 7 call with Woodward, but it suggests reopening restaurants and other small spaces is dangerous and that schools must be upgraded for better ventilation before they will be safe. Today the CDC abruptly scrubbed its website, saying the information was “posted in error.”
On Saturday, Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex M. Azar II, grabbed control of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the 26 other agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services, claiming sole authority to sign any new any new rules about foods, medicines, medical devices… and vaccines. Azar’s chief of staff Brian Harrison said the new policy was simply “a housekeeping matter,” but it seems clear there is a fight in HHS over approval for the vaccine Trump insists—contrary to scientists-- will be ready in October.
Investigative journalist Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair set out to figure out how the United States, “with its advanced medical systems, unmatched epidemiological know-how, and vaunted regulatory and public health institutions, could have fumbled the crisis so disastrously.” Her answer in a piece published Thursday: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who, along with his “shadow” coronavirus task force of young corporate officers, had a “quasi-messianic belief in the private sector’s ability to respond effectively to the crisis and their contempt for government capabilities.” “Free markets will solve this,” Kushner allegedly said. “That is not the role of government.”
Trump and his loyalists would also likely prefer people not to notice that his poll numbers continue to be bad. For him to convince people that a loss for him means the election has been stolen, he has to make people think he is running more strongly than he is. Trump carried white voters in Minnesota by 7 points in 2016; this year he is losing them by 2 points, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll. In 2016, Trump carried non-college educated white women in Wisconsin by 16 points; now he is losing them by 9.
Trump’s concern over this slippage shows in his recent attempts to recover a white base, calling, for example, for “patriotic education” that replaces recent attempts to grapple with the legacy of slavery and his reassurance to a rally audience in Minnesota that they have “good genes.”
The Trump campaign, and the Republicans in general, are now facing a cash disadvantage in these last weeks before the election. In 2019 and the first half of 2020, the Trump campaign raised $1.1 billion, but by early this month, it had already spent more than $800 million. Close to $60 million has gone into legal bills, $350 million went to continued fundraising, more than $100 million went to television ads before the convention, $11 million went to two Super Bowl ads. The campaign also lavished money on consultants. In the spring, Trump had nearly $200 million more than Democratic nominee Joe Biden, but that advantage was gone even before last weekend, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death prompted contributors to pour more than $160 million into Democratic causes.
Trump and Republican Senators would probably prefer that voters don’t look too closely at the upcoming fight over a new Supreme Court justice, either. For all that Trump and McConnell are pushing their nominee, and Senators are declaring they will vote for anyone Trump nominates, in fact it is not clear that forcing through a radical nominee will help the Republicans in the election. What is most clearly on the table right now is the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—which the Supreme Court will take up exactly a week after the election. Obamacare prohibits discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. This policy has always been hugely popular, and is even more popular now, when coronavirus has added almost 7 million Americans who have been infected with coronavirus to those with what could easily be considered pre-existing conditions. Right now, in the middle of a pandemic attributed to the administration’s poor handling of the crisis, seems a poor time to strip Americans of their healthcare.
For all that these stories are important, my favorite candidate for the story we’re not supposed to notice is last night’s leak of suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by banks with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN. This agency combats money laundering. The documents, leaked to BuzzFeed, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, found that banks flagged more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money between 1999 and 2017. The leaked documents, which make up less than 0.02% of the more than 12 million SARs filed with FinCEN between 2011 and 2017, show a world awash in money from criminal activity. They paint a picture of a world of fabulously wealthy oligarchs and criminals, operating out of our sight.
There is nothing specifically about Trump or his company in the leaked documents, and being flagged in a SARs does not necessarily mean wrongdoing. But transactions involving $1.3 trillion at Deutsche Bank, Trump’s bankers, made other bankers nervous enough to flag them. In one of the documents, Bank of America raises concerns about the amount of Russian money flowing into the U.S. in 2016 through Deutsche Bank.
Finally, there is one more thing we should be paying attention to, and this one falls under the category of “high time.” On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first woman to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.
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September 22, 2020 (Tuesday)
“We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. Vice President, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November.”
Thus reads the first line of a top-secret CIA assessment, published on August 31 but reported today. The report details how Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Treasury Department is a Russian agent, is disseminating false stories about Democratic nominee Joe Biden through congressmembers, lobbyists, the media, and people close to the president. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has been openly working with Derkach for several months.
The news stories that Trump denigrates as “Russia, Russia, Russia,” have been dropping steadily of late.
In his new book, veteran journalist Bob Woodward revealed that Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who was the president’s top intelligence official from March 2017 to August 2019, could not overcome his “deep suspicions” that Putin “had something” on Trump. Coats could see “no other explanation” for the president’s behavior toward the Russian president, Woodward wrote.
Peter Strzok, who led the FBI’s Russia investigation, told journalist Natasha Bertrand at the beginning of September that it is crucial to examine Trump’s financial documents in order to see if he is compromised. Strzok wondered why Special Counsel Robert Mueller appeared not to look at them. “I personally don’t see how they could have done [the counterintelligence investigation] because I don’t know how you do that without getting tax records, financial records, and doing things that would become public,” Strzok said. “Had they done it, I would have expected to see litigation and screaming from Trump. And the absence of that makes me think it didn’t occur.”
