On that we will have to differ. I’ve worked with both, and I’d give the nod to star-nosed moles. They are cute!
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My true childhood history with moles: My parents had cool friends, three brothers, who age-wise were between my age and my parents’ age. They introduced my brother and I to great music and they liked fireworks; those kind of cool friends. They kept a huge formaldehyde-filled jar. In that jar was a huge star-nosed mole. Every now and then they would whip out the jar for kicks. Big dead mole with its star nose smooshed against the glass. Not a pretty sight. Never any explanation as to where and how they acquired the mole or how they acquired formaldehyde. It was all kind of sad really. The finality of it. That makes an impression on a 9 year old.
Anyway… back to politics: Still waiting for comments or thoughts on the notion of the US intelligence community keeping tabs henceforth on Trump, his family, and any in the GOP who would likely give Russia a leg up in messing with the Biden administration’s term in office with the goal to regain the WH in 2024. I truly hope the NSA, CIA, etc. are as paranoid as I am.
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My mole story: I grew up for a while in midwestern US farm country. We had a small property, in that it was only an acre or so. It was loaded with moles. My first pet was an outside cat, and that cat was a brilliant murder-beast. Her favorite prey was moles. She would hunt them at night and bring them inside to show off.
Also back to politics…If 45 thought he was getting “spied on” back during the 2016 campaign, well, he’s going to get his ass spied off the moment he leaves office.
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December 15, 2020 (Tuesday)
There’s not a lot going on today that changes the national story, so this letter is a good one to skip if you’re tired of news.
Coronavirus numbers continue to climb, even as vaccinations are beginning. Josh Kovensky and Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo are following the story that the Trump administration appears to have planned a federal vaccine rollout only until Biden takes office, and then has simply planned to turn the problem over to the states to handle without any funding. This threatens to turn vaccine distribution into chaos, while Trump administration officials are making rosy predictions about how things will go in those early weeks.
Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore city health commissioner and a George Washington University health policy professor, told the TPM reporters: “I just don’t see how it would happen.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar has promised that the vaccine will be widely distributed in February and March, but, she said, “That’s an extremely optimistic projection that assumes everything is done perfectly, and when resources are so limited, that perfect execution is nearly impossible.”
Joe Biden continues to move forward with his administration, naming former rival Pete Buttigieg for Secretary of Transportation. Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, emerged as a surprisingly popular presidential candidate in 2020, and afterward turned out to be an astonishingly good voice for Democratic policies on the Fox News Channel. (Seriously. Go watch clips.)
But critics note that his experience in public office is limited to his mayorship, and his nomination would throw him at the head of a department of 55,000 employees in service to a president who has vowed extensive infrastructure development—for real, this time. Since he is obviously hungry for national elected office, nerdy about infrastructure, and good in front of the cameras, it’s not clear this is a bad idea. It might be a good way to boost a low-profile department that often goes unappreciated.
Buttigieg ran his presidential campaign on a platform of climate action, and his nomination has already drawn praise from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the League of Conservation Voters. If confirmed, he will be the nation’s first openly gay Cabinet member.
Now that the Electoral College has cast the votes that elect Joe Biden to the presidency, Republican senators are acknowledging Biden’s win. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told other Republican senators not to object to the certification of the Electoral College votes on January 6. Doing so would force the rest of the Senate to vote against Trump, infuriating Trump voters, and McConnell hopes to avoid such a vote. Still, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) have indicated they might be willing to join House Republicans in challenging the votes.
Tomorrow, the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which Johnson chairs, will hold an oversight hearing on what he says are the irregularities in the 2020 election. Courtrooms, where lawyers bear penalties for lying, have turned up no irregularities. The Senate hearing will have much more latitude, and its first witness is Republican operative Kenneth W. Starr, so it is almost certainly going to consist of rumors and assumptions rather than any evidence to which the witnesses could swear under oath.
The White House continues to refuse to acknowledge Trump’s loss. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany today said simply that “The president is still involved in ongoing litigation related to the election. Yesterday’s vote was one step in the constitutional process.”
The lies about the election spread by Trump and his loyalists are radicalizing Republican true believers, according to security officials and terrorism researchers. They worry that fringe conspiracy theories are going mainstream. Polls suggest that 77% of Trump supporters believe that Biden stole the election—although there is no evidence of fraud—and officials worry those true believers are turning to violence.
Elizabeth Neumann, who resigned from her job as Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy at the Department of Homeland Security in April out of concerns that Trump was exacerbating right-wing violence, noted that “the conservative infotainment sector makes money off… outrage.” Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who was a senior adviser in the State Department, Defense Department, and the National Security Council, agreed with others that Trump is promoting radicalism by spreading conspiracies and disinformation. “Leadership matters,” she said. “It really matters that the president of the United States is an arsonist of radicalization. And it will really help when that is no longer the case.”
In Houston, Texas, today, police arrested a former police department captain for running a man off the road and pointing a gun at his head in a misguided attempt to foil a massive voter fraud scheme. Sixty-three-year-old Mark Anthony Aguirre claimed to be part of a citizens’ group investigating voter fraud. Believing his victim was hiding 750,000 fraudulent ballots in his truck, Aguirre rammed the truck with his SUV and held the driver first at gunpoint and then with his knee in the man’s back until police came. Upon inspection, it turned out the truck was full of air conditioning parts. The district attorney, Kim Ogg, said “His alleged investigation was backward from the start—first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened…. [W]e are lucky no one was killed.”
But power is shifting in Washington. Tonight, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his wife Susan hosted an indoor holiday party to which they had invited more than 900 guests. Only about 70 people responded to the invitation and even fewer showed up to what public health officials warned could be a superspreader event. In the past, the party has drawn 200-300 people, but the combination of a pandemic and the waning days of the administration meant the event had little attraction. Pompeo’s name was on the invitation and he was scheduled to speak, but he canceled and sent someone else.
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December 16, 2020 (Wednesday)
The reality that Joe Biden is about to become president and Kamala Harris is about to become vice president is sinking in across Washington, and today gave us some indications of what that’s going to mean.
Stories about what exactly happened in the Trump administration are coming out, and they are not pretty. Politics trumped everything for members of the administration, even our lives.
Today Representative James Clyburn (D-SC), who chairs the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, revealed documents from senior appointees in the Trump administration overriding the work of the career officials in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those documents show that the political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services called for dealing with the coronavirus crisis by pursuing a strategy of “herd immunity,” deliberately spreading the coronavirus to try to infect as many people as possible, with the theory that this approach would minimize the dangers of the pandemic. While doing so, they downplayed what they were doing, tried to hide the dangers of the virus, and blamed the career scientists who objected to this strategy for the rising death rates.
