Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

May 21, 2021 (Friday)

Tonight, in Fulton County, Georgia, a judge allowed 9 Georgia voters and their experts to inspect copies of the 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in that county to make sure that officials did not accept counterfeit ballots. Georgia officials have already done three separate audits of the ballots from the 2020 vote, including a hand recount, and found no widespread fraud. But supporters of former president Trump insist that he actually won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from him by fraud.

It is this same belief that led to the private “audit” of ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, where Republican state senators made election officials give both ballots and election equipment to a private company, Cyber Ninjas, to recount and examine. The Cyber Ninjas had no experience doing such an audit and the process has been widely discredited, but they accused election officials of deleting databases, accusations picked up by Trump loyalists like Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ).

Today, attorneys for Maricopa County and those election officials warned the Republican Arizona Senators to preserve all evidence surrounding this “audit” for future lawsuits.

Despite the Arizona debacle, Trump supporters all over the country are demanding recounts like the one in Maricopa County. They say their only goal is to make sure that machines are accurate and the count is fair, but they are echoing Trump, who continues to insist he won the 2020 election.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” he said recently at Mar-a-Lago. “So we’re going to watch that very closely. And after that, you’ll watch Pennsylvania and you’ll watch Georgia and you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin. You’re watching New Hampshire. Because this was a rigged election. Everybody knows it.”

It was not a rigged election. Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won by more than 7 million votes with more than 51% of the popular vote to Trump and Mike Pence’s 46.8%. The Democrats won in the Electoral College by a vote of 306 to 232. Trump lost more than 60 lawsuits over the election, and recounts turned up no evidence of widespread fraud.

Observers call Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election the Big Lie.

It was this lie that led to the January 6 insurrection, when rioters stormed the Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Biden president. In case after case, the insurrectionists’ lawyers have claimed their clients believed that Trump won and the election was stolen from him. The lawyers have blamed the “propaganda” coming from the Fox News Channel and the former president for their clients’ actions.

According to “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley, his lawyer wrote, if not “for the actions and the words of the President, he would not have appeared in Washington, DC to support the President and, but for the specific words of the then-President during his January 6, 2021 speech, the Defendant would not have walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and would not have gone into the U.S. Capitol Building.”

In an interview with Matt Shuham of Talking Points Memo, the lawyer added: “These aren’t bad people; they don’t have a prior criminal history. Fk, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since fking Hitler.”

But here’s the rub: Last week, when they removed Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) from party leadership, Republicans indicated they have now tied themselves to Trump, along with his eagerness to overturn elections unless he gets his way.

We are on a very dangerous path.

Republican lawmakers are downplaying the January 6 insurrection, rewriting our history to suggest that the assault on the heart of our democratic process was no big deal. Last week, Representative Andrew S. Clyde (R-GA) said the event was like a “normal tourist visit”—photos show him that day screaming and frantically barricading the doors to the House gallery—and Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC) questioned whether the rioters were Trump supporters, despite their Trump flags and MAGA hats, and the fact the former president told them he loved them. On the Fox News Channel this week, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) claimed the insurrection was largely a “peaceful protest.”

On Wednesday, the House passed a bill to set up a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the events of January 6. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had set out conditions for the commission, apparently with the idea that Democrats would reject them, but in fact the Democrats agreed to his demands, leaving McCarthy scrambling to find a reason to oppose the commission. For oppose it he does, along with all but 35 Republicans (whom Trump promptly called “ineffective and weak”). Four fifths of the Republicans in the House oppose creating a bipartisan independent commission to figure out what happened on that hideous day.

They are opposed in part because they do not want voters to be reminded of their leader’s complicity in the event, driven as it was by the Big Lie, and also because a number of them would be witnesses, called to testify under oath. Cheney has repeatedly suggested that McCarthy himself, who had a heated telephone conversation with the former president during the riot, should testify voluntarily or, if necessary, under subpoena.

Yesterday, McCarthy pointedly refused to answer whether he was sure no members of his caucus had spoken with any of the rioters, bringing to mind the January 13 letter from 34 members of the House, including those with military training and former CIA agent Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), to request an immediate investigation into tours of the Capitol given on January 5. The letter reported that the number and nature of the tours were so concerning that members reported them to the Sergeant at Arms that day.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has vowed to oppose it, calling it “slanted and unbalanced” in what seems to be a shout out to Fox News Channel viewers by playing on “fair and balanced.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will bring the bill to the floor, where Republicans are expected to filibuster it, meaning it will take 60 votes, rather than a simple majority of 51, to pass it. They are likely to block even a debate on it.

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has maintained he can work with the Republicans, commented: “So disheartening. It makes you really concerned about our country…. I’m still praying we’ve still got 10 good solid patriots within that conference.”

