People are already threatening their neighbors:
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Thanks.
Some points of thought: blood oxygen levels below 80 are common in severe cases. I am under the impression that this is partly due to lung damage in later stages of the infection. Monoclonal antibodies, however, are to the best of my knowledge only effective in early stages of the infection. Combining dexamethasone with other treatments seems logical, since both monoclonal antibodies and Remsdesivir are treatments with the aim of slowing damage due to the virus, while dexamethasone is aiming at slowing the inflammatory responses (which cause much of the lung damage, see above). Also, solely extrapolated from my personal experience with dexamethasone, an energy boost due to dexamethasone treatment is not something I would expect.
I think Trump was more severely ill than the WH wanted the world to believe. However, I am a bit cautious here: both the WaPo and HCR’s take on it leave me slightly doubtful of the narrative this ex-TV personality being close to death.
Well, IANAP. Maybe some later reports will clearly show he nearly died, maybe not.
Either way, I’m very, very sad the infection of said ex-F-grade celebrity didn’t change the course of the pandemic by making it the top priority of the WH to fight it.
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hmmm… 81,268,924 people if memory serves, and i count myself as one. we’re all in on the conspiracy. voting in a relatively free and fair election.
it’s clear he did die and was replaced by an android or body double. ( proof: isn’t that what qanon said about clinton, and aren’t they always projecting? )
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June 25, 2021 (Friday)
Lots of legal news today.
In Minnesota, Judge Peter Cahill sentenced former police officer Derek Chauvin to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. Last April, a jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Floyd’s death sparked protests across the country last summer.
Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, noted that Chavin was going to get at least ten years. Prosecutors asked for 30. The Judge split the difference and added in time for the aggravating factors. Legal analyst and law school professor Joyce Alene White Vance noted that keeping the sentencing in the same realm as other sentences for felony murder make it less likely to be overturned on appeal.
This morning, Georgia Superior Court Judge Brian Amero dismissed seven of the nine claims in a lawsuit alleging there were 147,000 fraudulent ballots cast in Fulton County in the 2020 election. He did not dismiss two of them, which were argued under a different claim. The Fulton County elections board says it intends to file to get those claims dismissed as well. There have already been three audits of the ballots, including a hand recount. Those audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.
Georgia is in the news for another legal case today, as well. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice is suing the state of Georgia over its sweeping new election bill that restricts access to the vote. In a press conference, Garland said that the new law was not discriminatory against Black voters by accident; it was intended to be discriminatory.
“Our complaint alleges that recent changes to Georgia’s election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” he said.
In a statement, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said: ““The Biden Administration continues to do the bidding of Stacey Abrams and spreads more lies about Georgia’s election law…. I look forward to meeting them, and beating them, in court.” Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whose victory over Stacey Abrams in the 2018 election has been widely associated with voter suppression, accused the Biden administration of “weaponizing the Department of Justice to serve their own partisan goals.” He said at a news conference: “the DOJ lawsuit announced today is legally and constitutionally dead wrong. Their false and baseless allegations are, quite honestly, disgusting."
The DOJ also set up a task force to deal with the rise in threats against election workers since the 2020 election. Threats and intimidation have led election officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, to quit or retire early. Pennsylvania, alone, has lost about a third of its county election officials.
States passing voter restriction laws have also put in place punishments for county officials who expand voter access. A law in Florida imposes a $25,000 fine for leaving a ballot drop box accessible outside of established hours; another in Iowa imposes a $10,000 fine for a “technical infraction,” such as opening a few minutes late. Opponents think these laws could be enforced on a partisan basis. “It’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of variables and people make mistakes, and now I’m liable for all those mistakes,” Iowa’s Linn County auditor Joel Miller told the Associated Press. “The process could be likewise corrupted by the secretary of state arbitrarily administering the law in a very uneven manner, depending on whether you’re a Democratic county or a Republican county.”
The memo announcing the new task force quoted Attorney Merrick Garland’s statement on June 11 when he announced steps the DOJ would take over the next 30 days to protect the right to vote: “There are many things that are open to debate in America. But the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.”
It went on to say: “A threat to any election official, worker, or volunteer is, at bottom, a threat to democracy. We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders to protect the rights of American voters, to punish those who engage in this criminal behavior, and to send the unmistakable message that such conduct will not be tolerated.”
This is fitting, of course, because Congress established the Department of Justice in 1870, under President U.S. Grant’s administration, to keep members of the Ku Klux Klan from continuing to terrorize Black and white Republican voters in the South after the Civil War. Garland has often referred to that history and declared his intention to honor it.
Laws from that era are in the news in another way today, too. The bus driver and staffers who were on the Biden-Harris campaign bus that a caravan of about 100 trucks full of Trump supporters tried to drive off the highway last October are suing several people from the caravan under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. That law, passed at the height of KKK terrorism in the Reconstruction South, made election intimidation a crime. The group is also suing local law enforcement for refusing to come to their aid despite their frantic phone calls to 911.
The Biden-Harris campaign cancelled its events for the day out of safety concerns. Participants in the “train” announced their intentions on social media, filmed their actions, and then bragged about them after the fact, prompting Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump himself to cheer them on.
Finally, news broke today that yesterday, prosecutors for the Manhattan district attorney told lawyers for the Trump Organization that they could bring criminal charges against the company as soon as next week over tax issues. The former president has dismissed the investigation as “a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”
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June 27, 2021 (Sunday)
The big news today was a series of interviews that former attorney general William Barr did with Jonathan D. Karl of The Atlantic, in which Barr emphasized that former president Trump’s claims that he had won the 2020 election were “bullshit.”
What is interesting about this is not the idea that Barr stood against Trump’s claims of a win. In fact, shortly after the election, Barr fed the Big Lie. A week after the 2020 election, he overturned Justice Department policy to investigate “substantial allegations” of vote irregularities that “could potentially impact the outcome” of the election. Now he is saying that he took this unusual action because he knew Trump would ask him about allegations of fraud and wanted to be able to say he had looked into them. But his stance fed the idea that Trump had been cheated of victory.
That Barr is trying to spin the past now is a good indicator of current politics. While we are still in a dangerous moment, the former president is losing ground.