Although the White House has tried to distance itself from senior Health and Human Services Adviser Paul Alexander, last summer he was widely perceived to speak for his boss Michael Caputo, the Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs whom Trump had appointed, and for the White House itself. Alexander, a part-time university professor from Canada, defended Trump against scientists, accusing CDC Principal Deputy Director Dr. Anne Schuchat of lying when she provided accurate public information about the worsening pandemic. When she suggested everyone should wear a mask, he claimed: “her aim is to embarrass the President.” Alexander attacked Anthony Fauci for his attempts to protect Americans. “He just won’t stop!!!” wrote Alexander on July 3, 2020; “does he think he is the President???”
Alexander advocated spreading the infection to younger Americans: “So the bottom line is if it is more infectiouness [sic] now, the issue is who cares? If it is causing more cases in young, my word is who cares…as long as we make sensible decisions, and protect the elderely [sic] and nursing homes, we must go on with life….who cares if we test more and get more positive tests.”
Alexander wrote to Caputo: “There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD.” On the same day, he wrote: “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected.…”
On July 24, he wrote to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and Caputo: “it may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected” as a strategy to get “natural immunity…natural exposure,” an argument that illuminates Trump’s insistence this summer that schools and colleges must open.
But the idea that young people are safe from the virus is wrong. Today, an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that while Americans older than 65 have borne the brunt of the coronavirus, young adults are suffering terribly. From March through July, there were almost 12,000 more deaths than expected among adults from 25 to 44. Young Black and Hispanic Americans make up not just a disproportionate number of that group of victims; they are a majority. Those extraordinary death rates have continued. Younger adults are indeed endangered by the coronavirus; the idea it is harmless to them “has simply not been borne out by emerging data,” doctors Jeremy Samuel Faust, Harlan M. Krumholz, and Rochelle P. Walensky—Biden’s pick to run the CDC-- wrote in the New York Times today.
Another report today showcases two former CDC political appointees who are now speaking out to call attention to the silencing of career scientists at the agency. Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the CDC, and his deputy Amanda Campbell watched as political appointees in Washington ignored scientists, censored doctors’ messages to the public, and cut the agency’s budget. “It was… like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the CDC,” McGowan told New York Times reporter Noah Weiland. “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won.”
Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking website from the Poynter Institute, named the downplaying and denial of the seriousness of coronavirus its “Lie of the Year.”
Today it became clear the administration dropped the ball in other important ways. We have more information now about the extensive computer hack that appears to have been conducted by operatives from the Russian government. It’s bad. Hackers placed malware on commercial network management software upgrades to gain access to government computers, along with those of major U.S. companies, as far back as last March. They have been able to root around in our secrets for months. Hackers accessed the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and parts of the Pentagon, among other targets. The intrusion was discovered on December 8, when the cybersecurity company FireEye realized it had been hacked and alerted the FBI.
Today the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), issued a joint statement acknowledging “a significant and ongoing cybersecurity campaign” and indicated they are not sure yet what has been hit. “This is a developing situation, and while we continue to work to understand the full extent of this campaign, we know this compromise has affected networks within the federal government.” It is clear the U.S. has been hit hard: Trump’s National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien has cut short an overseas trip to come home and deal with the crisis.
In the New York Times, Thomas P. Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security Adviser said, “the magnitude of this national security breach is hard to overstate.” He insisted the U.S. must call out Russia for this attack (assuming it is confirmed that that country is, indeed, behind the attack). “Trump must make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable. The U.S. military and intelligence community must be placed on increased alert; all elements of national power must be placed on the table.”
“President Trump is on the verge of leaving behind a federal government, and perhaps a large number of major industries, compromised by the Russian government. He must use whatever leverage he can muster to protect the United States and severely punish the Russians.”
The New York Times called this breach “among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called it “stunning.” “Today’s classified briefing on Russia’s cyberattack left me deeply alarmed, in fact downright scared. Americans deserve to know what’s going on,” he tweeted. Blumenthal also recognized the severity of the coronavirus early: he tweeted on February 25: “This morning’s classified coronavirus briefing should have been made fully open to the American people—they would be as appalled & astonished as I am by the inadequacy of preparedness & prevention.”
And yet, there are signs that the country is reorienting itself away from Trump and modern-day Republicanism.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, previously a staunch Trump supporter, has released an advertisement urging people to wear masks and admitting he was wrong not to wear one at the White House. It seems likely he is eyeing a future presidential run, and clearly is calculating that it is wise these days to distance himself from Trump’s anti-mask politics.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has refused to advance a coronavirus relief bill since the House passed one last May, seven months ago, is now trying to make a deal that includes direct payments to Americans hurt by the pandemic. He explained to Republicans today that Republican senate candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are running against Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia, are “getting hammered” because the people want the bill and the Senate is holding it up.
Finally, Bloomberg last night ran a story by journalist Craig Stirling highlighting the work of economists David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, who examined the concept of “supply side economics,” or the “trickle down theory.” This is the economic theory popularized in the 1980s saying it’s best for the economy not to support wages at the bottom of the economy—the demand side—but rather to free up capital at the top—the supply side—because wealthy entrepreneurs will create new jobs and the resulting economic growth will help everyone. This idea has been behind the Republicans’ forty-year commitment to tax cuts for the wealthy.
In their study of 18 countries over 50 years, Hope and Limberg concluded that this theory was wrong. Tax cuts do not, they prove, trickle down. They do little to promote growth or create jobs. Instead, they mostly just help the people who get the tax cuts.
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Also, I knew their plan was to infect everybody. I just didn’t want to believe it
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Yeah, obvious answer is obvious, however it is nice to have actual data to use in these arguments. The trickle down folks won’t understand it or believe it, but it makes me feel less of an asshole if I can cite facts and studies instead of joining them in “but it is so obvious” level of reasoning.
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December 17, 2020 (Thursday)
Four days ago, on December 13, Reuters broke the story that computer hackers had breached U.S. government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department. It was serious enough that the National Security Council had been called into an emergency meeting on Saturday. While no nation has yet been charged with this attack, officials agree that it looks like a Russian operation.
On Monday, the story got worse. Also hit were the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the National Institutes of Health. Officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security told all federal agencies to disconnect the products containing the malware that had been used to breach the firewalls. Those products had been installed as far back as March, meaning that the attackers had been able to observe crucial aspects of our government from the inside for as much as nine months. Government officials found out about the breach only after a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, realized it had been hacked and alerted the FBI. Hackers planted the malware they used to get into the systems on a patch issued by the software company, SolarWinds, which produces widely used management software.
The story is getting worse still.
Today CISA said that the hackers used many different tools to get into government systems, taking them into critical infrastructure, which could include the electrical grid, telecommunications companies, defense contractors, and so on. Officials said that the hacks were “a grave risk to the federal government.”