It turned out Strzok was right. Reporter Michael Schmidt of the New York Times wrote in his own new book that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly limited what the FBI could look at when it was examining Trump’s ties to Russia. Rosenstein limited Special Counsel Robert Mueller to a criminal investigation rather than allowing a counterintelligence operation, so the full scope of Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia, developed over decades, has never been examined.
This limit was news to former acting FBI director McCabe who had been overseeing the case when Mueller took it over. "We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” McCabe said. "I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.”
In his own new book, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen wrote that Trump believed Putin was investing in him. In 2008, a Russian oligarch bought Trump’s mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, for nearly twice what Trump paid for it. This let Trump pocket $50 million. According to Cohen, Trump believed Putin put up the money for the deal.
Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who worked on Mueller’s team, also has a book coming out. He details how the team shied away from rising Trump’s wrath out of fear he would shut the investigation down, making them avoid looking at his finances, although Weissmann did remind readers that the same account that Cohen used to pay off Stephanie Clifford (known as Stormy Daniels) also received $500,000 in payments from a company linked to a Russian oligarch.
Weissmann noted that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort told investigators that his Ukrainian business partner, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, who has been identified by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a Russian operative, asked whether Trump would permit Russia to take over all of eastern Ukraine. But Manafort would say no more, leaving Weissmann wondering. “It would seem to require significant audacity — or else, leverage — for another nation to even put such a request before a presidential candidate,” Mr. Weissmann wrote. “This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, monumentally disconcerting: Namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return?”
On September 14, The Atlantic published an interview with Alexander Vindman, who, in July 2019, was the National Security Council’s director for European affairs. A specialist in Russia and Ukraine, Vindman organized a call between Trump and newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, and then listened to the conversation. Trump demand for an investigation into the Bidens before he would release badly needed money to Ukraine to enable it to resist Russian incursions so shocked Vindman that he reported it to the chief NSC lawyer John Eisenberg.
Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg asked Vindman if he thought Trump was working for Russia. “President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin," Vindman said. "They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it. They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.”
Vindman told Goldberg: “In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for—it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.”
Meanwhile, lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s trial for extradition to the United States for publishing secret documents on WikiLeaks accepted his lawyers’ claim that Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) offered Assange a presidential pardon if he would help cover up Russia’s role in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails in 2016. U.S. lawyers said: “The position of the government is we don’t contest these things were said. We obviously do not accept the truth of what was said by others.”
Ron Johnson is promising to release his committee’s investigation of Hunter Biden and Burisma, the Ukrainian company on whose board he sat, in the next week or so. Derkach sent material to Johnson directly, as well as sending it through Giuliani. Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee wanted to see what was going into the report, but the State Department refused to let it see the more than 16,000 pages of documents it had sent to Johnson’s committee until Eliot Engle (D-NY) threatened a subpoena and started contempt proceedings against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to see what got turned over.
Johnson has already announced his report will hurt Biden’s candidacy, and that assurance has even Republicans worried. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said, “It is not the legitimate role of government, for Congress or for taxpayer expense, to be used in an effort to damage political opponents.” Engel said, “This ‘investigation’ is obviously designed to boost the president’s campaign and tear down his opponent, while our own intelligence community warns it is likely to amplify Russian disinformation.” “We’re going to make sure the American people see the whole picture, not just cherrypicked information aimed at breathing new life into debunked conspiracy theories.”
Meanwhile, Russia is trolling us. Today it released a deepfake of Trump, superimposing his face on another body while he talked as a special guest anchor on the government-controlled RT network. Using Trump’s own words, they showed him cheering on Russia. It was designed to irritate Americans and to demonstrate that America no longer commands respect.
And yet still Trump refuses to criticize Putin. Asked today who he thought poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Trump replied: “Uhhhh … we’ll talk about that at another time.”
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September 23, 2020 (Wednesday)
Today Americans were roiled by an article in The Atlantic, detailing the method by which the Trump campaign is planning to steal the 2020 election. The article was slated for The Atlantic’s November issue, but the editor decided to release it early because of its importance.
The article’s author, Barton Gellman, explains that Trump will not accept losing the 2020 election. If he cannot win it, he plans to steal it. We already know he is trying to suppress voting and his hand-picked Postmaster General is working to hinder the delivery of mail-in ballots. Now Trump’s teams are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 states to challenge voters at polling places; this will, of course, intimidate Democrats and likely keep them from showing up.
But if those plans don’t manage to depress the Democratic vote enough to let him declare victory, he intends to insist on calling a winner in the election on November 3. His legal teams will challenge later mail-in ballots, which tend to swing Democratic, on the grounds that they are fraudulent, and they will try to silence local election officials by attacking them as agents of antifa or George Soros. The president and his team will continue to insist that the Democrats are refusing to honor the results of the election.