It seems to me that ship has sailed. Six months after the 2020 election, supporters of the former president are challenging vote counts all over the country as he continues to insist he won. His supporters stormed the Capitol to overturn our electoral process. And now our Republican lawmakers, who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, are trying to protect their leader from accountability for inciting that insurrection.

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has maintained he can work with the Republicans, commented: “So disheartening. It makes you really concerned about our country…. I’m still praying we’ve still got 10 good solid patriots within that conference.”

And yet this guy is willing to watch it all burn to preserve his own outsized influence. Asshole.

[milliefink]

May 22, 2021 (Saturday)

It is spring here, and the alewives are running from the ocean to the inland ponds to spawn. They mass at the mouths of freshwater streams and leap their way upstream, from pool to pool, to reach the inland waters where they were hatched, where they will lay and fertilize their eggs to create the next generation.

This is a terrible photo, caught on my old IPhone today in the glare of the sun, but it’s just too amazing not to share it. Years ago, before I had seen the alewives and had only heard of them, I thought their “running” would be, you know, a fish leaping… and then another fish leaping, and I figured that would be, you know, cool.

Instead, the alewives are a churning mass of thousands and thousands of fish, acting as one as they work their way upstream while seagulls and cormorants and osprey and eagles threaten them from above and below.

I find them absolutely mesmerizing.

My grades are in and I celebrated the end of this very long year by spending the day with alewives rather than politicians. I’ll pick things up again tomorrow, but for tonight, aren’t these fish amazing?

[milliefink]

May 23, 2021 (Sunday)

Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography three times, but to protect the people who helped him run away from enslavement, he did not explain how he had managed to get away until the last version.

Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1838. In his twenty years of life, he had had a series of masters, some kind, some harsh, and one who almost killed him. But by 1838, he was a skilled worker in the local shipyards, earning good money for his master and enjoying a measure of freedom, as well as protection. He had good friends in the area and had fallen in love with the woman who would become his wife.

It was enslavement, but within that existence, it was a pretty good position. His peers in the cotton fields of the Deep South were beaten like animals, their deaths by violence unremarkable. Douglass himself had come close to being “sold down the river”—a term that referred to the slave convoys that traveled down the Mississippi River from older, worn out lands in the East to fresh, raw lands in Mississippi and Louisiana—and he knew that being forced to labor on a plantation in the Deep South would kill him.

His relatively safe position would have been enough for a lot of people. They would have thanked God for their blessings and stayed put. In 1838, Frederick Douglass was no different than they were: an unknown slave, hoping to get through each day. Like them, he might have accepted his conditions and disappeared into the past, leaving the status quo unchanged.

But he refused.

His scheme for escaping to freedom was ridiculously easy. In the days of slavery, free black sailors carried documents with them to prove to southern authorities that they were free, so they could move from northern and foreign ports to southern ports without being detained. These were the days before photos, so officials described the man listed on the free papers as they saw him: his color, distinguishing marks, scars. Douglass worked in shipyards, and had met a sailor whose free papers might cover Douglass… if the white official who looked at them didn’t look too closely. Risking his own freedom, that sailor lent Douglass his papers.

To escape from slavery, all Douglass had to do was board a train. That’s it: he just had to step on a train. If he were lucky, and the railroad conductor didn’t catch him, and no one recognized him and called him out, he could be free. But if he were caught, he would be sold down river, almost certainly to his death.

To me, Douglass’s decision to step aboard that train is everything. How many of us would have taken that risk, especially knowing that even in the best case, success would mean trying to build a new life, far away from everyone we had ever known? Douglass’s step was such a little one, such an easy one… except that it meant the difference between life and death, the difference between a forgotten, enslaved shipyard worker and the great Frederick Douglass, who went on to become a powerful voice for American liberty.

Tomorrow, my students will graduate, and every year, students ask me if I have any advice for them as they leave college or university, advice I wish I had had at their age. The answer is yes, after all these years of living and of studying history, I have one piece of advice:

When the day comes that you have to choose between what is just good enough and what is right… find the courage to step on the train.

[milliefink]

May 24, 2021 (Monday)

On Sunday, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus forced a commercial airliner, operated by Ryanair, flying from Athens, Greece, to Vilnius, Lithuania, out of the sky as it passed through the airspace over Belarus. A MiG-29 fighter jet diverted the plane to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, after ground support warned its pilots (falsely) there was a bomb on board.

There wasn’t a bomb on the plane; there was an opposition journalist, 26-year-old Roman Protasevich (also spelled Raman Pratasevich), who was traveling with his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, who is a law student and a Russian citizen. Once the plane was on the ground, security forces took the two of them away. Pratasevich told another passenger: “I am facing the death penalty.” Three other passengers also stayed in Minsk; Lithuanian authorities are trying to figure out who they were.