Later in the day, it came out that the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees our nuclear weapons, was also hit, although a Department of Energy spokesperson said that there is no evidence that the hackers breached critical defense systems, including the NNSA.
Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, today said the company had identified 40 different companies, government agencies, and think tanks the hackers infiltrated, and that those forty were just the tip of the iceberg. Smith said that more companies had been hit than government agencies, “with a big focus on I.T. companies, especially in the security industry.”
The Associated Press quoted a U.S. official as saying: “This is looking like it’s the worst hacking case in the history of America. They got into everything.” Tom Kellermann, the cybersecurity strategy chief of the software company VMware, told Ben Fox of the Associated Press that the hackers could now see everything in the federal agencies they’ve hacked, and that, now that they have been found out, “there is viable concern that they might leverage destructive attacks within these agencies.”
It is not clear yet how far the hackers have penetrated, and we will likely not know for months. But given the fact they have had access to our systems since March and have almost certainly been planting new ways into them (known as “back doors”), all assumptions are that this is serious indeed.
Initially, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed the attack, saying that such attacks are common and that China, not Russia, is the biggest offender. Trump has said nothing about the attacks, and administration officials say that they are simply planning to hand the crisis off to Biden.
But this attack does not come out of the blue for the Trump administration. There was discussion of strengthening our security systems against attackers after the 2016 election, and on July 9, 2017, Trump suggested we would partner with Russia to address the issue. “Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded,” he tweeted.
Congress instead created the CISA within the Department of Homeland Security in 2018 to protect against precisely the sort of attack which has just occurred, shortly after Russia hacked our electrical grid, including “multiple organizations in the energy, nuclear, water, aviation, construction, and critical manufacturing sectors,” according to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security report.
In response to the Russian attack, the U.S. hit Russia’s electrical grid in June 2019.
Since then, administration officials have deliberately forced out of CISA key cybersecurity officials. The destruction was so widespread, according to Dr. Josephine Wolff, a professor of cybersecurity policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School who holds her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), “they signify the systematic decimation of the personnel most directly responsible for protecting critical infrastructure, shielding our elections from interference and guarding the White House’s data, devices and networks.”
Almost exactly a year ago, on December 19, 2019, Wolff warned in the New York Times that “As we head into 2020, worrying about the integrity of our elections, the growing scourge of ransomware and the increasingly sophisticated forms of cyberespionage and cybersabotage being developed by our adversaries, it’s disconcerting to feel that many of our government’s best cybersecurity minds are walking out the front door and leaving behind too few people to monitor what’s coming in our back doors.”
Just a month ago, Trump continued this process, firing Christopher Krebs, the former director of CISA, on November 18, saying he was doing so because Krebs defended the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history.” Krebs said that there “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
And now, here we are. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said to SiriusXM about the hack: “Our national security is extraordinarily vulnerable. And, in this setting, to not have the White House aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action is really, really quite extraordinary.”
The timing of the exposure of this hack might be coincidence, but it is curiously well timed. It illustrates to the world that Russia now holds power over the U.S. while the perpetrators can assume, after four years of Trump’s refusal to stand up to Putin, that they will not have to face immediate retaliation for the attack as they would have to if it were revealed just a month later.
President-elect Biden was briefed on the attack today. He warned that his administration would impose “substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks, including in coordination with our allies and partners.” “A good defense isn’t enough; we need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyberattacks in the first place,” Biden said. “I will not stand idly by in the face of cyberassaults on our nation.”
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So the Russian infiltration of our government has now borne fruit for Putin and his clan. When can we start taking espionage, if not treason, for this asshat and his whole frickin’ asshat family?
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Meanwhile, across the fruiting plains and coal ash mountains of this debatably great nation, millions of flag-draped, freedom cosplayers prefer to imagine threats to our government instead of demanding action on real attacks and disasters. Putin has exposed the US as a collection of feckless nitwits. Our (former) global partners aren’t going to be in any hurry to trust us again, even after the chucklebutt-in-charge leaves office. Talk about a return on investment.
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“Putin and I…” Yeah this wasn’t a hacking. It was inviting dracula across the threshold and into the house…
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I was just commenting to a friend today, the next time a Trumpist talks about “patriotism” or loving our country, I’m going to shush them so hard they are going to have librarian nightmares for years. You’re supporting open rebellion against the United States; that’s not patriotism, it’s treason.
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December 18, 2020 (Friday)
A year ago today, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
In his plea to Senators to convict the president, Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead impeachment manager for the House, warned “you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country.” Schiff asked: “How much damage can Donald Trump do between now and the next election?” and then answered his own question: “A lot. A lot of damage.” “Can you have the least bit of confidence that Donald Trump will… protect our national interest over his own personal interest?” Schiff asked the senators who were about to vote on Trump’s guilt. “You know you can’t, which makes him dangerous to this country.’’
Republicans took offense at Schiff’s passionate words, seeing them as criticism of themselves. They voted to acquit Trump of the charges the House had levied against him.
And a year later, here we are. A pandemic has killed more than 312,000 of us, and numbers of infections and deaths are spiking. Today we hit a new single-day record of reported coronavirus cases with 246,914, our third daily record in a row. The economy is in shambles, with more than 6 million Americans applying for unemployment benefits. And the government has been hobbled by a massive hack from foreign operatives, likely Russians, who have hit many of our key departments.
Today it began to feel as if the Trump administration was falling apart as journalists began digging into a number of troubling stories.
Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, appointed by Trump after he fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper by tweet on November 9, this morning abruptly halted the transition briefings the Pentagon had been providing, as required by law, to the incoming Biden team. Observers were taken aback by this unprecedented halt to the transition process, as well as by the stated excuse: that Defense Department officials were overwhelmed by the number of meetings the transition required. Retired four-star general Barry R. McCaffrey, a military analyst for NBC and MSNBC, tweeted: “Pentagon abruptly halts Biden transition—MAKES NO SENSE. CLAIM THEY ARE OVERWHELMED. DOD GOES OPAQUE. TRUMP-MILLER UP TO NO GOOD. DANGER.”
After Axios published the story and outrage was building, Miller issued a statement saying the two sides had decided on a “mutually-agreed upon holiday, which begins tomorrow.” Biden transition director Yohannes Abraham promptly told reporters: “Let me be clear: there was no mutually agreed upon holiday break. In fact, we think it’s important that briefings and other engagements continue during this period as there’s no time to spare, and that’s particularly true in the aftermath of ascertainment delay," a reference to the delay in the administration’s recognition of Biden’s election.
Later, the administration suggested the sudden end to the transition briefings was because Trump was angry that the Washington Post on Wednesday had published a story showing how much money Biden could save by stopping the construction of Trump’s border wall. Anger over a story from two days ago seems like a stretch, a justification after the briefings had been cancelled for other reasons. The big story of the day, and the week, and the month, and the year, and probably of this administration, is the sweeping hack of our government by a hostile foreign power. The abrupt end to the briefings might reflect that the administration isn’t keen on giving Biden access to the crime scene.