Trump’s Big Lie has a number of elements that echo the argument behind the organization of the Confederacy in 1861. Like the Confederates, the Big Lie inspired followers by calling for them not to destroy America, but to defend it. The insurrectionists of January 6, and those who continue to insist the election was stolen, do not think of themselves as domestic terrorists, but as patriots in the mold of Samuel Adams.
“Today is 1776,” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) tweeted on January 6.
The Confederates, too, believed they were defending America. In February 1861, even before Republican President Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, lawmakers for the Confederate States of America wrote their own constitution. It was remarkably similar to the United States Constitution—copied from it verbatim, in fact—except for three key changes that they believed made the original constitution better: they defended state’s rights, denied that the government could promote internal improvements, and prohibited any law that denied or impaired “the right of property in negro slaves.”
Confederate leaders convinced ordinary white men in the southern states that defending the expansion of human enslavement would be defending the nation against the “radicals” who valued the principles of equality outlined in the Declaration of independence.
On the basis of that powerful patriotism, they took their states out of the Union shortly after Lincoln was elected president, hurrying to secede while tempers were hot.
But, once they declared an insurrection, they found it hard to keep up enthusiasm for it. Confederate leaders approved the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 in part because interest in creating a new nation was fading. The new nation that had seemed exciting and inspiring in the holiday gatherings after the election seemed a little silly in the spring, when attention turned to planting. Sparking a crisis made sure that southern whites did not abandon the Confederacy. And, once the war had begun, white southerners were committed. Wars are far easier to start than to stop.
Trump’s insurrection seems to be facing the same waning enthusiasm that Confederate leaders faced. Saturday night, at his first large rally since January 6, Trump spoke at Wellington, Ohio, about 35 miles west of Cleveland. While attendees responded to his complaints about the election, many left early.
Today Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “there’s a growing recognition that this is a bit like [professional wrestling]. That it’s entertaining, but it’s not real. And I know people want to say, yeah, they believe in the ‘Big Lie’ in some cases, but I think people recognize that it’s a lot of show and bombast. But it’s going nowhere. The election is over. It was fair….let’s move on."
Rather than inspiring continued resistance, Trump increasingly looks like President Richard M. Nixon, whose support eroded as more and more sordid information about his White House came to light. Exposés of the Trump White House recently have shown his cavalier approach to the pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 Americans, and his willingness to employ force against peaceful protesters in summer 2020.
Last week, news broke that the Manhattan district attorney is considering criminal charges against the Trump Organization—news that will likely hurt the organization’s ability to borrow money—and prosecutors have given the Trump Organization’s lawyers until Monday afternoon to finish their arguments about why the organization should not be charged. Further, we know a special grand jury is set to meet three times a week until November, suggesting that more information may be forthcoming.
And the ground seems to be giving way under the Big Lie, as well. Last week, the Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee threw out claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and reiterated that President Joe Biden won fairly. A Georgia judge threw out most of the lawsuit calling for another inspection of ballots from Fulton County. And a New York court suspended Trump’s lawyer Rudy Guiliani from practicing law after it concluded that Giuliani made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.”
As the idea that the January 6 insurrectionists were not terrorists but patriots has become more and more far-fetched, the radical right has become more and more outrageous. Last week, for example, a contributor to the right-wing conspiracy network OAN repeated the lie that “voter fraud” undermined the 2020 election, and then suggested that those “involved in these efforts to undermine the election” deserve “execution.”
Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that the House will be organizing a select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection, and trials for the January 6 insurrectionists will be starting soon. Those trials will likely highlight the belief of the rioters that they were following the lead of then-president Trump to protect the country.
But, rather than looking like heroic patriots, they increasingly look like dupes. Barr’s effort to rewrite his actions is a good indication of which way he thinks the wind is blowing. When he left office in December, he wrote a glowing letter to his former boss promising to update him “on the Department’s review of voter fraud allegations in the 2020 election and how these allegations will continue to be pursued,” and promoting the rhetoric of those pushing the Big Lie: “At a time when the country is so deeply divided, it is incumbent on all levels of government, and all agencies acting within their purview, to do all we can to assure the integrity of elections and promote public confidence in their outcome.”
Today’s article told a different story: “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
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i think the only word we’ve got is: revolution.
when you replace “witch hunt”, it works out nicely.
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June 28, 2021 (Monday)
This evening, President Joe Biden published an op-ed in Yahoo News about the infrastructure bill now moving forward on its way to Congress. He called the measure “a once-in-a-generation investment to modernize our infrastructure” and claimed it would “create millions of good-paying jobs and position America to compete with the world and win the 21st century.”
The measure will provide money to repair roads and bridges, replace the lead pipes that still provide water to as many as 10 million households and 400,000 schools and daycares, modernize our electric grid, replace gas-powered buses with electric ones, and cap wells leaking methane that have been abandoned by their owners in the private sector to be cleaned up by the government. It will invest in railroads, airports, and other public transportation; protect coastlines and forests from extreme weather events; and deliver high-speed internet to rural communities.
“This deal is the largest long-term investment in our infrastructure in nearly a century,” Biden wrote. “It is a signal to ourselves, and to the world, that American democracy can work and deliver for the people.”
Biden is making a big pitch for this infrastructure project in part because we need it, of course, and because it is popular, but also because it signals a return to the sort of government both Democrats and Republicans embraced between 1945 and 1980. In that period after World War II, most Americans believed that the government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, investing in infrastructure, and promoting civil rights. This shared understanding was known as the “liberal consensus.”
With the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, the Republican Party rejected that vision of the government, arguing that, as Reagan said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But while Reagan limited that statement with the words “in this present crisis,” Republican leaders since the 1980s have worked to destroy the liberal consensus and take us back to the world of the 1920s, a world in which business leaders also ran the government.
For the very reason that Biden is determined to put through this massive investment in infrastructure, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would like to kill it. Until recently, he has presided over the Senate with the declared plan to kill Democratic bills. He opposes the liberal consensus, wanting to get rid of taxes and stop the government from intervening in the economy. But today’s Republican lawmakers are in an awkward place: by large margins, Americans like the idea of investing in infrastructure.
So the Republicans have engaged in a careful dance over this new measure. Biden wants to demonstrate to the country both that democracy can deliver for its people and that the two parties in Congress do not have to be adversarial. He wanted bipartisan support for this infrastructure plan.
