Chris Hedges's Blog, page 185

Trump, Republican Party Sue Over California Tax Return Law

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—The Trump campaign and Republican Party sued California on Tuesday over a new law requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns to run in the state’s primary, legislation that was aimed at prying loose President Donald Trump’s returns.

California’s law is “a naked political attack against the sitting President of the United States,” the state and national Republican parties argued in one of two lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Sacramento.

The law signed last week by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom requires candidates for president and governor to release five years of tax returns to appear on the state’s primary ballot, but the requirement does not extend to the general election. Trump has refused to release his returns, saying they are under audit.

The lawsuits argue the law violates the U.S. Constitution by creating an extra requirement to run for president and deprives citizens the right to vote for their chosen candidates. The Constitution puts just three requirements on presidential candidates: That they are natural born citizens, 35 or older and a U.S. resident for at least 14 years.

California is the first state to pass such a law, though many others under Democratic control have tried since Trump left office.

California holds its 2020 presidential primary on March 3. Without a serious Republican competitor, Trump would likely be able to forego the state’s primary and still win the nomination.

But the parties’ lawsuit argues it will “directly impede” Trump’s ability to secure the nomination. California provides 14% of the delegates needed to win the party’s nomination, the suit says.

Trump counsel Jay Sekulow called the law “flagrantly illegal,” and said voters already spoke in 2016 on whether Trump should release his tax returns.

“The effort to deny California voters the opportunity to cast a ballot for President Trump in 2020 will clearly fail,” Sekulow said in a statement.

It’s the latest legal battle between the Trump administration and California, which has sued the federal government more than 50 times since Trump took office.

Tax returns reveal sources of income, charitable giving, business dealings and other information that Democrats in the state Legislature say is essential for voters. Every president has released his or her tax returns since the early 1970s.

“There’s an easy fix Mr. President — release your returns as you promised during the campaign and follow the precedent of every president since 1973,” Newsom tweeted.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, argued in its suit that Democrats are “on a crusade to obtain the President’s federal tax returns in the hopes of finding something they can use to harm him politically.”

Republicans also say keeping Trump off the ballot could depress voter turnout in the primary, hurting Republicans in other races down ticket, such as for the state Legislature. That could hurt the party’s chances of being in the general election in some races, given California’s top-two primary system that sends the two highest vote getters in the primary to the general election regardless of party.

The U.S. Supreme Court has previously halted state efforts to add ballot access rules for congressional candidates. Former Gov. Jerry Brown, also a Democrat, vetoed a similar law two years ago, arguing it would create a slippery slope of trying to force candidates to release additional information to run for president.

At least two other lawsuits have already been filed.

Ohio GOP Governor Backs Gun Reform; Texas Democrats Balk at Trump Visit

DAYTON, Ohio—Ohio’s Republican governor bucked his party to call for expanded gun laws Tuesday and some Democrats in Texas told President Donald Trump to stay away as both states reeled from a pair of shootings that killed 31 people.

A racist screed remained the focus of police investigating the massacre at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, while the FBI opened an investigation into the mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, citing the gunman’s interest in violent ideology.

Push for legislation in Ohio

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine urged the GOP-led state Legislature to pass laws requiring background checks for nearly all gun sales and allowing courts to restrict firearms access for people perceived as threats.

Persuading the Legislature to pass such proposals could be an uphill battle. It has given little consideration this session to those and other gun-safety measures already introduced by Democrats and DeWine’s Republican predecessor, John Kasich, also unsuccessfully pushed for a so-called red flag law on restricting firearms for people considered threats.

“We can come together to do these things to save lives,” DeWine said.

FBI investigating Dayton shooting

On Tuesday, the FBI opened an investigation into the mass shooting at a popular Dayton nightlife district to try to determine what ideologies influenced 24-year-old gunman Connor Betts.

Special Agent Todd Wickerham, head of the FBI’s Cincinnati field office, said the agency is looking into who might have helped Betts and why he chose his specific target.

Wickerham didn’t say whether the FBI is looking at treating the case as domestic terrorism, as it did in the Texas mass shooting earlier in the weekend.

El Paso Democrats shun Trump visit

President Donald Trump was planning visits to both cities Wednesday, an announcement that stirred some resistance in El Paso.

Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso made clear that the president was not welcome in her hometown as it mourned. Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, who was an El Paso congressman for six years, also said Trump should stay away.

Escobar said Tuesday that victims’ families were already using the city’s newly opened resource center where various government and mental health services have set up booths.

“We’ve got to make sure that folks have access to mental health care. There’s going to be a lot of trauma in our community, a lot of children saw things that no human being should see,” Escobar said.

Woman: Ohio shooter shared dark thoughts

A woman who said she briefly the Ohio gunman said he suffered from bipolar disorder, joked about his dark thoughts and exhibited a fascination with mass shootings.

Adelia Johnson wrote in an online essay that Betts showed her a video of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on their first date.

She said Betts expressed “uncontrollable urges” that she called “red flags,” which eventually led her to call things off in May.

Gun control and immigration

On Monday, Trump made a vague expression of openness to new gun laws , suggesting a bill to expand gun background checks could be combined with his long-sought effort to toughen the nation’s immigration system but gave no rationale for the pairing.

Studies have repeatedly shown that immigrants have a lower level of criminality than those born in the U.S., both shooting suspects were citizens, and federal officials are investigating anti-immigrant bias as a potential motive in the Texas massacre.

In both El Paso and Dayton, a young white male was identified as the lone suspect. The suspect in the Texas shooting, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, was booked on murder charges. Betts was killed as police quickly swooped in to end his ambush.

___

Attanasio reported from El Paso. Contributing to this report were Julie Carr Smyth and Kantele Franko in Columbus, Ohio; Astrid Galvan and Morgan Lee in El Paso; Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas; and Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire in Washington.

Impeachment Is Designed for Presidents Like Trump

It’s easy to understand why a majority of House Democrats have finally gone on record to call for an impeachment inquiry of President Donald J. Trump. Not only has he committed the requisite “high crimes and misdemeanors” to trigger such an inquiry, but an argument can be made that he’s the most corrupt and treacherous commander in chief in modern American history. The stage is set for Congress to act, regardless of how the Senate responds.

Bearing in mind impeachable offenses do not have to be crimes in the formal sense and they may include behavior prior to the target assuming office, Trump’s offenses include but are by no means limited to:

Committing campaign finance violations by paying hush money to two women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs, Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels;
Obstructing justice in connection with the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller;
Defying congressional subpoenas;
Using the presidency for personal economic gain;
Abusing the pardon power to reward political allies;
Attacking the press and the judiciary;
Threatening to prosecute political opponents;
Abusing emergency powers to build his border wall;
Incarcerating undocumented immigrant children in concentration camps;
Attempting to strip millions of Americans of health insurance;
Promoting tax reform to benefit the super-rich;
Gutting environmental regulations and pulling out of the Paris climate accord;
Refusing to enforce the Voting Rights Act; and
Curbing the use of federal consent decrees to counter police misconduct.

The bill of particulars that can be drafted against Trump is practically limitless. But beyond the specifics, there is a more fundamental reason to insist on impeachment: Trump is a racist and a fascist.

Anyone who doubts that Trump is a racist either is extraordinarily gullible, isn’t paying attention, doesn’t care, or worse, is a racist himself or herself.

Trump has been a practicing white supremacist his entire adult life. In the early 1970s, he and his father were successfully sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to non-whites. In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in major New York City newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers, the “Central Park Five,” falsely accused of raping a white woman. To this day, he refuses to acknowledge the five teens were innocent, as confirmed by DNA testing.

During the previous administration, Trump was a prime architect of the “birther” conspiracy, alleging that President Obama was born in Kenya. In December 2015, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” As president, he implemented a more targeted version of the travel ban, initially directed against seven Muslim-majority nations and later revised following several adverse federal rulings. The modified ban was subsequently upheld in a shameless abdication of judicial independence by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court.

Last month, Trump tweeted that four minority Democratic congresswomen—the so-called Squad” consisting of Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts—should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime-infested” countries they came from. All four are U.S. citizens; only Omar was born abroad.

In response to Trump’s tweet, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a celebrated veteran of the civil rights movement, said, “I know racism when I see it, I know racism when I feel it, and at the highest level of government, there’s no room for racism.”

To its credit, the House has since passed a resolution condemning Trump’s posts as racist. But the resolution is non-binding, and it is by no means sufficient.