Republicans appear to be trying to cripple the Biden administration more broadly. The country has been thrilled by the arrival of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine that promises an end to the scourge under which we’re suffering. Just tonight, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second vaccine, produced by Moderna, for emergency authorization use. This vaccine does not require ultracold temperatures for shipping the way the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine does. Two vaccines for the coronavirus are extraordinarily good news.
But this week, as the first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were being given, states learned that the doses the federal government had promised were not going to arrive, and no one is quite sure why. The government blamed Pfizer, which promptly blasted the government, saying it had plenty of vaccines in warehouses but had received no information about where to send them. Then the White House said there was confusion over scheduling.
Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo has been following this story, and concluded a day or so ago that the administration had made no plans for vaccine distribution beyond February 1, when the problem would be Biden’s. Kovensky also noted that it appears the administration promised vaccine distribution on an impossible timeline, deliberately raising hopes for vaccine availability that Biden couldn’t possibly fulfill. Today Kovensky noted that there are apparently doses missing and unaccounted for, but no one seems to know where they might be.
Today suggested yet another instance of Republican bad faith. With Americans hungry and increasingly homeless, the nation is desperate for another coronavirus relief bill. The House passed one last May, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to take it up. Throughout the summer and fall, negotiations on a different bill failed as Republicans demanded liability protection for businesses whose employees got coronavirus after they reopened, and Democrats demanded federal aid to states and local governments, pinched as tax revenue has fallen off during the pandemic. Now, though, with many Americans at the end of their rope, McConnell indicated he would be willing to cut a deal because the lack of a relief package is hurting the Republican Senate candidates before the runoff election in Georgia on January 5. Both sides seemed on the verge of a deal.
That deal fell apart this afternoon after Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) with the blessing of McConnell, suddenly insisted on limiting the ability of the Federal Reserve to lend money to help businesses and towns stay afloat. These were tools the Trump administration had and used, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tried to kill them after Trump lost the election. The Federal Reserve’s ability to manage fiscal markets is key to addressing recessions. Removing that power would gravely hamper Biden’s ability to help the nation climb out of the recession during his administration.
It’s hard not to see this as a move by McConnell and Senate Republicans to take away Biden’s power—power enjoyed by presidents in general, and by Trump in particular—to combat the recession in order to hobble the economy and hurt the Democrats before the 2022 election.
Money was in the news in another way today, too. Business Insider broke the story that the Trump campaign used a shell company approved by Jared Kushner to pay campaign expenses without having to disclose them to federal election regulators. The company was called American Made Media Consultants LLC. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was president, and Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew, John Pence, was vice president until the two apparently stepped down in late 2019 to work on the campaign. The treasurer was the chief financial officer of the Trump campaign, Sean Dollman.
The Trump campaign spent more than $700 million of the $1.26 billion of campaign cash it raised in the 2020 cycle through AMMC, but to whom it paid that money is hidden. Former Republican Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter is trying to take up the slack left by the currently crippled Federal Elections Commission. His organization, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan clean election group, last July accused the Trump campaign of “disguising” campaign funding of about $170 million “by laundering the funds” through AMMC.
This news adds to our understanding that Trump is leaving the White House with a large amount of cash. He has raised more than $250 million since November 3, urging his supporters to donate to his election challenges, but much of the money has gone to his own new political action committee or to the Republican National Committee. Recently, he has begged supporters to give to a “Georgia Election Fund,” suggesting that the money will go to the runoff elections for Georgia’s two senators, but 75% of the money actually goes to Trump’s new political action committee and 25% to the Republican National Committee.
Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times note that are very few limits to how Trump can spend the money from his new PAC.
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December 19, 2020 (Saturday)
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” wrote Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Trump and the Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to retain their hold on power, while President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris are quietly trying to move forward.
There are monsters, indeed. Today, New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported that Trump held a long meeting at the White House yesterday with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani; disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whom Trump recently pardoned for lying to the FBI; and Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell. These four are the heart of those insisting—without evidence—that Trump won the 2020 election. They have talked of Trump declaring martial law and holding new elections. In the meeting, Trump apparently asked about appointing Powell as special counsel to investigate voter fraud in the 2020 election.
White House advisers in the room, including White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, pushed back strongly, noting that Powell has yet to prove any of her accusations. Axios journalist Jonathan Swan reported that senior Trump officials think Trump is spending too much time with crackpots who are egging him on to seize power. One told Swan: when Trump is “retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends.”
The country is increasingly ravaged by the pandemic. Friday saw more than 250,000 new infections in a single day. More than 315,000 have died, including 3,611 on Wednesday. More than 128,000 Americans have received the vaccine.
The economy is in recession, but yesterday, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected to one-time federal payments of $1200 because he says he’s worried about the deficit. Democrats noted that the Trump administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy and military spending added a projected $4 trillion to the deficit by 2026. Then, just as it seemed both sides had come to an agreement over a coronavirus relief bill, the Republicans scuttled it with a new demand that would rein in the ability of the Federal Reserve to combat the recession. This would take from Biden a key tool. The Republicans seem to be doing their best to undercut the Biden administration so they can regain power in 2022 and 2024.
(Just before midnight tonight, the Senate appears to have reached a compromise. Details are not yet available).
This week, the United States learned of a massive hack on our government and business sector. Intelligence agents as well as Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, say Russia is behind the attack. Once again, though, Trump refuses to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin. He claimed that the attack wasn’t as bad as the “Fake News Media” says it is, and he suggested the culprit could have been China, rather than Russia. Then, once again, he insisted he won the election.
And yet, if the Trump administration models an assault on our country by a group of oligarchs determined to seize power, the incoming Biden administration is signaling that it takes seriously our future as a true multicultural democracy.
Nothing signals that more than the nomination of Representative Deb Haaland (D-NM) as Secretary of the Interior Department. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo people who have lived in the land that is now New Mexico for 35 generations. She is the daughter of two military veterans. A single mother who earned a law degree with a young daughter in tow, she was a tribal leader focused on environmentally responsible economic development for the Lagunas before she became a Democratic leader.
Her nomination for Interior carries with it deep symbolism. If confirmed, Haaland will be the first Native American Cabinet secretary and will head the department that, in the nineteenth century, destroyed Indigenous peoples for political leverage.
The United States government initially put management of Indian affairs into the War Department but, in 1849, transferred the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the newly created Department of the Interior. Reformers hoped that putting Indian relations under the control of civilians, rather than military, would lead to fewer wars. But the move opened the way for indigenous people to be swept up in a political system over which they had no control.