A group of Democrats and Republicans negotiated the measure that is now being prepared to move forward. Last week, five Republican negotiators backed the outline for the measure. They, of course, would like to be able to tell their constituents that they voted for what is a very popular measure, rather than try to claim credit for it after voting no, as they did with the American Rescue Plan.
Negotiators were always clear that the Democrats would plan to pass a much larger bill under what is known as a “budget reconciliation” bill in addition to the infrastructure plan. Financial measures under reconciliation cannot be killed by filibuster in the Senate, meaning that if the Democrats can stand together, they can pass whatever they wish financially under reconciliation. Democrats planned to put into a second bill the infrastructure measures Republicans disliked: funding to combat climate change, for example, and to promote clean energy, and to invest in human infrastructure: childcare and paid leave, free pre-kindergarten and community college, and tax cuts for working families with children.
Crucially, that bigger measure, known as the American Families Plan, will also start to dismantle the 2017 Republican tax cuts, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden wants to return the corporate tax rate to 28%, still lower than it was before 2017, but higher than it is now.
To keep more progressive Democrats on board with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, Democrats need to move it forward in tandem with the larger, more comprehensive American Families Plan. This has been clear from the start. After announcing the bipartisan deal, Biden reiterated that he would not sign one without the other.
And yet, although he himself acknowledged the Democratic tandem plan on June 15, McConnell pretended outrage over the linkage of the two bills. McConnell and some of his colleagues complained to reporters that Biden was threatening to veto the bipartisan bill unless Congress passed the American Families Plan too.
It appears McConnell had hoped that the bipartisan plan would peel centrist Democrats off from the larger American Families Plan, thus stopping the Democrats’ resurrection of the larger idea of the liberal consensus and keeping corporate taxes low. Killing that larger plan might well keep progressive Democrats from voting for the bipartisan bill, too, thus destroying both of Biden’s key measures. If he can drive a wedge through the Democrats, he can make sure that none of their legislation passes.
Over the weekend, Biden issued a statement saying that he was not threatening to veto a bill he had just worked for weeks to put together, but was supporting the bipartisan bill while also intending to pass the American Families Plan.
McConnell then issued a statement essentially claiming victory and demanding control over the Democrats’ handling of the measures, saying “The President has appropriately delinked a potential bipartisan infrastructure bill from the massive, unrelated tax-and-spend plans that Democrats want to pursue on a partisan basis.” He went on to demand that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) agree to send the smaller, bipartisan bill forward without linking it to “trillions of dollars for unrelated tax hikes, wasteful spending, and Green New Deal socialism.”
McConnell is trying to turn the tide against these measures by calling the process unfair, which might give Republicans an excuse to vote no even on a bill as popular as the bipartisan bill is. Complaining about process is, of course, how he prevented the Senate from convicting former president Trump of inciting the January 6 insurrection, and how he stopped the establishment of a bipartisan, independent committee to investigate that insurrection.
But McConnell no longer controls Congress. House Speaker Pelosi says she will not schedule the bipartisan bill until the American Families Plan passes.
Pelosi also announced today that the House is preparing legislation to establish a select committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. She had to do so, she noted, because “Senate Republicans did Mitch McConnell a ‘personal favor’ rather than their patriotic duty and voted against the bipartisan commission negotiated by Democrats and Republicans. But Democrats are determined to find the truth.”
The draft of the bill provides for the committee to have 13 members. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), himself likely to be called as a witness before the committee, will be able to “consult” with the Speaker on five of the members, but the final makeup of the committee will be up to the Speaker. This language echoes that of the select committee that investigated the Benghazi attack, and should prevent McCarthy from sabotaging the committee with far-right lawmakers eager to disrupt the proceedings rather than learn what happened. Instead, we can expect to see on the committee Republicans who voted to establish the independent, bipartisan commission that McConnell and Republican senators killed.
Biden’s op-ed made it clear that he intends to rebuild the country: “I have always believed that there is nothing our nation can’t do when we decide to do it together,” he wrote. “Last week, we began to write a new chapter in that story.”
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June 29, 2021 (Tuesday)
Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis became the latest Republican governor to sign a bill making it harder for citizens to shift away from the fossil fuels that are changing the climate. The move came after Miami, which is in danger as sea levels rise, proposed cutting carbon emissions by banning natural gas infrastructure in new buildings. The bill was written by lawyers for utility companies, based on a pattern written by the American Gas Association. Lobbyists for the Florida Petroleum Association, the Florida Natural Gas Association and the Florida Retail Federation, the Florida Home Builders Association, and the National Utility Contractors Association of Florida supported the bill.
Nine other Republican states have already passed similar legislation.
Republican-led states are defending the use of fossil fuels in other ways. News that President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, was urging major U.S. banks to invest responsibly with an eye to the climate crisis, led the state treasurers of West Virginia, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and South Dakota to write to him expressing their “deep concern” that he, along with other members of the Biden administration, was pressuring banks “to refuse to lend to or invest in coal, oil, and natural gas companies, as a part of a misguided strategy to eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country.” They accused the Biden administration of “picking economic winners and losers” according to “Biden’s own radical political preferences,” and thus depriving “the people” of agency.
Coal, oil, and natural gas are crucial to their states’ economies, they said, providing “jobs, health insurance, critical tax revenue, and quality of life.” They warned that they would withhold public funds from any banks that refused to lend to fossil fuel industries.
And yet, historically, the government has picked fossil fuels as a winner that outranks any other energy source. While Republicans tend to claim any spending for alternative energies is wasteful, a recent report by the Stockholm Environment Institute, a nonprofit think tank, says that U.S. subsidies to new oil and gas projects inflate their value by up to $20 billion per year. This would seem to fly in the face of Republican complaints about “socialism” in which the government picks winners and losers.
A recent Morning Consult poll shows that 50% of voters say climate change is a critical threat to America. Another 26% think it is important, but not critical. Among Democrats, 75% think climate change is crucial, while another 17% say it is important. Among Republicans, 21% say that climate change is crucial, while another 37% say it is important, but not crucial.
With this support for addressing climate change, why do Republicans appear to be dead set against dealing with it in a meaningful way and instead are propping up the fossil fuels that feed that change?
At the nomination hearing for now–Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who has promised to protect our lands, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told Haaland that his state collects more than a billion dollars a year in royalties and taxes from the oil, gas, and coal produced on federal lands in the state, and warned that the Biden administration is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.”