Gellman warns that the Trump team is already exploring a way to work around the vote counts in battleground states. Rather than appointing Democratic electors chosen by voters, a state legislature could conclude that the vote was tainted and appoint a Republican slate instead. A Trump legal advisor who spoke to Trump explained they would insist they were protecting the will of the people from those who were trying to rig an election. “The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the adviser explained. The election would then go to Congress, where there would be two sets of electoral votes to fight over… and things would devolve from there.
They would likely end up at the Supreme Court, to which Trump this morning said he was in a hurry to confirm a new justice so there would be a solid majority to rule in his favor on the election results. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices, and I think the system’s going to go very quickly,” he said. “Having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.”
Amidst the flurry of concern over The Atlantic piece, a reporter this afternoon asked Trump if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster.” He went on to say: “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”
In response to this shocking rejection of the basic principles of our government, Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted, “This is how democracy dies.” He said: “This is a moment that I would say to any republican of good conscience working in the administration, it is time for you to resign.” But only one Republican, Mitt Romney (R-UT,) condemned Trump’s comments as “both unthinkable and unacceptable.”
On Facebook, veteran journalist Dan Rather wrote of living through the Depression, World War Two, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, Watergate, and 9-11, then said: “This is a moment of reckoning unlike any I have seen in my lifetime…. What Donald Trump said today are the words of a dictator. To telegraph that he would consider becoming the first president in American history not to accept the peaceful transfer of power is not a throw-away line. It’s not a joke. He doesn’t joke. And it is not prospective. The words are already seeding a threat of violence and illegitimacy into our electoral process.”
There is no doubt that Trump’s statement today was a watershed moment. Another watershed event is the fact that Republicans are not condemning it.
But there are two significant tells in Trump’s statement. First of all, his signature act is to grab headlines away from stories he does not want us to read. Two new polls today put Biden up by ten points nationally. Fifty-eight percent of Americans do not approve of the way Trump is doing his job. Only 38% approve of how he is handling the coronavirus. Voters see Biden as more honest, intelligent, caring, and level-headed than Trump. They think Biden is a better leader.
Trump’s headline grabs keep attention from Biden’s clear and detailed plans, first for combatting coronavirus and rebuilding the economy, and then for reordering the country. The Republicans didn’t bother to write a platform this year, simply saying they supported Trump, but Trump has not been able to articulate why he wants a second term.
In contrast, Biden took his cue from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and has released detailed and clear plans for a Biden presidency. Focusing on four areas, Biden has called for returning critical supply chains to America and rebuilding union jobs in manufacturing and technology; investing in infrastructure and clean energy; and supporting the long-ignored caregiving sector of the economy by increasing training and pay for those workers who care for children, elderly Americans, and people with disabilities. He has a detailed plan for leveling the playing field between Black and Brown people and whites, beginning by focusing on economic opportunity, but also addressing society’s systemic racial biases. Biden’s plans get little attention so long as the media is focused on Trump.
The president’s antics also overshadow the reality that many prominent Republicans are abandoning him. Yesterday, Arizona Senator John McCain’s widow Cindy endorsed Biden. “My husband John lived by a code: country first. We are Republicans, yes, but Americans foremost. There’s only one candidate in this race who stands up for our values as a nation, and that is [Biden].” She added “Joe… is a good and honest man. He will lead us with dignity. He will be a commander in chief that the finest fighting force in the history of the world can depend on, because he knows what it is like to send a child off to fight."
McCain is only the latest of many prominent Republicans to endorse Biden, and her endorsement stings. She could help Biden in the crucial state of Arizona, especially with women. “I’m hoping that I can encourage suburban women to take another look, women that are particularly on the fence and are unhappy with what’s going on right now but also are not sure they want to cross the line and vote for Joe. I hope they’ll take a look at what I believe and will move forward and come with me and join team Biden,” McCain said.
That McCain’s endorsement stung showed in Trump’s tweeted response: “I hardly know Cindy McCain other than having put her on a Committee at her husband’s request. Joe Biden was John McCain’s lapdog…. Never a fan of John. Cindy can have Sleepy Joe!”
And, of course, Trump’s declaration has taken the focus off the Republican senators’ abrupt about-face on confirming a Supreme Court justice in an election year. The ploy laid bare their determination to cement their power at all costs, and it is not popular. Sixty-two percent of Americans, including 50% of Republicans, think the next president should name Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement.
The second tell in Trump’s statement is that Trump’s lawyers confirmed to Gellman that their strategy is to leverage their power in the system to steal the election. Surely, they would want to keep that plan quiet… unless they are hoping to convince voters that the game is so fully rigged there is no point in showing up to vote.
Trump’s statement is abhorrent, and we must certainly be prepared for chaos surrounding this election. But never forget that Trump’s campaign, which-- according to our intelligence agencies-- is being helped by Russian disinformation, is keen on convincing Americans that our system doesn’t work, our democracy is over, and there is no point in participating in it. If you believe them, their disinformation is a self-fulfilling prophecy, despite the fact that a strong majority of Americans prefers Biden to Trump.
Trump’s statement is abhorrent, indeed; but the future remains unwritten.
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Rhetorical question, I assume?
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