Lukashenko, who has been called “Europe’s Last Dictator,” has been president of Belarus since 1994 and claimed to be reelected on August 9, 2020, with 80% of the vote, although before the election the president’s security forces threw journalists, political opponents, activists, and human rights defenders in jail. After the election, security forces arrested almost 7000 people in four days, denying many food and water and torturing hundreds of them. By mid-November, the number arrested had climbed to more than 25,000 people.

The European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom did not recognize Lukashenko’s claim of an election victory. They called for an end to the political prosecutions and a new election.

In Belarus, which has a population of about 9.5 million, hundreds of thousands of protesters were more direct. They took to the streets, calling for new elections and Lukashenko’s resignation. Protasevich was not in the country. He had begun protesting Lukashenko as a teenager; he was arrested and beaten in 2012 when he was 17 for running opposition groups on social media. He fled Belarus in 2019 and, from exile, was one of the journalists who operated a communications channel to provide information about the democratic movement during the demonstrations. The government declared him a “terrorist” in absentia. Terrorism carries the death penalty in Belarus.

To capture Protasevich, Lukashenko has committed an act of state-sponsored piracy against two European Union countries, a European-registered airline, and passengers who are mostly European Union citizens. This is an astonishing move that likely has something to do with Lukashenko’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian officials praised the hijacking, calling it a “brilliant special operation.”

Russia and Belarus loosely agreed to form a unified state in 1996 and made the agreement tighter in 1999, but Lukashenko has not been eager to give up control of his country. As his grip on his people has weakened, though, Lukashenko has turned to Russia, which gave Belarus a loan of $1 billion in December 2020. Lukasheko and Putin are scheduled to meet this week.

Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, an authoritative scholar of authoritarianism, notes that autocrats are watching to see how the West reacts, since they, too, would like to be able to control their dissident communities in exile, showing them: “You are not safe. You are never safe. Not even if you live in a democracy; not even if you have political asylum; not even if you are sitting on a commercial plane, thousands of feet above the ground.”

Immediately after the hijacking, Western leaders, including the secretary-general of NATO, the president of the European Commission, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, condemned it. Today, European leaders imposed sanctions on Belarus and prohibited airplanes from the European Union from flying over Belarus. As the U.S. lets Europe take the lead on the response, it is demonstrating definitively that the U.S. and European countries are united and that the divisions fostered under the former president are gone.

This afternoon, Belarus released a 29-second video of Pratasevich that appeared to be a forced confession. Tonight, President Biden issued a statement saying “The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms both the diversion of the plane and the subsequent removal and arrest of Mr. Pratasevich…. This outrageous incident and the video Mr. Pratasevich appears to have made under duress are shameful assaults on both political dissent and the freedom of the press.”

The National Security Council then shared a readout of a call between NSC adviser Jake Sullivan and the Belarus opposition leader who likely won the 2020 election, indicating American support for “the demands of the Belarusian people for democracy, human rights, and fundamental freedoms.”

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, new documents unsealed in the Paul Manafort case today show that the Trump campaign chair did, indeed, collude with his partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian operative, before the 2016 election. The documents come from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s case arguing that Manafort had not delivered his side of the plea bargain he had made. They show that Manafort—whom Trump later pardoned—repeatedly lied to federal investigators during their interviews. He lied about his contact with Kilimnik and about discussing a peace plan between Ukraine and Russia that would create an autonomous eastern Ukraine—that is the region Russia wants—and about sharing internal polling data with Kilimnick.

In separate news, we also learned that a security unit in the Commerce Department turned into a rogue counterintelligence operation over the past few years, collecting information on hundreds of people suspected of talking critically about the 2020 U.S. census or of having ties to China. John Costello, who was a deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security in the department during the Trump administration, told Washington Post reporter Shawn Boburg that the office “has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation.” The unit seems to have become a tool to target employees of Chinese descent.

When they took over, Biden officials ordered the unit to stop all activities until further review.

A new Gallup poll today finds that 53% of Republicans think that Trump won the 2020 election. But only 26% of Americans identify as Republicans. Journalist Richard Hine crunched the numbers and notes that those percentages boil down to about 14% of Americans who think Trump is still president. They are a minority, but they believe the former president, who continues to insist that he won the 2020 election despite all evidence to the contrary.

[docosc]

@milliefink

They are a minority,

But a very vocal, influential and dangerous minority. And in virtual control of half of the legislative body of the United States. A frightening period in time we are going through.

[Mindysan33]

@docosc

A frightening period in time we are going through.

[DukeTrout]

@docosc

But a very vocal, influential and dangerous minority.

I’ve heard them refer to themselves as “the silent majority.”