Oil produces the most revenue for Texas, which earned $16.3 billion from oil in 2019, an amount that made up 7% of the state’s revenue. Oil revenues accounted for 70% of state revenues ($1.1 billion) in Alaska in 2019, 52% of state revenues ($2.2 billion) in Wyoming in 2017, and 45% of the revenues ($1.6 billion) in North Dakota in 2017.
But production declines in the past year due to the coronavirus pandemic have hurt these fossil fuel states. Wyoming expects to have 29% less money than it expected in 2021–2022. Alaska expects an estimated 18% budget deficit in fiscal 2021. Without money coming in from fossil fuels, people will have to make up the difference by paying taxes, an unpopular outcome, especially in Republican-dominated states, or by losing even more services.
Reducing dependence on fossil fuels will also cost current jobs, and one of the hallmarks of an economy developed around an extractive industry is that it tends to have little flexibility. The rural American West was developed around extractive economies, with a few wealthy men employing lots of workers, and its limited economy means that workers cannot transition easily into other fields.
Fossil fuel advocates also contribute mightily to Republican campaigns, adding financial interest to party members’ general dislike of regulation. In Florida, utility companies employ an average of one lobbyist for every two legislators. “It’s no secret we play an active role in public policy,” a spokesman for a Florida utility told Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson in 2016.
This week, in the Pacific Northwest, temperatures in Portland, Oregon, reached 115°F; Seattle hit 108°. Canada hit its highest temperature on record: 116°F in British Columbia. Roads are buckling and power cables melting. In the New York Times today, climate scientist Michael Mann and climate communicator Susan Joy Hassol warned that the conditions of our earth will only get worse unless we do something. But, they wrote, “A rapid transition to clean energy can stabilize the climate, improve our health, provide good-paying jobs, grow the economy and ensure our children’s future.”
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That’s better than a blowtorch - which is the outcome if we keep exacerbating climate change in order to make a few individuals rich in the fossil fuel industry.
The GOP is a death cult.
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June 30, 2021 (Wednesday)
Yesterday, by a vote of 285 to 120, the House of Representatives voted to remove the statues of Confederates from the U.S. Capitol. While 67 Republicans voted in favor of the measure, 120 did not. Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), who told the insurrectionists on January 6 before they stormed the Capitol ““Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” issued a statement titled: “CONGRESSMAN MO BROOKS DEFENDS STATES’ RIGHTS, RIPS INTOLERANT SOCIALISTS WHO SEEK TO TAKE DOWN CAPITOL STATUES THEY DON’T LIKE.”
“I support federalism and a state’s right to decide for itself who it should honor. As such, I will proudly vote ‘No’ on H.R. 3005. Alabama, not New Yorkers, Californians, or anyone else, should decide who we wish to honor in Alabama’s contribution to the National Statuary Collection,” the statement read. “Socialist Democrat states should butt out!”
When voters elected President Joe Biden and gave the Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Republicans turned to the states they control to enforce their vision of the country.
They began by challenging the elections in those states, challenges that continue in Arizona with an “audit” of the ballots cast in Maricopa County in the 2020 election performed by a company called Cyber Ninjas, whose CEO has recently appeared in a video advancing conspiracies about the election. They have passed laws limiting reproductive rights and the rights of transgender children, and lately they have attacked what they claim is Critical Race Theory being taught in public schools in an attempt to enforce their own version of history.
Now, as Republican governors appear to have settled on using migrants at the border as an issue to undermine President Biden, they have begun to use state power over the National Guard to enforce that attempt.
On June 10, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Arizona governor Doug Ducey invoked the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an agreement that lets states send aid to each other after a governor has declared a disaster or an emergency. Abbott has declared a disaster and Ducey an emergency over the influx of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that the Biden administration is “unwilling or unable” to secure the border.
In fact, since last October, more than a million migrants trying to cross the border have been arrested. Right now, the number of migrants approaching the border is at a two-decade high, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountering 180,000 migrants last month. But a high percentage of those apprehended have tried to come multiple times—38% of those apprehended in May—and, operating under a coronavirus protocol established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Border Protection in May expelled more than 112,000 of those 180,000 migrants. The number of unaccompanied children coming across the border dropped from almost 14,000 in April to about 10,700 in May. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas insists that, having inherited a system gutted by the previous administration, Biden’s team has rebuilt the necessary structures to manage migrants at the border.
Nonetheless, Abbott and Ducey have called for governors of other states to send “additional law enforcement personnel and equipment” to “arrest migrants who illegally cross the border into our territory.” The letter concludes: “Texas and Arizona have stepped up to secure the border in the federal government’s absence, and now the Emergency Management Assistance Compact gives your State a chance to stand strong with us.”
Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis have all pledged to send law enforcement to Texas and Arizona. Yesterday, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem one-upped them by announcing that she is sending 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and that billionaires Willis and Reba Johnson from Franklin, Tennessee, are paying for the troops. Johnson told Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo that he was making the donation because “this President would rather help other countries than help America.”
At least some of the Republican focus on taking command of states appears to be backfiring. Voters in Arizona, for example, appear to be turning against those who supported the “audit.” They oppose it by 49-46 percent, and Independents, on whose votes carrying the state depends, oppose the audit by 18 points.
“As bloody red meat for the MAGA Republican base, the audit is manna from heaven, but the problem is that Arizona is not a red state any more. It’s a swing state,” Fernand Amandi, who conducted the survey for Bendixen & Amandi International, told Politico’s Marc Caputo.
But, of course, the other piece of Republican focus on the states has been the dramatic reworking of state election laws to help the Republicans retain control of their state governments no matter what the voters choose.
Still, the federal government is not giving the Trump Republicans a free pass. This afternoon, by a vote of 222 to 190, the House of Representatives voted to create a select committee to investigate the events of January 6. Republicans Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois were the only two Republicans who voted in favor.
“Our bipartisan, good-faith proposal was met with a filibuster. Now that Senate Republicans have chosen to block the formation of an independent commission, it falls to the House to stay the course and get the answers they deserve,” said House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS).
The need for an official investigation was illustrated this evening by the release of a 40-minute investigative video by the New York Times. Using video shot by the rioters themselves, the Times’s Visual Investigations team concluded that there was “a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.” It showed how close the rioters came to doing far more damage than they did.