In the nineteenth century, as settlers pushed into Indigenous territory, the government took control of that land through treaties that promised the tribes food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, and usually the tools and seeds to become farmers. As well, tribal members usually received a yearly payment of cash. These distributions of goods and money were not payment for the land. They were the terms of the deal. If tribes were to give up the lands on which they depended to survive, their people needed a replacement for their livelihoods.
But here’s where politics came in. Tribes moved onto the reservations, either willingly or by force. In the nineteenth century, those reservations were often large tracts of land. To pick up their food and so on, the Indigenous people would go once or twice a month to the agency, essentially a town on the reservation, usually with a school, a doctor, warehouses, and stores. The agency grew up around the man in charge of the agency: the agent.
With Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, the agents were political appointees. The U.S. senators of the state in which the reservation was located made their choices and told the president, who then made the appointment. While some of the agents actually tried to do their job, most were put into office to advance the interests of the political party in power. So, they took the money Congress appropriated for the tribe they oversaw, then gave the contracts for the beef, flour, clothing, blankets, and so on, to cronies, who would fulfill the contracts with moldy food and rags, if they bothered to fulfill them at all. They would pocket the rest of the money, using it to help keep their political party in power and themselves in the position of agent.
When tribal leaders complained, lawmakers pointed out—usually quite correctly—that they had appropriated the money required under the treaties. But the system had essentially become a slush fund, and the tribes had no recourse against the corrupt agents except, when they were starving, to go to war. Then the agents called in the troops. Democrat Grover Cleveland tried to clean up the system (not least because it was feeding the Republicans so much money) in 1885-1889, but as soon as Republican Benjamin Harrison took the White House back, he jump-started the old system again.
The corruption was so bad by then that military leaders tried to take the management of Indian Affairs away from the politicians at the Interior Department, furious that politicians caused trouble with the tribes and then soldiers and unoffending Indians died. It looked briefly as if they might manage to do so until the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 ended any illusions that military management would be a better deal for Native Americans than political management.
The Interior Department today manages our natural resources as well as the government’s relationship with Indigenous tribes. Placing Haaland at the head of it is more than simply promoting diversity in government. It is a recognition of 170 years of American history and the perversion of our principles by men who lusted for power. It is a sign that we are finally trying to use the government for the good of everyone.
“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” Haaland tweeted after the announcement. “I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”
A new world struggles to be born.
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■■■■■ Malone.
That’s my alt name for Post Malone now. I don’t have a reason for calling him that. Just, like you, I guess, just wanted to use the word “■■■■■” in passing.
December 21, 2020 (Monday)
In the past two days, stories in major papers have focused on the president’s deteriorating mental state. The Atlantic ran a story by Peter Wehner titled “Trump is Losing His Mind.” It describes “Trump’s descent into madness.” Politico ran Michael Kruse’s story titled “Is Trump Cracking Under the Weight of Losing?””[T]he actual fact of the matter,” it said, is that “Trump is a loser.” Kruse points to Trump’s uncharacteristic absence from the public eye to wonder if he is breaking down mentally.
“His fragile ego has never been tested to this extent,” Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen told Kruse. “While he’s creating a false pretense of strength and fortitude, internally he is angry, depressed and manic. As each day ends, Trump knows he’s one day closer to legal and financial troubles. Accordingly, we will all see his behavior deteriorate until it progresses into a full mental breakdown.”
CNN reported that senior White House officials are worried about what Trump might do in the next month as he spends more and more time with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who is under active investigation by federal prosecutors; conspiracy lawyer Sidney Powell and her client disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn; Steve Bannon, who has recently been indicted for fraud; Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser; and now Patrick Byrne, the founder of the Overstock retail website.
Trump is turning to this group of misfits rather than advisers like his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, or White House counsel Pat Cipollone. The new advisers are encouraging him to declare martial law or to seize state voting machines to examine them for fraud or to appoint a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Trump has floated the idea of naming Powell as a special counsel inside the White House Counsel’s office to investigate the election. Meadows and Cipollone argue, correctly, that this is crazy.
Nonetheless, far right House lawmakers met with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Monday to strategize challenging Congress’s certification of the states’ electoral votes on January 6. While several House Republicans are on board with the scheme, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is trying to stop senators from signing on, since challenges in both the House and the Senate would force Republicans to vote against Trump, publicly. The challenges do not have the votes to stop to certification of Biden’s ballots.
Previous loyalists are opening up water between themselves and the president. Evangelical leader Pat Robertson, who famously said Trump was part of God’s plan for America, made the news today with his declaration that, for all the good he claims Trump has done, the president “lives in an alternate reality,” and has been “very erratic.” Robertson said it was time to recognize that Biden is the president-elect, and it is time for Trump “to move on.”
Attorney General William Barr also broke with Trump today, saying that he saw no need to appoint a special counsel to investigate voter fraud or to investigate Hunter Biden, and that there was no evidence of voter fraud that would’ve changed the outcome of the 2020 election. Barr also confirmed that it was Russia, rather than any other country, who hacked the United States government and prominent companies over the course of the past year. Barr will leave office on Wednesday.
Yesterday, Erica Newland, a former lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, published an op-Ed in the New York Times saying she is “Haunted by What I Did as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department.” Lawyers like her, she said, hoped they were limiting the damage Trump could do but they were instead, she concluded, finding ways to make his demands legal. Represented by the caliber of lawyers who are currently at his side—Giuliani and Powell, for example—Newland argues, he could never have made anything stick. Newland resigned from her post in 2018, and now says, “No matter our intentions, we were complicit.” They helped enable Trump’s assault on our democracy, and on reality. She offered her apology to the nation.
Meanwhile, right-wing media outlets the Fox News Channel, Newsmax, and One America News are also concerned with the law. They are madly backpedaling as they face the consequences of their baseless accusations against election software company Smartmatic. Although that company was involved in the 2020 election only in Los Angeles County, right wing media personalities have accused it of altering votes in several states in the 2020 presidential contest. The lawyer for the company’s founder, Antonio Mugica, has sent letters to the FNC, Newsmax, and OAN demanding that they retract their stories and warning them to keep documents for a forthcoming defamation suit. Voting machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems, also included in the news stories, has also hired legal counsel.
The threat of lawsuits has prompted the FNC and Newsmax to “clarify” at some length that they had no evidence of any of the improprieties they alleged. On Newsmax, John Tabacco also had to clarify that there was no relationship between Dominion Voting Systems and Diane Feinstein, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Hugo Chavez, or the government of Venezuela.
As he descends into the fever swamps, Trump has largely given up any pretense of governing. His public schedule remains empty, and his private meetings appear to focus on how he can stay in office. Today we learned that Russian hackers broke into email system used by the leadership of the Treasury Department, but the cyberattack from Russia has gone unaddressed except to the extent the president tried to blame the attack on China (although he has made no move to retaliate against China for the attack). He has made little attempt to shepherd any sort of an economic relief bill through Congress. And, most crucially, he is silent about the epidemic that is killing us. As of this evening, more than 18 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 319,000 have died.