Intercept reporter Shaun King argued in a recent column that racism should be considered an impeachable offense. Both the history of impeachment and the gravity of racism as an affront to the nation support King’s assertions.

As political science professor Peter Irons, the author of “A People’s History of the Supreme Court,” observed in an NBC.com column last week, President Andrew Johnson was impeached at the mid-point of his first and only term precisely because of his racism—specifically his opposition to post-Civil War Reconstruction programs.

Like Trump today, Johnson’s rhetoric and policies brought the “high office of the president of the United States into contempt, ridicule and disgrace.” And while Johnson avoided conviction and removal from office by a single vote in the Senate, Irons noted that impeachment left Johnson “crippled and ineffective in his two remaining years in office.”

Fascism, too, should be considered impeachable. And lest there be any confusion, Trump is not simply a product or “symptom” of late capitalism in decline, as even some on the left have argued. Trump represents a political disease that is spreading like an antibiotic-resistant superbug across the globe.

By any standard definition, Trump is a fascist. Trumpism, along with its international analogs, aspires to impose “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialistic elements of finance capital,” long decried by Marxist thinkers.

Trumpism also fits the definition of fascism offered by Robert Paxton in his classic study, “The Anatomy of Fascism”:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Still unconvinced? Consider, as I’ve written before in this column, Umberto Eco’s list of the 14 common factors of fascism:

A cult of traditionalism.
The rejection of modernism.
A cult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
The view that disagreement or opposition is treasonous.
A fear of difference. Fascism is racist by definition.
An appeal to a frustrated middle class that is suffering from an economic crisis and feelings of humiliation and fear of the pressure exerted by lower social groups.
An obsession with the plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.
A requirement that the movement’s enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
A rejection of pacifism.
Contempt for weakness.
A cult of heroism.
Hypermasculinity and homophobia.
A selective populism, relying on chauvinist definitions of “the people” that the movement claims to represent.
Heavy usage of “newspeak” and an impoverished discourse of elementary syntax and resistance to complex and critical reasoning.

Many if not all of these points will sound familiar and with good reason: Our president is a fascist, and fascists do not belong in the White House.

The reticence of some Democrats to initiate impeachment proceedings is understandable. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the moderates and center-right politicians who still control the party are correct when they argue the Senate will never convict and remove Trump. They are worried that a failed impeachment could bolster Trump’s popularity, just as impeachment improved Bill Clinton’s public standing. Still, these concerns are likely overblown, and it would appear Pelosi and her fellow centrists have drawn the wrong lessons from the Clinton saga.

While it’s true Clinton’s approval ratings increased in the aftermath of his impeachment, the effect actually was short-lived. Clinton finished his second term, but he left the Oval Office in disgrace. Republicans used the trial against Al Gore in the 2000 election, putting Clinton’s vice president on the defensive and forcing him to distance himself from his predecessor. Even accounting for the contested Florida vote tally, Gore lost to an incompetent opponent he should have trounced.

But impeachment should not be evaluated along electoral lines alone. It should be viewed at as an end in itself—the process by which the Constitution allows federal officials to hold those who have violated the public trust accountable.

Should the House vote to impeach Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans will be left with two choices, neither of which is likely to boost Trump’s reelection chances. On the one hand, they could vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment lodged against Trump, which Senate rules may permit them to do. On the other, they could allow the president to be put on trial, permitting all the world to hear the evidence against him.

Either prospect scares McConnell and his minions stiff. Dismissing the case against Trump amounts to a massive cover-up while a vote of acquittal would make the Republican officials enablers of the racism and fascism that pervade the president’s administration.

The time for worrying is over. It’s time to act.

The Best Tribute to Toni Morrison Is to Read Her Work

Writer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison died Tuesday, at age 88. She is best known as the author of 11 novels, as well as essay collections and children’s books.

Whether in her novels or in criticism, covering a number of subjects, including black identity, (especially that of black women), Morrison’s prose is as precise as it is lyrical.

As journalist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah wrote in a 2015 New York Times Magazine profile, she didn’t think she had to choose in her writing.

“Morrison writes stories that are more aesthetic than overtly political, better expressed in accurate Tolstoyan detail than in generalizing sentiments blunted with anger,” Kaadzi Ghansah argues. “Most important, she is an author who writes to tease and complicate her world, not to convince others it is valid.”