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A bit of pushback on this:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/30/adam-smith-national-guard-deployment-497220
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July 1, 2021 (Thursday)
Today, by a 6 to 3 vote, the Supreme Court handed down Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee saying that the state of Arizona did not violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) with laws that limited ballot delivery to voters, family members, or caregivers, or when it required election officials to throw out ballots that voters had cast in the wrong precincts by accident.
The fact that voting restrictions affect racial or ethnic groups differently does not make them illegal, Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote.”
The court also suggested that concerns about voter fraud—which is so rare as to be virtually nonexistent—are legitimate reasons to restrict voting.
We are reliving the Reconstruction years after the Civil War.
That war had changed the idea of who should have a say in American society. Before the war, the ideal citizen was a white man, usually a property owner. But those were the very people who tried to destroy the country, while during the war, Black Americans and women, people previously excluded from politics, gave their lives and their livelihoods to support the government.
After the war, when white southerners tried to reinstate laws that returned the Black population to a position that looked much like enslavement, Congress in 1867 gave Black men the right to vote for delegates to new state constitutions. Those new constitutions, in turn, gave Black men the right to vote.
In order to stop voters from ratifying the new constitutions, white southerners who had no intention of permitting Black Americans to gain rights organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize voters. While they failed to prevent states from ratifying the new constitutions, the KKK continued to beat, rape, and murder Black voters in the South.
So, in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to defend Black rights in the South. It also passed a series of laws that made it a federal crime to interfere with voting and with the official duties of an elected officer. And it passed, and the states ratified, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, declaring that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Immediately, white Americans determined to stop Black participation in government turned to a new argument. During the Civil War, the Republican Party had not only expanded Black rights, but had also invented the nation’s first national taxation. For the first time, how people voted directly affected other people’s pocketbooks.
In 1871, white southerners began to say that they did not object on racial grounds to Black voting, but rather on the grounds that formerly enslaved men were impoverished and were electing to office men who promised to give them things—roads, for example, and schools and hospitals—to be paid for with tax dollars. Because white men were the only ones with property in the postwar South, such legislation would redistribute wealth from white men to Black people. It was, they charged, “socialism.”
In 1876, white southerners reclaimed control of the last remaining states they had not yet won by insisting they were “redeeming” their states from the corruption created when Black voters elected leaders who would use tax dollars for public programs.
In 1890, a new constitution in Mississippi, which at the time was about 58% Black, restricted voting not on racial grounds but through a poll tax and a “literacy” test applied against Black voters alone. Mississippi led the way for new restrictions across the country. Although Black and Brown Americans continually challenged the new Jim and Juan Crow laws that silenced them, voting registration for people of color fell into single digits.
These laws stayed in place for 75 years. Then, in 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, designed to undo voter suppression laws once and for all. The VRA worked. In Mississippi in 1965, just 6.7% of eligible Black voters were registered to vote. Two years later, that number was 59.8%, although there was still a 32-point gap in registration between Blacks and whites. By 1988, that gap had narrowed to 6.3%, and in 2012, 90.2% of eligible Black residents were registered compared to 82.4% of non-Hispanic whites.
The Voting Rights Act was considered so important that just 15 years ago, in 2006, Congress voted almost unanimously to reauthorize it.
But the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long disliked the VRA, has chipped away at the law, cutting deeply into it in 2013 with the Shelby County v. Holder decision. And now, with three new justices appointed by former president Trump, the court has weakened it further.
To what end are we returning to the 1890s?
The restrictive voting measures passed by Republican-dominated legislatures are designed to keep Republicans in power. Today that means allegiance to former president Trump, whose Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation were indicted by a New York grand jury today, along with Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, on 15 felony counts, including a scheme to defraud, conspiracy, grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, and falsifying business records.
The indictment alleges that the schemes involve federal, as well as state and local, crimes. New York Attorney General Letitia James emphasized that the investigation is not over.
Republican lawmakers are lining up behind the former president so closely that last night, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) threatened to take away the committee assignments of anyone agreeing to work on the select committee to investigate the events of January 6 that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is putting together after Senate Republicans filibustered the creation of a bipartisan independent committee.
(McCarthy’s declaration prompted Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who appears appalled at the direction his party has taken, to respond “Who gives a s–t?” He added: “I do think the threat of removing committees is ironic, because you won’t go after the space lasers and white supremacist people but those who tell the truth.”)
Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) nonetheless said she was “honored” to join the committee, along with seven Democrats. While it is unclear if McCarthy will add more Republicans, it will now get underway. The committee includes House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), both of whom showed extraordinary ability to assess huge amounts of material when they managed Trump’s impeachment trials.
That the Republicans have fought so hard against an investigation of the January 6 insurrection suggests we might well learn things that reflect poorly on certain lawmakers.
So, today’s news puts the American people in the position of watching as a political party, lined up behind a man now in legal jeopardy, who might be involved in an attack on our government, tries to cement its hold on power.
“Today’s decision by the Supreme Court undercuts voting rights in this country,” President Biden said, “and makes it all the more crucial to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore and expand voting protections.”
“Our democracy depends on it.”
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July 2, 2021 (Friday)
Today news broke that Anthony Aguero, who was in the Capitol on January 6 and who is close to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), joined Republican members of the right-wing Republican Study Committee when they traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border Tuesday night.
Aguero interviewed, chatted with, translated for, and gave a ride to one of the lawmakers, there. Those included Representatives Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Thomas Tiffany (R-WI), Chris Jacobs (R-NY), Michael Cloud (R-TX), John Rose (R-TN), and Mary Miller (R-IL). The Republican Study Committee’s deputy communications director, Buckley Carlson, who is Tucker Carlson’s son, said Aguero’s presence with the group was “purely incidental.”
The association of sitting Congress members with someone who was apparently part of an insurrection is particularly audacious at a moment when the House of Representatives is in the process of forming a select committee to investigate that series of events.
Once before, in 1879, a political party behaved in a similarly aggressive way, trying to destroy the government from within. Then, too, Congress members took an extremist position in order to try to steal the upcoming presidential election. They hoped to win that election by getting rid of Black voting.