The House select subcommittee on coronavirus that is investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis today released documents showing that Trump appointees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tried to “alter or block” at least 13 of the reports written by CDC scientists. Appointees messed around with the CDC’s traditional “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports” and edited reports on the use of masks, the dangers of Covid-19 in children, and the spread of the disease. They also tried to delete emails revealing political interference in scientific assessments. Some of the emails from science adviser Paul Alexander calling for the administration to speed the spread of coronavirus in order to achieve herd immunity have sparked outrage.
Chaired by Representative Jim Clyburn (D-SC), the select subcommittee today issued subpoenas to Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar and Director of the CDC Dr. Robert Redfield for all documents “relating to efforts by political appointees… to interfere with scientific work conducted by career officials.” It had requested the documents earlier this month, but HHS and the CDC declined either to cooperate or to permit Redfield to testify about political censorship to the committee.
Meanwhile President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris are preparing to take office in the midst of a pandemic, a sweeping computer systems hack, and a recession, while the outgoing president tries to undermine them by telling his own officials not to tell them anything that could be used against him and by insisting that they were not legitimately elected.
Biden was inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine today on national television to illustrate that the shot is safe; Dr. Biden also got the shot today. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will be vaccinated next week.
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December 22, 2020 (Tuesday)
Late last night, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which combined a $900 billion coronavirus relief bill and a $1.4 trillion spending bill, as well as incorporating a number of other measures. At 5,593 pages, the bill was the longest bill ever passed by Congress, and is one of the largest spending bills ever passed.
The bill provides $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits on top of state benefits, a $13 billion increase in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food support program, a one-time $600 direct payment to individuals, and $25 billion in assistance to help pay past-due rent. It allocates $20 billion to buy more vaccines and about $8 billion to distribute them. Schools will get $82 billion; colleges and universities are in line for $23 billion. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges and institutions have access to $1.7 billion.
The measure also includes an appropriations bill that will keep the country funded until next September. It is a standard appropriations measure that includes all the normal aid packages and annual funding. The new bill also cuts taxes by about $200 billion and increases military spending by about $5 billion.
The bill made many lawmakers of both parties angry, as it was negotiated by congressional leaders and they had about two hours to absorb what was in it before voting yes or no. This sort of bill, passed at the end of a congressional session, is “a clearing of the decks,” Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University told New York Times reporters Luke Broadwater, Jesse Drucker, and Rebecca R. Ruiz. “It’s all the stuff we wanted to pass but couldn’t. Everybody would love for legislation to be passed individually, but that really is a function of a bygone era that is not coming back.”
Still, it was a bipartisan accomplishment to help dull some of the economic pain of the pandemic and to keep the government funded. Then, tonight, Trump shocked everyone when he released a video attacking the bill, calling its payments of only $600 to individuals a “disgrace” and suggesting he would veto the measure unless Congress increases stimulus payments to $2000.
Trump refused to have anything to do with negotiations on the bill, and his new demand seems primarily designed to undercut Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), at whom Trump is furious for recognizing that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Last night, Trump sent an email to Republican lawmakers taking credit for McConnell’s victory in Kentucky and blasting McConnell for abandoning Trump and acknowledging Biden’s victory.
Trump is also picking a fight with Senator John Thune (R-SD), the number two Republican in the Senate, warning Thune he would be challenged from the right in 2022 and that his political career is over. “Republicans in the Senate so quickly forget," Trump tweeted. “Right now they would be down 8 seats without my backing them in the last Election.” Thune said that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election by stopping the certification of the votes of the Electoral College on January 6 would “go down like a shot dog.”
Trump is reportedly angry as well at Vice President Mike Pence, who has not been as supportive of Trump’s attempts to overturn the election as the president would like. Indeed, Trump is turning on everyone around him who is not defending his attack on the election results, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as well as McConnell and Pence. Instead of working with them, he is spending his time with fringe advisers-- lawyer Sidney Powell, for example-- who tell him he can still seize the election victory.
If Trump vetoes the Consolidated Appropriations Act—along with the National Defense Authorization Act he has also threatened to veto-- Congress has the votes to override it. But such an override would take time that has now run out.
Meanwhile, Democrats jumped on the suggestion they should increase the stimulus payments that Republicans kept low. In the House, they will likely offer a new, stand-alone bill that authorizes the $2000 payments, using a parliamentary tactic that will require a Republican to go on the record objecting to the measure. Trump is forcing Republicans to choose between him and their party, making the high-stakes gamble that he will win.
He will not. That ship has sailed. The Electoral College has voted and Congress on January 6 will certify the votes that will put Biden in the White House.
But Trump can continue to keep himself in the news by escalating the drama of his behavior, seeking a showdown with the Senate Republicans who are doing their very best to avoid precisely such a showdown. He wants a fight.
Tonight, Trump pardoned 15 people, including four military contractors convicted of opening fire on a crowd and killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007. The men sparked an international outcry about the use of private military contractors in war zones when they fired machine guns and grenade launchers in what came to be known as the Nisour Square massacre. One had been sentenced to life in prison; the other three to 30 years each. When the massacre occurred, the four worked for the Blackwater Worldwide security company, founded by Erik Prince, a key Trump loyalist. Prince is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother.
Trump also pardoned three Republican lawmakers, two of whom were early supporters of his: California Representative Duncan Hunter, convicted of stealing campaign funds, and New York Representative Chris Collins, convicted of insider trading and lying to the FBI.
Trump also pardoned two more of the men swept up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election: campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about a conversation he had about Russia’s possession of “dirt” on 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton; and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who was associated with Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort. Van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to making a false statement to investigators.
Papadopoulos and van der Zwaan make up two of the now four people involved in the Russia investigation that Trump has pardoned or whose sentence he has commuted. The other two are his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and his adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying under oath, withholding documents, and threatening a witness.
Normally, pardons go through the Justice Department, reviewed by the pardon attorney there, but the president has the right to act without consulting the Department of Justice. He has done so.
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December 23, 2020 (Wednesday)
The main story today was that Trump has essentially quit even pretending to govern, and instead created chaos in Washington before leaving for Mar-a-Lago until sometime in the new year. The confusion he has sown promises to keep him central over the holidays, and remaining central is what drives this man.
Today the White House first told staffers that they would “start departing” the week of January 4, then told the same staffers to “please disregard” the earlier memo.