When Morrison did directly address politics, in interviews, public speeches and essays, she did so with a striking clarity that was an inspiration to, and guide for, fellow writers.

Below are just a few examples of her incredible literacy legacy, on war, racism and the responsibility of those with privilege to share it with those without.

On racism as a distraction, from her 1975 keynote address at Portland State University:

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

On black veterans returning home to racism after World War I and the Korean War:

From her novel, “Jazz” (1992): Disgruntled veterans who had fought in all-colored units […] came home to white violence more intense than when they enlisted and, unlike the battles they fought in Europe, stateside fighting was pitiless and totally without honor.”

From her novel, “Home” (2012): “You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.”

On freedom ( O, The Oprah Magazine , 2003)

“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

On the lead-up to the Iraq War :

“Reckless, sinister and unnecessary: when you don’t have diplomacy, all you have left is the bullet. But waging war is unmodern; the language is puny.”

Listen to her 1993 Nobel lecture:

Or read the transcript here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Supreme Court May Be Lost for a Generation

This piece originally appeared on The Progressive.

“There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018-19 term made it clearer than ever that Chief Justice John Roberts rules the roost behind the high tribunal’s regal red curtains. Roberts has replaced the retired Anthony Kennedy as the panel’s most critical swing vote, and he is making full use of the power that comes with that pivotal role.

But make no mistake: Roberts is no liberal. He may be more cautious and less dogmatic than some of his brethren, but each and every Republican-appointed Justice—from Roberts to Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—is staunchly conservative. And that’s bad news for progressives.

“With the confirmation of Kavanaugh last October, we now have five current or former members of the Federalist Society on the Supreme Court,” Michael Avery, professor emeritus of law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, says in an interview. “If Trump is reelected, there probably will be a sixth at some point.”

Avery, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, is the co-author of the definitive study The Federalist Society: How the Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals, published in 2013. The book charts the group’s rise from a law-school debate club at Yale and the University of Chicago in the early 1980s to a nationwide network of 70,000 economic, social, and Christian conservatives, along with rightwing libertarians, scattered in lawyers’ chapters in eighty cities, and with student affiliates in nearly every major law school.

Federalist Society members attend conferences, seminars, and meetings, and participate in “practice groups” where they learn the contemporary right’s gospel on civil rights, labor, the First Amendment, and other important areas of substantive law.

No longer a shoestring operation, the society’s 2016 budget exceeded $26 million, raised in large part from contributions by rightwing philanthropists like the Koch brothers and other deep-pockets like the Mercer, Scaife, and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations.

Though Roberts claims he can’t recall belonging to the Federalist Society, the group listed him as a member in its 1997-98 directory. The Court’s other Republican appointees remain active participants in society events and conventions. Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh all attended the organization’s annual black-tie gala in November 2018 at the Main Hall of Union Station in Washington, D.C. The event was held in honor of the late Antonin Scalia, who served as one of the society’s first academic mentors during his teaching days at the University of Chicago.

With the exception of Thomas, the Federalist Society has had a hand in selecting all of the Court’s GOP-appointed conservatives. According to The Washington Post, in 2005 and 2006, the society’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, a devout Catholic and outspoken critic of abortion rights, raised about $15 million from his well-heeled patrons to pay for ads, telemarketing, and the mobilization of astroturf advocacy groups to support the nominations of Roberts and Alito.

Leo took a formal leave of absence to help Trump secure the confirmation of both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

It’s not just party affiliation and the Federalist Society that link Roberts and his Republican colleagues. They are also united by judicial philosophy. Each, to varying degrees, embraces “originalism,” the legal theory that posits the Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning for the Founding Fathers, rather than read as a “living document” that can and should accommodate contemporary values, social needs, and evolving traditions.

Any doubts about Roberts’s influence or the ideological orientation of the Court’s conservative wing were laid to rest on June 27, the last open session of the just-concluded term, when the two most highly anticipated and sharply contested decisions of the year were announced: the first, Rucho v. Common Cause, dealing with partisan “gerrymandering,” and the second, Department of Commerce v. New York, concerning the U.S. Census. The justices divided 5-4 in both cases, with Roberts writing the majority opinion in each.