Still angry after the votes of Black southerners tipped the contested election of 1876 to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, Democrats set out to stop government protection of Black voters before the next presidential election. In 1879, they attached to appropriations bills riders that prohibited the use of the army to guard southern polling places (it is a myth that federal troops abandoned the South in 1877) and eliminating federal supervision of elections. The punishment for holding federal troops at the polls was a fine of up to $5000 and imprisonment at hard labor for 3 months to 5 years, that is, an express ride into the convict labor system that was brutalizing formerly enslaved people.
Republicans refused to accept the terms of the appropriations bill, and Congress adjourned without passing it. Hayes immediately called the new Congress into special session. In this Congress, though, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, for the first time since before the Civil War. And, since the senior members of the party were southerners, former Confederates quickly took over the key leadership positions in Congress.
Once there, they ignored that voters had put them in office in a reaction against Republicans’ economic policies and Hayes’s contested election. Instead, they insisted that the American people wanted them to enact the extreme program they had advocated since the war, overturning the federal policies that defended Black rights and reinstating white supremacy, unchallenged. They took their fight to end Black voting directly to the president.
The House Minority leader was a Union veteran from Ohio, James A. Garfield. He explained to a friend the Democrats’ plan: if Hayes vetoed the bills and the Democrats were unable to pass them over his veto—“that is, if he does not consent or 2/3 of the two Houses do not vote on these measures as the Democratic caucus has framed them,” Garfield wrote—“[t]hey will let the government perish for want of supplies.” “If this is not revolution,” he concluded, “which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.”
Democrats tried to argue that they were fighting for free elections, for liberty from a tyrannical national government. But they also listed the virtues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, whom they compared to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and U.S. Grant, and celebrated the former Confederates who had been elected to make up their new majority. Just like Davis, they claimed, all they asked was to be left alone to run their states as they wished. One ex-Confederate told the New York Times that leaving Congress in 1861 had been “a great blunder.” Southerners were far more likely to win their goals by controlling Congress. Southern Democrats urged their constituents to “present a solid front to the enemy.”
With Garfield stiffening the spines of nervous Republicans, Hayes vetoed the bill with the riders five times, and as popular opinion swung behind him, the Democrats backed down. They had badly misjudged their power. The extended rider fight kept the story of their attack on the government firmly in front of voters, who despised their behavior and principles both. In the next presidential election, voters turned away from the Democratic candidate and to Garfield, now famous for his stand against the riders and for his wholehearted defense of Black voting.
The 1879 overreach of the Democratic extremists marked a sea change in the Democratic Party. Scorched by their 1880 defeat, Democratic leaders turned away from ex-Confederates and toward new urban leaders in the North. Eager to nail together a new constituency, those leaders talked of racial reconciliation and began to lay the groundwork for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was born in 1882, just two years before New York Democrat Grover Cleveland would win the White House on the party’s new platform.
The story of Garfield’s rise to power has been much on my mind today, partly because it is the anniversary of the day in 1881 when assassin Charles Guiteau shot the president, although he would live until September 19, when he finally succumbed to horrific infections caused by his doctor’s insistence on probing the bullet wound without washing his hands.
But I am also thinking of this story as I watch House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) try to figure out how to respond to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to suggest five members for the new select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection. Senate Republicans killed the bipartisan select committee on which Republicans would have had significant power to limit the investigation both in scope, by refusing to agree to certain subpoenas, and in time, because Congress had required that committee to report before the end of the year. Now, Republicans are facing a committee dominated by Democrats who have subpoena power and no time limit, all while Republican extremism is on increasingly public display.
Forcing the creation of this select committee, rather than taking the offer of an independent, bipartisan committee, was a curious decision.
In 1879, when voters spent several months watching extremists of one party try to suppress the vote and take over the country, they rejected that party so thoroughly that it had to reinvent itself.
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July 3, 2021 (Saturday)
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators clinging to the edge of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other. America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to guarantee that Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish would be permanently locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.” “Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and as people of different races, incomes, genders, and abilities began to demand that the nation honor its founding principles, Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against the idea of equality, as a few wealthy men seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality, however limited they were in executing it. Ever since then, Americans from all walks of life have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Words to live by in 2021.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
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July 5, 2021 (Monday)
Last night, in a speech to honor Independence Day, President Joe Biden used his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to defend democracy.
Biden urged people to remember where we were just a year ago, and to “think about how far we’ve come.” “From… silent streets to crowded parade routes lined with people waving American flags; from empty stadiums and arenas to fans back to their seats cheering together again; from families pressing hands against a window to grandparents hugging their grandchildren once again. We’re back traveling again. We’re back seeing one another again. Businesses are opening and hiring again. We’re seeing record job creation and record economic growth—the best in four decades and, I might add, the best in the world.”
The president was referring, in part, to the jobs report that came out on Friday, showing that the nation added a robust 850,000 non-farm jobs in June.
But he was also talking about how the United States of America took on the problem of the pandemic. Coming after two generations of lawmakers who refused to use federal power to help ordinary Americans, Biden used the pandemic to prove to Americans that the federal government could, indeed, work for everyone.
The former president downplayed the pandemic and flip-flopped on basic public health measures like masking and distancing. Unlike most European and Asian countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the Trump Administration sidelined the country’s public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, considered to be the top national public health agency in the world. Trump downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus out of fear of hurting the stock market, and turned over to states the process of dealing with this unprecedented crisis. The U.S. led the world in COVID-19 deaths. More than 603,000 Americans have died so far.
When he took office, Biden had already begun to use the government response to coronavirus as a way to show that democracy could rise to the occasion of protecting its people. The day before his inauguration, President Biden held a memorial for the 400,000 who had, to that date, died of COVID-19. He put Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a renowned infectious disease expert, at the head of the CDC and reinstated the CDC at the head of the public health response to the pandemic. And he made vaccines accessible to all Americans. Fifty-eight percent of American adults have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus; 67% have had at least one shot. The U.S. has one of the highest vaccine rates in the world and is helping to vaccinate those in other countries, as well.
Biden recalled that the United States of America was based not on religion or hereditary monarchy, but on an idea: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights—among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
We have never lived up to that ideal, of course, but we have never abandoned it, either. Those principles, he said, “continue to animate us, and they remind us what, at our best, we as Americans believe: We, Americans—we believe in honesty and decency, in treating everyone with dignity and respect, giving everyone a fair shot, demonizing no one, giving hate no safe harbor, and leaving no one behind.”