‘When the fuck have you been silent, Darren?”

[gatto]

@milliefink

In separate news,

i hadn’t heard of that, so here’s a link –

‘Rogue’ Commerce unit scanned social media for Census disinformation

“Over time, the ITMS began regularly conducting criminal investigations and eventually began using counterintelligence tools to gather information about both foreign visitors and U.S. citizens––despite lacking any proper form of authorization,” [ Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) ] wrote in his fact sheet, adding that “ITMS has mutated into a rogue, unaccountable police force without a clear mission.”

[milliefink]

May 25, 2021 (Tuesday)

A year ago today, 46-year-old George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis as then–police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. As bystanders begged Chauvin to get up, a teenage girl walking by had the presence of mind to video what was happening. Thanks to that girl, Darnella Frazier, we all could hear Floyd telling Chauvin, “I can’t breathe.”

Floyd’s murder sparked more than 4700 protests across the nation that popularized both the idea that policing must be reformed and the concept that American systems, starting with law enforcement and moving to include housing, healthcare, education, and so on, are racially biased. In the past fourteen months, support for the Black Lives Matter movement among white people has jumped 5%, fueled mostly by younger people.

And yet, the rate of deaths at the hands of law enforcement officials has not changed, and Black people are three times more likely than white people to die at the hands of law enforcement even though they are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed.

In April, a jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He will be sentenced in June.

After the jury convicted Chauvin, President Joe Biden promised Floyd’s family that he would deliver a police reform bill. Today he and Vice President Kamala Harris met with Floyd’s family privately in the Oval Office for more than an hour, but the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act has not become law. The act bars the use of chokeholds and makes it easier to prosecute police officers, but lawmakers have been unable to compromise over so-called “qualified immunity,” a federal doctrine established in 1967 by the Supreme Court that protects officials—including law enforcement officers—from personal liability for much of their behavior while they execute their professional duties. Members of both parties, though, say a deal on the measure is in sight.

Today we learned that the Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., has recently called together a special grand jury to hear a number of cases, including whether to indict former President Trump, other people in charge of running his company, or the Trump Organization itself. That a grand jury is considering whether a former president committed a crime is unprecedented.

It also suggests that Vance believes there is evidence of a crime. There appears to be a focus on whether the Trump Organization manipulated the value of real estate to make it seem more valuable when trying to get loans against it, and less valuable when listing it for tax valuations. Investigators are also looking at compensation for Trump Organization executives.

Vance began to investigate in 2018 after Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to making hush-money payments for Trump and to lying to Congress.

The former president also responded today to a lawsuit filed by Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who in March filed a lawsuit against Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; Alabama Representative Mo Brooks; and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani for inciting the insurrection of January 6. Trump’s lawyers asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the president has “absolute immunity conveyed on the President by the Constitution as a key principle of separation of powers." The memo is the usual political attack we have come to expect from Trump, but it’s interesting: his claim that he enjoys absolute immunity leaves the rest of the defendants out in the cold.

On January 22, just two days after President Biden took office, Lincoln Project founder George Conway published a piece in the Washington Post noting that Trump’s frantic efforts to stay in office might well have been “a desperate fear of criminal indictment.” Trump needed the protection of the presidency to avoid the fallout from his connections with Russia; the Ukraine scandal; and bank, insurance, and tax fraud. Conway noted that refusing to prosecute ex-presidents would undermine the rule of law because it would place them above the law: they could do whatever they wished as president—including trying to overthrow our democracy—knowing they would never answer for it.

Trump, of course, has refused to admit he lost the 2020 election. Today, he issued a statement suggesting that all potential prosecution of him would be political, saying that he was “far in the lead for the Republican Presidential Primary and the General Election in 2024.”

Trump’s memo also suggested he had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wished about the 2020 election, but in January, criminal law professor Joseph Kennedy of the University of North Carolina School of Law pointed out that while Trump’s speech might have been protected, he had a legal duty to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, a duty that meant he should have immediately told his supporters to stop what they were doing on January 6. His supporters breached the Capitol shortly after 2:00 p.m., and he did not ask them to leave until 4:17, in a video that was itself incendiary.

Meanwhile, the “audit” of 2020 ballots in Maricopa County hit another pothole when the Pennsylvania-based technology company in charge of running the recount refused to renew its contract, which expired on May 14, the day the process was supposed to be done. Wake Technology Services Inc. was subcontracting under Cyber Ninjas. A different technology company has taken over from Wake TSI.