Trump vetoed the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act today, complaining that this bill, which funds the military and is usually a bipartisan must-pass bill, changed the names of military bases currently named for Confederate officers and did not repeal the protection for social media companies from liability for content posted by third parties. This second demand has nothing to do with the military, but Trump wanted it to give him power to rein in the insults he sees on Twitter and Facebook. Congress is expected to repass the bill over Trump’s veto.
In his fury at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator John Thune (R-SD) for recognizing Joe Biden as President-Elect, Trump yesterday attacked the hard-won Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 bill, which Congress passed after months of struggle late Monday night. The bill contains a coronavirus relief measure which provides $600 to individuals in a one-time payment. Trump insisted the amount should be $2000. Republicans had rejected a higher payment than $600 during negotiations, and a Republican official noted today that Trump had been informed of the discussions of the bill as they progressed and had made no objection to the terms at the time. His complaints now, the official said, were driven by his desire to skewer McConnell and Thune.
After indicating he might veto the bill and leave the government unfunded, Trump has not told anyone how he would like the bill amended to be sure of his signature. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi urged the president to “sign the bill to keep government open!”
Meanwhile, the president’s attack on the $600 payments has opened the door for Democrats, who always wanted a higher amount, to propose a stand-alone bill increasing those payments. They will likely do so tomorrow night, on Christmas Eve. Republicans still oppose that measure, and Trump has put them in the likely position of voting down this payment to needy Americans on Christmas Eve.
Trump’s stall on signing the bill and his sudden call for higher payments also threatens to hurt the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia, who have been campaigning on the promise that there would be a coronavirus relief package before Christmas. Their Democratic challengers have seized on the idea of higher payments, putting the two Republicans, who oppose higher payments, on the spot. A Georgia Republican strategist complained that Trump had put the Republican candidates in “an impossible situation repeatedly throughout the entirety of the runoff.”
In Washington, one top Republican aide told Politico reporters Anita Kumar, Melanie Zanona and Marianne Levine that Trump’s handling of the bill was a “complete clusterf***.”
Trump wasn’t done for the day. Tonight, he pardoned 26 more people, including his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his friend Roger Stone, both of whom were instrumental in connecting the 2016 Trump campaign to Russian operatives. He also pardoned Jared Kushner’s father Charles Kushner, who was convicted of tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions. It is likely that Attorney General William Barr made his resignation effective today because he didn’t want to be associated with these pardons.
Legal analyst for CNN Elie Honig notes that the pardons mean that “every significant Mueller defendant who refused to cooperate (or started but then stopped) has now been pardoned. Only Rick Gates and Michael Cohen—both of whom testified publicly, in court or Congress—have not been pardoned. The math isn’t hard to do.”
The CDC announced today that more than a million Americans have received a first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, a significant milestone but far below the 20 million goal the administration had aimed for. Currently, the nation is averaging more than 200,000 new cases a day.
As the Trump administration has largely given up governing, the incoming Biden administration is trying to prepare to take over despite being kept in the dark about key issues. The transition process started late, as Trump officials refused to recognize Biden’s election, and now administration officials either can’t or won’t tell Biden’s people what’s going on. In some departments, “the professionals are at a loss” to explain what’s happening, Biden said today. “I can’t tell if I have a clear view of where the landmines are,” he said. His team has not received a briefing from the Defense Department in close to a week, leaving him largely unclear about Russia’s recent cyberattack on the government and key businesses, among other things.
Biden says that part of the reason he has chosen old hands in Washington to fill key positions is because they, at least, know the ropes well enough to get the ship of state underway again.
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December 26, 2020 (Saturday)
On December 21, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, a $2.3 trillion bill that pulled together a number of different pieces of legislation, including a $900 billion coronavirus relief bill and a $1.4 trillion appropriations bill (which included 12 separate annual appropriations bills). Today’s news is that Trump is refusing to sign the bill into law.
Here’s what’s at stake: the bill provides $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits on top of state benefits, and without it, expanded unemployment benefits ran out today for millions of Americans. The bill increases the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food support program by $13 billion, and allocates $25 billion in assistance to help pay past-due rent. It also provides $20 billion to buy more vaccines and about $8 billion to distribute them. The bill also calls for a one-time $600 direct payment to individuals.
That’s the coronavirus relief piece of the measure. Another piece is the regular appropriations bill for the 2021 federal fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2021. This includes military spending, aid to foreign countries, and the money that keeps federal programs afloat. It has $1.4 billion allocated to the wall on our southern border.
Congress should have passed this appropriations bill in time for the start of the 2021 fiscal year on October 1, 2020, but it didn’t, so it has kept the government funded through continuing resolutions. The one under which we are currently operating expires at midnight on Monday, December 28.
Here’s the third piece of the measure. More than 3000 of the 5593 pages of this massive bill are additional measures that have nothing to do with the first two. They extend tax breaks from previous laws, amounting to tax cuts of about $200 billion. They include money for flood control and coastal protection. They fund community health centers and historically Black colleges and universities. They reauthorize intelligence programs for 2021. They establish the Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (although it appears they do not allocate money for them, but simply authorize their establishment, as required by law).
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 passed Congress by large bipartisan majorities. Trump has not called congressional Democratic leaders in more than a year, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was part of the negotiations, and spoke for the White House. Everyone expected that, after Congress had passed the bill, Trump would sign it into law.
But he left for Mar-a-Lago on December 23 without signing it, and is threatening not to. In a surprise video on Tuesday, December 22, he called the legislation “a disgrace.” He complained about the $600 stimulus checks—it was Mnuchin who insisted on that amount—and demanded the amount be raised to $2000. He also complained about “wasteful spending and much more,” although some of the things he called out, including funds for Egypt and the Egyptian military and money for the Kennedy Center, were his own requests. Republicans were stunned by his sudden hostility. Democrats, who had wanted higher stimulus payments all along, promptly tried to pass a stand-alone $2000 payment measure through the House, but were stopped by Republicans.
Trump’s sudden hostility to a bill that took months to hammer out is disastrous for millions of Americans whose expanded unemployment benefits ran out today and whose state benefits are long gone. It also threatens to force a government shutdown.
So, what’s Trump up to?
A couple of things. First, he is furious with Senate Republicans, especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Majority Whip (the second most powerful Republican in the Senate, who enforces party discipline) John Thune (R-SD), both of whom have acknowledged that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Trump continues to insist that he won “by a landslide” and that the election was stolen. He is incensed by any Republican who has not signed on to his crusade, yet as he relies more and more on marginal figures, like his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and as Biden’s victory becomes more and more secure, party leaders are distancing themselves from him. Tonight, he tweeted that it is “[t]ime for Republican Senators to step up and fight for the Presidency….”
Now, though, Republican leadership needs him to sign this bill to help Republican Senate candidates in Georgia. Democrats in the House passed coronavirus relief back in May, but McConnell objected to anything of the sort until after the election, when it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on the outcome of a runoff for both Senate seats from Georgia.