But, he said, democracy isn’t top down. “Each day, we’re reminded there’s nothing guaranteed about our democracy, nothing guaranteed about our way of life,” he said. “We have to fight for it, defend it, earn it…. It’s up to all of us to protect the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the right to equal justice under the law; the right to vote and have that vote counted; the right… to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that our children and grandchildren will be safe on this planet for generations to come… the right to rise in the world as far as your God-given [talent] can take you, unlimited by barriers of privilege or power.”
Biden’s speech recalled that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on June 5, 1944, upon the fall of Rome during World War II. It was Italian leader Benito Mussolini who articulated the ideals of fascism after World War I, envisioning a hierarchical world in which economic and political leaders worked together to lead the masses forward by welding them into a nationalistic, militaristic force.
In his 1944 speech, FDR was careful to explain to Americans how they were different from the Italian fascists. He talked about “Nazi overlords” and “fascist puppets.” Then, in contrast to the fascists’ racial hierarchies, FDR made a point of calling Americans’ attention to the fact that the men who defeated the Italian fascists were Americans from every walk of life.
And then he turned to how fascism treated its people. “In Italy, the people have lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that in spite of the tinsel at the top—you have seen the pictures of it—their economic conditions have grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education, a lower public health, all byproducts of the fascist misrule.”
To rebuild Italy, FDR said, the troops had to start from the bottom. “[W]e have had to give them bread to replace that which was stolen out of their mouths,” he said. “We have had to make it possible for the Italians to raise and use their local crops. We have had to help them cleanse their schools of fascist trappings….”
He outlined how Americans had anticipated the need to relieve the people starved by the fascists, and had made plans to ship food grown by the “magnificent ability and energy of the American people,” in ships they had constructed, over thousands of miles of water. Some of us may let our thoughts run to the financial cost of it,” he said, but “we hope that this relief will be an investment for the future, an investment that will pay dividends by eliminating fascism, by ending any Italian desires to start another war of aggression in the future….”
FDR was emphasizing the power of the people, of democracy, to combat fascism not only abroad but also at home, where it had attracted Americans frustrated by the seeming inability of democracy to counter the Depression. They longed for a single strong leader to fix everything. Other Americans, horrified by FDR’s use of the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, wanted to take the nation back to the 1920s and in so doing had begun to flirt with fascism as well.
As he celebrated the triumph over democracy in Italy, he was also urging Americans to value and protect it at home.
Biden, too, is focusing on how efficient his administration has been in combating the coronavirus to combat authoritarianism both abroad and at home. With its support for the Big Lie; congress members like Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who openly associates with white nationalists; and its attack on voting rights, the modern-day Republican Party is moving rapidly toward authoritarianism. But the former president botched the most fundamental task of government: protecting its people from death. In contrast, more than 60% of Americans approve of how Biden has managed the coronavirus pandemic, with 95% of Democrats approving but only 33% of Republicans in favor.
Biden’s approach appears to be helping to solidify support for democracy. A recent PBS Newshour/NPR/Marist poll showed that two thirds of Americans believe democracy is under threat, but 47%— the highest number in 12 years—believe the country is moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, that number, too, reflects a difference by party. While 87 percent of Democrats say the country is improving, 87 percent of Republicans say the opposite.
Biden conjured up our success over the coronavirus to celebrate democracy: “[H]istory tells us that when we stand together, when we unite in common cause, when we see ourselves not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans, then there’s simply no limit to what we can achieve.”
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July 6, 2021 (Tuesday)
Six months ago today, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, intending to stop the counting of the certified ballots that would make Joseph R. Biden president and Kamala Harris vice president. This attack was unprecedented. It broke our nation’s long history of the peaceful transfer of power.
You know the story of that day. Former president Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, insisting that he had lost only because the election had been “stolen” from him, despite Biden’s decisive victory of more than 7 million votes and 74 electoral votes. He urged his supporters to stop Biden’s election from becoming official.
What has surprised me most in the six months since is how quickly the leaders of the Republican Party turned from establishing oligarchy—a process that the country has undergone in the past—to embracing authoritarianism, which it hasn’t.
Since 1986, Republican leaders have pushed policies that concentrate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. In 1986, they began to talk of “voter integrity” measures that would cull Black voters from the rolls; by 1994, after the Democrats passed the Motor Voter Act allowing voter registration at state offices like the Registry of Motor Vehicles, Republicans began to say they were losing elections only because of “voter fraud.” Suppressing the vote became part of the Republican strategy for winning.
But voter suppression has a long history in America. Especially in the 1850s and the 1890s, political parties concerned about losing power cut their opponents out of the vote.
After the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Republican leaders accepted the support of talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who created a narrative in which Democrats were dangerous socialists, out to destroy home and family. With the establishment of the Fox News Channel in 1996, that narrative, shared not by reporters but by personalities behind sets meant to look like newsrooms, skewed reality for FNC viewers.
But promoting a false narrative through media is not new to the United States. Elite enslavers in the 1840s and 1850s similarly shaped what information their neighbors could hear.
In 2000, Republicans put into office George W. Bush, who had lost the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. The election came down to the state of Florida, where more than 100,000 voters had recently been removed from the voter rolls. A recount there stopped after a riot encouraged by Roger Stone, and the Supreme Court then decided in favor of Bush.
In 2016, Trump, too, lost the popular vote, but the distribution of those votes enabled him to win in the Electoral College.
But installing a president who has lost the popular vote is not new, either. In 1877 and 1889, presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison both took office after losing the popular vote, Hayes by 250,000 votes, Harrison by more than 100,000.
In 2010, Republican leaders used Operation REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project) to win control of swing state legislatures and deliver the states to the Republicans by gerrymandering them. It worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Republicans received 1.4 million fewer votes for the House than Democrats did, but won a 33 seat majority.
Still, gerrymandering has been around for so long it’s named for early Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, whose name a journalist mixed with “salamander” in 1812.
Taken together, all these old tactics, amplified by modern technology, had enabled the Republican leadership to lay the foundation for an oligarchy. Beginning in 1981, wealth began to move upward significantly, reversing the trend from 1933 to 1980, when wealth compressed. By 2017, lawmakers who had initially opposed Trump appeared to come around when he backed a huge corporate tax cut and put three originalists who endorsed the Republican vision of America on the Supreme Court.