The Nevada Republican Party has its own troubles. It recently censured Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, charging that she had failed “to investigate election fraud” in the 2020 election. Recently, one of the people who claimed to have voted for that censure said on a podcast that he is a member of the far-right Proud Boys. He said he and about 30 of his friends had been urged by state Republican leaders to step into the political fray on the side of the former president and were, he claimed, the deciding votes on the censure. Republicans in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, and in Washoe County, which includes Reno, are now trying to clean the Proud Boys and their ilk out of the party, while Trump loyalists are now trying to purge the party of anti-Trump people.

As of today, 50% of adult Americans are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, and on May 24th, the seven-day average of new cases was the lowest it has been at any point since last June. But those numbers are driven by the vaccinated part of the population. Among those who are unvaccinated, the rate of disease and death is estimated to be as high as it was in late January.

[milliefink]

May 26, 2021 (Wednesday)

Today, President Joe Biden asked the intelligence community to increase its efforts to figure out where the coronavirus started. At stake is not only isolating the origins of a deadly pandemic to make sure the same mistakes are not made again, but also a new U.S. approach to China by the Biden administration.

First, what this is not: a continuation of the Trump administration’s attempt to blame China for a bioweapon launched against the world as a way to deflect attention from the former president’s botched handling of the pandemic that has, at this point, left at least 592,000 Americans dead. Trump initially praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his handling of the coronavirus, but at the time the coronavirus first started to make its presence felt in the U.S.,Trump was celebrating a deal with China to purchase American agricultural products, a sale Trump believed would help him with farmers in the 2020 election after his tariffs had hamstrung the U.S. agricultural sector.

Once the pandemic really hit and it became clear the administration had no real plan to handle it, Trump began to try to deflect blame onto China for hiding the origins of the coronavirus, and then onto the World Health Organization for deferring to China as it tried to respond to the crisis. As he called the novel coronavirus the “China virus”—drawn out like a schoolyard insult—attacks on Asian Americans skyrocketed. Trump supporters, like Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), implied that the Chinese had released the virus as a bioweapon.

Now, as scientists revisit the question of whether the coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, Cotton is suggesting he was right all along. But, in fact, Biden’s demand for a fact-based investigation is not an attempt to scapegoat China and Americans of Chinese descent for political points at home—after all, he just signed a bill to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans—rather, it appears to be an attempt to advance a new China policy based on clear-eyed competition as opposed to the attempts at cooperation that have characterized U.S. policy since Nixon.

At the same time, this policy stands a good chance of undercutting the support Trump garnered among workers who resented losing their jobs to China, without adopting Trump’s isolationism. (Trump’s own merchandise was made overseas, including in China.)

Biden has been very clear that he sees the nation’s foreign policy as key to his attempt to rebuild America. His National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has emphasized that the Biden administration has called for a “foreign policy for the middle class” that prioritizes protecting the American worker from foreign competition and making sure that American industry stays strong and provides good jobs. Repairing the economy and democracy at home is a way to keep the nation strong and safe from international aggression, Biden officials say.

And China is the country to which Biden is looking. In his address to Congress on April 28, Biden said: “America is moving—moving forward—but we can’t stop now. We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century. We’re at a great inflection point in history.” He vowed to make “sure every nation plays by the same rules in the global economy, including China,” and said the U.S. would “stand up to unfair trade practices that undercut American workers and American industries, like subsidies…to state-owned… enterprises and the theft of American technology and intellectual property.”

Today, Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s top official for Asia, said that the era of cooperation with China has come to an end and the two countries are entering a period of competition. The U.S. intends to address that competition by strengthening our traditional alliances. Meanwhile, the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are using the need to compete with China as an incentive to rebuild our domestic economy. In his April 28 address to Congress, Biden said he told President Xi, “We welcome the competition. We’re not looking for conflict.”

Like President Biden, Blinken insists the shift in the nation’s stance toward China is not antagonistic, as the previous administration’s was, but realistic. In an interview with Financial Times, Blinken said, “This is not about initiating a Cold War. This is all about doing our part to make sure that democracy is strong, resilient, and meeting the needs of its people.” He continued: “You know what we’ve seen over the last 15 years is unfortunately something of a democratic recession around the world: countries falling back on the basic metrics of democracy. The United States has had its own challenges visible for the world to see when it comes to democracy.”

[milliefink]

May 27, 2021 (Thursday)

Today the focus is on the Senate and whether it will pass the bill the House passed last week to establish an independent commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. Thirty-five Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to create the commission.

Today, four former leaders of the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement urging the Senate to pass the bill. Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson, who served in the Barack Obama administration, joined Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, who served under George W. Bush, to tell the Senate, “We must understand how the violent insurrection at the Capitol came together to ensure the peaceful transfer of power in our country is never so threatened again.” They called for senators to “put politics aside and create a bipartisan, independent 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) opposes the commission, as does former president Trump, who called it a “Democrat trap.” It will take ten Republicans voting with the Democrats to overcome a Republican filibuster of the bill, and such a bipartisan effort is unlikely. So far only Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Mitt Romney (R-UT), both of whom have their own power bases outside of the national Republican Party, have indicated they will vote for the commission.