In that state, the two Republican candidates are having a hard time because voters are disgusted that there has been so little help coming from the Republicans for people hurt by the economic crisis that came in on the heels of the pandemic. If those Senate seats go the Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the Senate will be balanced 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. In the case of such a tie, the position of the Senate Majority Leader goes to the top member of the party of the U.S. President, meaning that a Democrat would replace McConnell.
McConnell assured the Georgia Republican Senate candidates that there would be a coronavirus relief package before Christmas, and they ran on that promise. Now Trump has them over a barrel.
That’s one reason he’s suddenly stalling.
The other is quite likely that he is angry and frustrated at his impending loss of power, and is lashing out to hurt people. It seems of a piece with the fact that he and then-Attorney General William Barr resumed federal executions in July 2019, and that he has sped up the executions of federal prisoners since his November defeat. During his administration, the federal government has executed ten prisoners, more than any president since Grover Cleveland in 1896. This includes executions during the transition to the next administration, although traditionally, presidents stop executions during this period, leaving life-and-death decisions to their successors.
One person in conversation with White House officials talked with Jeff Stein of the Washington Post about Trump’s scuttling of the Consolidated Appropriations Act and said, “He’s just angry at everybody and wants to inflict as much pain on Congress as possible.”
Trump’s supporters are urging him to “pocket veto” the bill, taking advantage of a weird option at the end of a congressional session. Normally, a president has ten days, not including Sunday, to review and sign a bill. During a congressional session, if the president doesn’t sign a bill within ten days, it becomes a law. But if the congressional session ends within ten days, the bill does not become a law. This is known as a pocket veto. The 116th Congress—this one—officially ends at noon on January 3. If Trump got the bill on December 24, and all indications are that he did, the ten-day window ends on January 4. So, he could, in fact, run out the clock in such a way that Congress could not override his veto.
For his part, President-Elect Joe Biden is scathing of the machinations that could leave him inheriting an epic disaster. “[M]illions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of… Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority,” his transition team wrote today. “This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences.” Biden pointed out that about 10 million Americans will lose their unemployment insurance benefits, paychecks for military personnel will be at risk, a moratorium on evictions expires, small businesses will fail, and distribution of vaccines will falter. “This bill is critical,” he wrote. It needs to be signed into law now. But it is also a first step and down payment on more action that we’ll need to take early in the new year to revive the economy and contain the pandemic….”
Biden noted that “In November, the American people spoke clearly that now is a time for bipartisan action and compromise.” Congress has stepped up to the plate with this appropriations bill, Biden said, and added that “Trump should join them, and make sure millions of American can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads in this holiday season.”
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December 27, 2020 (Sunday)
Tonight, Trump relented and signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which includes the coronavirus relief measure and the 2021 appropriations bill (along with other measures).
He accompanied it with a statement claiming he would demand changes to the law, but these have no force; Congress will almost certainly ignore him. He also continued to pressure Senate Republicans to increase payments to individuals and families, saying that the House would vote to increase the amount of stimulus payments on Monday and that the Senate should agree. But he seemed to confuse the CAA with the National Defense Authorization Act he vetoed, said that Congress has agreed to do things it hasn’t, and then threw in complaints about voter fraud. The statement was weirdly disconnected from the way the legislative process actually works.
Trump tried to suggest he was saving the nation from the crisis he, himself, has caused, but it is likely that he finally signed the bill because his stubbornness was not playing well across an increasingly desperate nation, especially as he is golfing at Mar-a-Lago and Vice President Mike Pence is skiing in Vail, Colorado. Americans were generally angry over his inaction on a bill that would provide relief for those suffering from the economic crisis, funding for the distribution of vaccines, and funding for the government. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) pointed out today, "if his goal was really to get a better deal on the budget, he would have vetoed it immediately and begun negotiating. But his goal is actually national arson—chaos for the fun of it. So he sits on the budget—does nothing—in order to guarantee a government shutdown.”
He was also under pressure from Republican Senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who likely told him his stubbornness was undermining the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia before the January 5 runoff. While Trump is furious with McConnell and the other Senate Republicans who have acknowledged Biden’s win, he is apparently not furious enough that he wants to see McConnell replaced by a Democrat, as would happen if the Senate is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.
So the CAA will become law, and the drama of lawmaking for this congressional session should be over. But it is not quite over yet. Trump vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act, which specifies how the defense budget will be spent, on Wednesday, December 23. The NDAA has passed with bipartisan majorities since the 1960s when it first began, and presidents have always signed it. But Trump has chosen to veto it, on the grounds that it calls for the renaming of U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals and that it does not strip social media companies of protection from liability when third parties post offensive material on them.
The National Defense Authorization Act this year does something else, though, that seems to me of far more importance to the president than the naming of military bases.
It includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.
America is currently the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company which enables them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes. The measure will pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists dug into leaked documents from FinCEN this fall, they discovered shell companies moving money for criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria.
Shell companies also mean that our political system is awash in secrecy. Social media giants like Facebook cannot determine who is buying political advertising. And, as Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted, shell companies allow “foreign bad actors” to corrupt our system even more directly. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” he reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”
We know the Trump family uses shell companies: Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off Stormy Daniels, and just this month we learned that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner approved a shell company that spent more than $600 million in campaign funds.
The new requirements in the NDAA apply not just to future entities, but also to existing ones.
Congress needs to repass the NDAA over Trump’s veto—indeed it is likely that the CTA was included in this measure precisely because the NDAA is must-pass legislation—and both the CTA and the NDAA bill into which it is tucked have bipartisan support. Trump has objected to a number of things in the original bill but has not publicly complained about the CTA in it. It will be interesting to see if Congress repasses this bill in its original form and, if not, what changes it makes.
Finally, we have a little more information now about the attack in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas morning, when an explosive device in a recreational vehicle exploded near an AT&T transmission building near Second Avenue North and Commerce Street.
At 5:30 on December 25, the sound of what seemed to be gunfire woke residents in the area, then a computerized message warned them to evacuate before a bomb went off. The recording began a countdown to detonation. Law enforcement officers knocked on doors telling people to evacuate. At about 6:30, the device exploded. The blast damaged more than 40 businesses, sent three people to the hospital, and disrupted cell service, 911 systems, and the Internet throughout Tennessee as well as in parts of Kentucky and Alabama. Planes were temporarily grounded at Nashville International Airport. Yesterday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee asked Trump to issue an emergency disaster declaration, which would free up federal money to help clean up and rebuild.
This evening, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, Donald Cochran, identified Anthony Quinn Warner, a 63-year-old white man and former IT specialist, as the bomber. “He was present when the bomb went off,” Cochran said, and he “perished in the bombing.”
Trump has not yet commented.
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