Although the legal issues raised in each case are distinct, they are related, as states with more than one Congressional district are required to redesign their voting districts every ten years in accordance with new Census data.

Activists at the Supreme Court opposed to partisan gerrymandering hold up representations of Congressional districts from North Carolina, left, and Maryland, right, as justices hear arguments about redistricting in Rucho v. Common Cause.

Because redistricting is basic to the functioning of democracy, it often sparks heated litigation. Unfortunately, the Rucho ruling dealt democracy a body blow, as the Court held that partisan gerrymandering, no matter how extreme, presents a nonjusticiable “political question” beyond the jurisdiction of federal judges.

As Roberts noted in his opinion, gerrymandering has a long history. The term itself is a portmanteau coined after the salamander-like voting districts created by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812 to give an advantage to his Democratic-Republican Party. The term is used today to refer to abusive forms of redistricting aimed at entrenching a particular party in power.

Political gerrymandering is especially acute in the thirty states currently controlled by Republican legislatures. In the 2018 elections, Republicans won about 50 percent of the popular vote for U.S. House Representatives in North Carolina, but were accorded 70 percent of the state’s Congressional delegation due to how the maps were drawn. But both parties have historically been guilty of the practice.

In Rucho, the Court consolidated two lawsuits initiated, respectively, by Democrats in North Carolina and Republicans in Maryland. Each alleged their state’s redistricting plan unconstitutionally discriminated against their own party. Federal district judges in both cases agreed, but their rulings were appealed to the Supreme Court.

Because of the bipartisan nature of the challenges, there was some hope following oral arguments in March that the Supreme Court would uphold the challenges based on longstanding precedents. In Baker v. Carr (1962), the Court outlawed population-based gerrymandering, establishing the doctrine of “one person, one vote.” And by the mid-1980s, the Court had forbidden “racial gerrymandering”—the designing of districts to dilute the voting power of minorities.

But the Court has never overturned an instance of purely partisan gerrymandering. And, with the Rucho ruling, it appears the practice is here to stay.

Roberts argued that some degree of partisan gerrymandering is inherent in any electoral system, and there is no objective standard by which judges can distinguish permissible from improper forms of partisan gerrymandering. He also invoked originalism to bolster his opinion, writing, “Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new. Nor is frustration with it. The practice was known in the Colonies prior to Independence, and the Framers were familiar with it at the time of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution.”

The Framers, he continued, left the issue to be resolved by the states and, if need be, by Congress. But, he admonished, for judges “[t]o hold that legislators cannot take partisan interests into account when drawing district lines would essentially countermand the Framers’ decision to entrust districting to political entities.”

Roberts’s ruling will likely keep contested Republican gerrymanders in place for the 2020 elections, not only in North Carolina, but in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

In dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, speaking for herself and the Court’s liberals, rebuked the majority for endorsing partisan gerrymanders that have “debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people . . . . For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a Constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”

In the census question case, the majority Roberts cobbled together was far more fractured, with the conservatives joining some sections and the panel’s liberals—Kagan and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor—endorsing other portions.

The central issue was whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross acted lawfully when he directed the Census Bureau, which his department oversees, to add a citizenship question to the basic “short-form” that will be sent early next yearto all U.S. residents.

The Census, which the Constitution requires be conducted every ten years, is used to set the number of votes each state is accorded in the Electoral College and the number of seats allocated to each state in the House of Representatives. It has not included a question regarding citizenship since 1950. Citizenship data is available to the government from other sources, such as the American Community Survey, which the Census Bureau sends out to 3.5 million households each year, and Social Security Administration and state voting records.

Immigration activists rally outside the Supreme Court as the Justices hear arguments over the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.

Reviving a citizenship question in an era of heightened immigration law enforcement, one study found, would lead to an undercount of more than six million Hispanics, about 12 percent of the country’s Hispanic population. This undercount could potentially dilute the political power of blue states like California and New York that have large numbers of immigrants.

Appearing before the Ways and Means Committee in March 2018, Ross testified under oath that he revived the citizenship question at the request of the Department of Justice, which, he said, wanted more precise citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Ross’s directive spurred federal lawsuits in New York, California, and Maryland. In each case, federal district court judges struck down the citizenship question, rejecting Ross’s stated justification. (The Trump Administration has yet to file a single Voting Rights Act enforcement case.)