Democrats can put together their own committee to figure out what happened on January 6, but Republicans will undoubtedly accuse them of partisanship and dismiss whatever they uncover. Democrats would prefer to have an independent, bipartisan investigation.

Today, the mother and partner of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the January 6 insurrection, were in Washington, D.C., pleading with Republican senators to support the creation of an independent commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. Joining them were D.C. Police officer Michael Fanone and U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, both of whom protected congress people during the riot, in which 140 police officers were injured.

Murkowski told Gladys Sicknick, “I’m heartsick that you feel you need to advocate to members of Congress that we stand up and say the truth is hard but the truth is necessary.”

After their visit, McConnell pressured Republican senators to filibuster the bill as “a personal favor” to him. Murkowski commented: “To be making a decision for the short-term political gain at expense of understanding and acknowledging what was in front of us on Jan. 6, I think we need to look at that critically. Is that really what this is about, one election cycle after another?”

Republicans are saying that they don’t want the commission because they’re afraid it will hurt them in the 2022 midterm elections. The tactic of using investigations to taint elections, of course, has been the Republicans’ go-to specialty since the mid-1990s, when Republicans “investigated” suspected cases of election wins through so-called “voter fraud” to convince Americans that voter fraud—which is statistically insignificant in the U.S.—is a problem.

That use of investigations continued until it became a key factor in the 2016 election, when investigations into the 2012 attack on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, along with accusations that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had misused an email server, helped to sway the election’s outcome. Tellingly, using an investigation to taint an election was the goal behind the scandal that led to former president Trump’s first impeachment, after he tried to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter—not to launch an investigation, but only to announce one—to weaken Biden before the 2020 election.

In this case, though, the House bill, which adopted all the key Republican demands, requires that the commission issue its final report by the end of 2021.

McConnell doesn’t want the publicity associated with the insurrectionists, but also likely doesn’t want to run the risk of losing any Republican senators who might turn out to be associated with the rioters. The Senate is precariously balanced at 50-50, and the organizing resolution the senators adopted on February 3, 2021, is based on that even split. McConnell filibustered that resolution until he got a Democratic commitment to preserve the filibuster.

So, an independent investigation of the insurrection has the potential to affect not only individual senators, but also the balance of the Senate and the power the Republicans continue to hold in it, sharing power with the Democrats despite the fact they represent 40.5 million fewer people than the 50 Democrats do.

Thus the fight to establish an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the events of January 6 has become a key test for the Senate filibuster and the power it enables Republicans to exert over our government. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who is one of the two holdouts on the Democratic side to preserve the filibuster, says “there is no excuse for any Republican to vote against” the bill but maintains that “ten good people” in the Republican Party will come around to vote in favor.

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who is one of the two holdouts on the Democratic side to preserve the filibuster, says “there is no excuse for any Republican to vote against” the bill but maintains that “ten good people” in the Republican Party will come around to vote in favor.

I didn’t know recreational hallucinogenic drugs were legal in West Virginia.

[docosc]

They ain’t legal, but quite easily accessible.

[Faffenreffer]

I expect it’’s anoxia. There ain’t much fresh air where he has his head.

[milliefink]

May 28, 2021 (Friday)

This afternoon, Republicans in the Senate killed the bill to establish a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. The vote was 54 to 35, and yet the thirty-five “no” votes won because of the current shape of the Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break, even if the minority doesn’t show up to vote.

For their part, having killed the bipartisan, independent commission, Republicans are now complaining that the Democrats might set up a committee on their own. Maine Senator Susan Collins told Politico, “The most likely outcome, sadly, is probably the Democratic leaders will appoint a select committee. We’ll have a partisan investigation. It won’t have credibility with people like me, but the press will cover it because that’s what’s going on.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could indeed set up such a House committee, although she has been clear that she preferred the bipartisan approach. Such a select committee could issue subpoenas and hold hearings to investigate the people involved in the attack. Republicans, who likely fear some of their own would be implicated, are already claiming such a committee would be partisan. President Biden could also set up a commission, which he could then staff in a bipartisan fashion, but without congressional support it could not issue subpoenas.

On Thursday, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) continued to hope Republicans would vote for the commission, saying, “…the Democrats have basically given everything they’ve asked for, any impediment that would have been there, and there’s no reason not to now unless you just don’t want to hear the truth.” Today, after the vote, he said, “I never thought I’d see it up close and personal that politics could trump our country. I’m going to fight to save this country.”

Indeed, by refusing to investigate what is arguably the most dangerous attack on our democracy in our history, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has brought out into the open just how radical the Republican Party has become.