Then Trump lost the 2020 election.
Before January 6, Republican lawmakers seemed to humor the outgoing president as he refused to accept the outcome. Trump and his people launched and lost more than 60 lawsuits over the election. They tried to pressure election officials in both Georgia and Arizona to change the outcome in those states. They refused to start the normal transition process that would enable Biden and Harris to set up their administration. And Republican lawmakers, trying to court Trump’s help in the Georgia Senate special runoff elections of January 5, kept their mouths shut.
And then January 6 happened. At a rally on Washington, D.C.’s Ellipse, Trump lied to his supporters again and again that the election had been stolen “by emboldened radical-left Democrats.” “We will never give up, we will never concede,” he told them. “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” He promised (falsely) that Vice President Mike Pence could send the ballots back to the states for recertification in his favor, “and we become president and you are the happiest people.”
“[W]e’re going to have to fight much harder,” he said, “[b]ecause you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
“So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
In the ensuing crisis, lawmakers had to be rushed out of the chambers as rioters broke in. Five people died, and 140 police officers were injured. It could have been much worse: the insurrectionists erected a gallows for Pence. Nonetheless, even after the insurrection, 147 Republicans voted against certification of the electoral votes.
Still, at first, many Republican lawmakers appeared to condemn the events of January 6. But they quickly came around to defending the Big Lie that Trump won the election. That lie is behind the voter suppression measures enacted by a slew of Republican-dominated states, as well as the new measures in Arizona and Georgia that enable legislatures to have control over election results.
In the House, the Republicans removed Liz Cheney from a leadership position for her criticism of Trump and rejection of the Big Lie, replacing her with a Trump loyalist, tying House Republicans as a group to the former president. Republicans in the Senate came together to kill a bill to create a bipartisan, independent committee to investigate the events of January 6. Lawmakers and pundits are downplaying the insurrection itself, claiming either that it was not a big deal or that Democrats are using it to suppress rightwing activism.
And now, of the 700 Republicans who have filed paperwork to run for Congress next year, at least a third of them have backed the idea that Trump won the 2020 election.
In American history, the attempt to overturn our election procedures for one man, based on a lie, is unprecedented.
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July 7, 2021 (Wednesday)
Last week, the Bullock Texas State History Museum cancelled a book event three and a half hours before it was supposed to start. Written by journalists Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, the book is titled “Forget the Alamo,” and, according to historian H. W. Brands, who reviewed the book for the Washington Post, it both introduces the story of the Alamo to readers unfamiliar with it and explains how the story has been interpreted since the 1836 battle occurred, using the ways in which British musicians Phil Collins and Ozzy Osbourne interacted with the site as a new lens.
Historians long ago put aside the heroic story of the Alamo, which told of freedom-loving Americans fighting off a Mexican tyrant who was trying to crush a fledgling republic. In the past several decades, so many historians have rewritten this history that Brands notes that the new retelling “sometimes appear[s] to be beating a horse that, if not dead, was put to pasture awhile back.”
Historians have explained how Mexican officials, eager to stabilize their northern borderlands after their own agreements with Apache tribes fell apart, permitted Americans to settle in what is now Texas. Americans moved to the area to grow cotton in the boom years of that era. When Mexico banned slavery in Texas in 1830, Americans rebelled. In October 1835, they joined with Mexican opponents of President Antonio López de Santa Anna’s government and went to war. By December, the Texian Army had pushed Mexican troops out of the Mexican territory of Texas, and the Texians hunkered down in the Alamo Mission near what is now San Antonio. In January, reinforcements, including James Bowie and Davy Crockett, arrived. About 200 Texians were there on February 23, 1836, when 1800 of Santa Anna’s troops laid siege to the Alamo. On March 6, Santa Anna’s troops attacked, killing almost all of the defenders (but not Davy Crockett, who surrendered and was executed later).
This history is well established… but Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick—who in March 2020 suggested that elders should be willing to die from Covid-19 in order to get the economy moving again—was one of apparently a number of Republican leaders who demanded that museum officials cancel the event. Governor Greg Abbott, Patrick and other Republican leaders are board members of the State Preservation Board, which oversees the Bullock Museum. “As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it,” Patrick tweeted. “[T]his fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place [at the Bullock Museum].”
As of the end of June, nine states have passed so-called “divisive concepts” laws, and 17 more are considering them. These measures try to control how teachers talk about issues of race, sex, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, saying that such discussions are divisive. Yet, as historians James Grossman and Jeremy Young of the American Historical Association noted yesterday in The Hill, a survey by the American Historical Association and Fairleigh Dickinson University shows that, “regardless of political identity, age, race, gender or education level,” there is broad consensus that these issues provide essential content to understand our history and that they are appropriate for school history classes.
“We should be clear about what’s happening here,” Young and Grossman say. “This is the legislative equivalent of push-polling—creating division where none exists, raising fears about something that isn’t even happening to score political points.”
They point out that the bills are not coming from people in school districts, but instead follow a template produced by an organization led by Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under the Trump administration. The organization’s website has a file on it titled: “Model-School-Board-Language-to-Ban-CRT-SD-HCS-edits-1.”
Here’s why this rewriting of our history matters.
Historians study how societies change. In order to do that, we examine sources created at the time—newspapers, teapots, speeches, tweets, photographs, landscapes, and so on-—and judge what we think happened by comparing these primary sources to things other historians have said, on the basis of evidence they have found. We argue a lot. But if we cannot see an ever-widening story, we cannot give an accurate account of how societies change.
An inaccurate picture of what creates change means that people cannot make good decisions about the future. They are at the mercy of those who are creating the stories. Knowledge is indeed power.
So the destruction of accurate history is about more than schools. It’s about self-determination. It’s about having the freedom to make good decisions about your life.
It’s about the very things that democracy is supposed to stand for.
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Can’t have folks learning what actually, truly happened. It might lead to critical analysis of what is happening now, and that would lead to more liberal ideas!! Facts have a well known liberal bias, and so must be stomped out where ever they raise their ugly heads! And historians, those peddlers of such facts, they are just the enemies of the people, amirite??
(I should not have to append a (/s) to this, but Poe’s Law applies even here. So there it is)
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In case anyone wants to read this…
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