In fact, evidence discovered during the lawsuits proved that the idea for reinstating the citizenship question came not from the Department of Justice but from discussions between Ross, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, both of whom have long histories of anti-immigrant vitriol. (As head of Trump’s since-abandoned Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Kobach propagated the myth that millions of undocumented people had voted in 2016.) The Department of Justice endorsed the citizenship question only after Ross asked it to.

After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April, documents released by the daughter of Thomas Hofeller, a Republican redistricting strategist who died in 2018, provided shocking new evidence of the administration’s racial animus. They showed that in early 2017, Hofeller pushed Trump officials to reinstate the citizenship question to give “white Republicans” a redistricting advantage.

Despite these disclosures, Roberts and his conservative bench-mates held that there was nothing illegal in resurrecting the citizenship question for the upcoming Census, even if it depresses Hispanic responses. But Roberts, to his credit, joined with the Court’s liberals to temporarily block the question, saying its rationale “seems to have been contrived.” He gave the government another chance to justify its actions.

Trump, predictably, condemned the Court’s decision as “ridiculous” in an angry tweet on the day the decision was announced. He later called the ruling a “very sad time for America,” and threatened to find a way to sidestep it, but ultimately ended up backing down.

Appointed Chief Justice by President George W. Bush in 2005, Roberts has long been at the center of speculation about the Court’s future. “Roberts cares a lot about the Supreme Court as an institution and his own historical legacy,” says professor Eric Segall, who teaches constitutional law at Georgia State University. “At times, I think he might feel that he’s the only thing that prevents the Court from losing all legitimacy in the eyes of the public.”

“Roberts cares a lot about the Supreme Court as an institution and his own historical legacy. At times, I think he might feel that he’s the only thing that prevents the Court from losing all legitimacy in the eyes of the public.”

Last November, after Trump blasted a federal judge as an “Obama judge” for overturning his new restrictions on political asylum, Roberts issued a biting reply: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best [for] those appearing before them. The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

But while such words are welcome, Roberts remains “deeply conservative,” Segall says. “Apart from his opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate in 2012, he rarely votes with the liberals in the most critical 5-4 cases. People tend to forget that in the same case, he also struck down the ACA’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid.”

Adam Feldman, who holds a law degree as well as a doctorate in political science from the University of Southern California, spends his days combing through the Supreme Court’s cases, crunching the numbers and discerning the trends behind the Court’s decisions for his Empirical Scotus website.

“There are in fact some glaring differences in the voting patterns of the Justices that align with the party of the President who appointed them,” Feldman says. His research shows that during the Court’s 2017-18 term, Kennedy’s last stint on the Court, the Justices voted along party lines at a 73 percent rate.

Roberts’s 5-4 majority opinions also include Shelby County v. Holder (2013), regarded by Segall as “one of the Court’s worst” recent decisions for striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. In June 2018, Roberts swung sharply to the right again, penning the Court’s 5-4 opinion that upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

Segall’s 2018 book, Originalism as Faith, traces the evolution of the concept as a tool for interpreting the Constitution. Initially, as popularized by Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese and the late failed-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, the doctrine asserted that the flowery but ambiguous terms in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights like “freedom,” “liberty,” “due process,” and “cruel and unusual punishments” should be understood according to the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers.

The current version—call it Originalism 2.0—was popularized by Scalia and others, who recognized the difficulty of ascertaining the Founders’ actual intent. They chose instead to focus on the original “public meaning” of Constitutional provisions, as revealed in the recorded debates from the Constitutional Convention as well as dictionaries from that time.

Proponents of both versions insist their approach restrains judicial discretion, limits subjectivity, and prevents judges from behaving like legislators, as Scalia alleged in his blistering dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Roberts wrote a separate dissent.

Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell affirmed the “living Constitutionalist” view, declaring: “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

The originalist position, Segall says, is “so dumb it’s hard to respond.” There is “no grand theory or intellectual construct” that can determine the outcome of all Supreme Court cases. Yes, history and text matter, but in the end “originalism is just another result-oriented approach dressed up as objectivity.”

For instance, Segall notes, “There is nothing persuasively originalist about the Court’s recent decisions on campaign finance or affirmative action.” And so the decisions rendered ultimately reflected the Justices’ life experiences, personal values, and political beliefs. He says it’s no wonder that the opinions of Clarence Thomas—considered by many to be the Court’s most ardent originalist—“are remarkably similar to the platform of the Republican Party.”