As if in illustration of the party’s increasingly antidemocratic radicalism, in Georgia last night, Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) continued to stoke the same Big Lie that drove the insurrectionists, claiming (falsely) that former president Trump won the 2020 election. The two representatives are on a tour of rallies, possibly to distract from the scandals in which they’re embroiled. Last night, Gaetz, who is under federal investigation for sex trafficking, told attendees that the nation’s founders wrote the Second Amendment to enable citizens to rise up against the government. “It’s not about hunting, it’s not about recreation, it’s not about sports,” he said. “The Second Amendment is about maintaining, within the citizenry, the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary.”

As the audience cheered, Gaetz continued: “I hope it never does, but it sure is important to recognize the founding principles of this nation and to make sure that they are fully understood.”
For his part, President Biden appears to be trying to undercut the increasingly radical Republicans by trying to improve conditions across the country, especially for those hurting economically as the nation’s factories automate and as their jobs move overseas.

When he took office, his first order of business was to get the coronavirus under control, demonstrating that the federal government could, indeed, do good for the people. That has been a roaring success, with about 62% of American adults currently having received at least one vaccine. Biden is now aiming to have 70% of American adults vaccinated by July 4. New cases are plunging as the vaccines take effect, and the country is reopening rapidly.

Biden also turned quickly to repairing the economy, with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which expanded unemployment benefits and the child tax credit. That credit will start to show up in people’s bank accounts in mid-July and is expected to cut child poverty in half.

So far, Biden’s approach to turning the mood of the country seems to be working: while his predecessor is polling at 39% approval and 57% disapproval, Biden is currently enjoying a 63% job approval rating.

We’ll see how these two themes play out. Today, Biden released a proposed $6.01 trillion budget, tying together three plans he’s already proposed—the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, and $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending—and adding more to invest in education, health, science, and infrastructure. The proposal increases defense spending by 1.7% and nondefense spending by 16%. Overall, it increases federal spending to levels like those of WWII. By 2031, it would peg spending at $8.2 trillion. Deficits would run higher than $1.3 trillion for the next ten years but then would begin to decrease.

The president proposes to pay for the additional spending by increasing revenue by $4.17 trillion through taxes on individuals who have an annual income of more than $1 million and by revising the top capital gains rate to 39.6%, plus a 3.8% Medicare surtax, bringing the rate to 43.4%. (The current rate is 20% plus the Medicare surtax, making it 23.8%). The White House figures the capital gains tax reform should raise about $322 billion over the next decade.

The budget shows Biden aiming to rebuild the middle class and make America globally competitive again. Acting director of Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young said that the administration had earlier called for such investment because, “The country had been weakened by decades of underinvestment in these areas.” The 2022 budget would, she said, “grow the economy, create jobs, and do so responsibly by requiring the wealthiest Americans and big corporations to pay their fair share.”

Doubling down on the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which funneled money upward even as corporate tax revenues fell 31%, Republicans have vowed to oppose all tax increases and want no part of Biden’s proposed spending.

Today, McConnell responded to the budget proposal with words that were somewhat unfortunate coming, as they did, on the same day the Republicans refused to create a bipartisan commission to investigate an attack on our government. “If Washington Democrats can move beyond the socialist daydreams and the go-it-alone partisanship,” he said, “we could get a lot of important work done for our country.”

[milliefink]

May 29, 2021 (Saturday)

A red, white, and blue morning from Buddy this week. He says he didn’t tweak it at all-- this is exactly how it came from his iPhone when he was headed out to haul.

I’m going to go all American Studies on you and say that the colors of this image jumped out at me immediately as a modern reflection of Frederic Church’s 1861 painting “Our Banner in the Sky,” which Church painted to show how, as the Civil War broke out, the heavens indicated their support for the United States by reflecting the nation’s colors in the setting sun.

I like that Buddy’s image is of the sunrise.

Am still making up for lost sleep from the semester. Will see you tomorrow.

[photo by Buddy Poland]

[milliefink]

Our Banner in the Sky
Frederic Edwin Church
1861

[milliefink]

May 31, 2021 (Monday)

President Joe Biden spoke at Arlington National Cemetery today to remember those who gave the “last full measure of devotion” to the United States, dying in our service. His speech was a full-throated defense of the cause for which those soldiers gave their lives: democracy.

“Democracy is more than a form of government,” Biden said. “It’s a way of being; it’s a way of seeing the world. Democracy means the rule of the people—the rule of the people. Not the rule of monarchs, not the rule of the moneyed, not the rule of the mighty—literally, the rule of the people.”

Democracy, he said, is in peril as authoritarians around the world try to destroy it. But while our democracy is imperfect, Americans “of all backgrounds, races, creeds, gender identities, sexual orientations, have long spilled their blood to defend our democracy… because they understand the truth that lives in every American heart: that liberation, opportunity, justice are far more likely to come to pass in a democracy than an autocracy.”

Biden called today’s Americans to repay their sacrifice by making America live up to the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence. “We owe them the work of our hands and our hearts, to make real the promise of a nation founded on the proposition that all of us—all of us—all of us are created equal and deserve to be treated that way throughout our lives.”

Biden’s impassioned defense of democracy is not a rhetorical device.

Just last week, the refusal of Republican leaders to back the creation of a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection illustrated that the party is now wedded to former president Trump and his ongoing determination to overturn the 2020 election. Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who headed the 9/11 Commission, told David Smith of The Guardian that the failure to create a 9/11-type commission for the events of January 6 was “a mistake and it’s a country’s loss and a democracy’s loss.” “[T]here was no real, public reason for turning it down,” he said. “I guess some people were scared of what they’d find out.”

This weekend, a QAnon conference in Dallas, Texas, featured Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn and Trump’s former lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood as keynote speakers. Republican Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas and Texas Republican Party chair Allen West were also featured. They continue to insist, against all evidence, that Trump won the 2020 election.

Powell suggested that Trump could “simply be reinstated” as president, although she said she could not be sure Trump would get credit for time lost when Biden was in the White House.

After he left office, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak—Trump pardoned him—and has fallen more and more deeply into QAnon conspiracy theories. For months, QAnon supporters have been praising the February military coup in Myanmar that overturned a democratically elected government and calling for such a coup here. During Flynn’s speech, an audience member asked why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here. The crowd cheered and Flynn replied: “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.” When the video clip of the exchange went viral, Flynn’s verified Parler account called the idea he had called for a coup “a boldface fabrication based on twisted reporting.”

The Big Lie rhetoric is behind the voter suppression bills in Republican-dominated states, where legislators insist they must combat the alleged “voter fraud” that they blame for Biden’s victory. In Texas in the middle of Sunday night, House Republicans rushed to pass a sweeping election reform bill that would make it harder to vote and easier for judges to overturn an election, although Texas had just one potential case of voter fraud in 2020, out of 11 million ballots cast.

Texas Democrats thwarted the passage of the bill by leaving the chamber until there were too few people left to make up a quorum, which is the number of people required to be there in order to hold a vote. Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, vowed to veto funding for the legislature in retaliation. “No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” he tweeted. He demanded the legislature take the “must-pass” measure up again in a special session.

The approximately 60 Texas Democratic lawmakers were forced to walk away from bills they had hoped to pass, but they felt they had to send a message. State Representative Trey Martinez Fischer said, “Breaking quorum is about the equivalent of crawling on our knees begging the president and the United States Congress to give us the For the People Act and give us the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.”

The For the People Act would, among other things, make it easier to vote, stop partisan gerrymandering, and limit the use of money in elections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is more limited: it would restore the parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013 in the Shelby County v. Holder decision, thereby returning protections to people of color voting in state with a history of racial discrimination.

In a letter to Senate Democrats on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) thanked them for a productive May session that included confirming Biden’s nominations; advancing the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) to invest in science, technology, and manufacturing; rolling back Trump-era rules that hurt the environment, consumers, and workers; and passing the Hate Crimes Act that will help protect Asian Americans from attacks.

Senate Democrats “are doing everything we can to move legislation in a bipartisan way when and where the opportunity exists,” he said. “But we will not wait for months and months to pass meaningful legislation that delivers real results for the American people.” Schumer committed to bringing to vote in the last week of the June work period the For the People Act, “legislation that is essential to defending our democracy, reducing the influence of dark money and powerful special interests, and stopping the wave of Republican voter suppression happening in the states across the country in service of President Trump’s Big Lie.”

At Arlington National Cemetery, President Biden warned us that we are fighting for “the soul of America itself.” “Folks, you all know it,” he said. “Democracy thrives when the infrastructure of democracy is strong; when people have the right to vote freely and fairly and conveniently; when a free and independent press pursues the truth, founded on facts, not propaganda; when the rule of law applies equally and fairly to every citizen, regardless of where they come from or what they look like.”

“[T]he right to vote, the right to rise in a world as far as your talent can take you, unlimited by unfair barriers of privilege and power—such are the principles of democracy.”

[LutherBlisset]

Thanks, @milliefink, for your continuous updates. I can’t keep track since a couple of weeks, so I just read that Richardson and Freeman now have a web/podcast.

This might help me. Audio is much easier for me to integrate into my life ATM (also, I tend to speed up playback, which helps to catch up with some things faster - with the side effect that listening to normal speed makes me wonder how slow some people are talking… )