Not all progressives reject originalism as an unworkable scam. The lawyers at the scrappy Constitutional Accountability Center, based in Washington, D.C., actually used it to secure a rare win for workers in a case decided earlier this year.

“Progressives too often concede the founding of the Constitution to conservatives,” says Brianne Gorod, the center’s chief counsel. “That’s a mistake. We emphasize not only the text and history of the Constitution, but also the values it expresses, particularly those embedded in the Reconstruction-era amendments, which are both democratic and egalitarian.”

The case concerned the definition of an “employee” under the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act, and Gorod’s brief urged the Justices to consult dictionaries and other texts from the 1920s to find that a group of truck drivers were employees rather than independent contractors, and were thus entitled to file a class-action lawsuit over wage and hour disputes. The Justices agreed and, in a unanimous ruling written by Gorsuch, held that the drivers were not required to file individual arbitration claims.

The Court’s conservatives also occasionally broke ranks to join with liberals in other cases this term. In Apple Inc. v. Pepper, for example, Kavanaugh drafted the 5-4 majority opinion, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, ruling that iPhone purchasers can sue Apple for allegedly monopolizing the retail market for the sale of iPhone apps. Similarly, in Herrera v. Wyoming, Gorsuch joined a 5-4 decision written by Sotomayor that held Wyoming’s statehood did not abrogate the Crow Tribe’s 1868 federal treaty right to hunt in the Bighorn National Forest.

The Roberts Court isn’t just conservative; it’s also activist.

Nonetheless, progressives are understandably worried about the future. The Roberts Court isn’t just conservative; it’s also activist.

In two 5-4 decisions this past term, the Court overruled two of its own recent precedents to hand significant victories to rightwing and business interests. In Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt, written by Thomas, the Court held that states must be accorded “sovereign immunity” to protect them from private lawsuits brought in the courts of other states. And in Knick v. Township of Scott, written by Roberts, the Court decreed that property owners may bring federal lawsuits against state and local governments for the taking of property by means of eminent domain.

In another significant development, Justices Alito and Gorsuch wrote concurring opinions that suggested discarding the longstanding doctrine that advises judges to defer to executive agencies in interpreting the scope and meaning of federal regulations. Although the Court left the deference doctrine in place, many observers anticipate future efforts to weaken agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and further deregulate the economy.

And throughout the recent term, Thomas called for overruling some of the most cherished liberal precedents of the last seventy years, urging his colleagues to revisit both Gideon v. Wainwright, on the right to court-appointed counsel in criminal prosecutions, and New York Times v. Sullivan, which affords vital protections to individuals and the media against defamation actions brought by public figures.

Thomas also attacked Roe v. Wade this term in Box v. Planned Parenthood, in which the Court upheld Indiana’s new law mandating the burial or cremation of fetal remains. In his bizarre concurrence, Thomas compared abortion to eugenics.

It’s likely that the Roberts Court will agree to reconsider and perhaps overturn the Roe decision. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, decided in 2016, the Court invalidated harsh restrictions Texas had imposed on abortion clinics. The opinion was written by Breyer and joined by Kennedy. Roberts, Alito, and Thomas voted to uphold the restrictions.

“We’re very concerned that Thomas is staying on the Court so that he can do whatever needs to be done to either overturn Roe or gouge it out piece by piece,” says Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, one of the country’s leading progressive advocacy organizations. “It’s long been the dream of the far right to turn back the clock on liberties that we’ve all taken for granted for a long time.”

Although the Supreme Court has yet to schedule an abortion challenge for next term, it has agreed to take up polarizing cases on LGBTQ rights and Trump’s attempt to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

As we look ahead, one thing is certain: The law is dynamic and ever-changing. Just how far and how fast John Roberts and his rightwing cohorts are willing to go is the big question.

Are Trump’s Top Medicaid Regulators Inviting Disaster?

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

This story was co-published with The Dallas Morning News.

The ranking member of the Senate health committee has complained for months about the Trump administration’s failure to look into Medicaid contractors that have reaped big profits while sometimes failing to provide crucial patient services.

So last week, Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., called in the top boss of Centene, the nation’s largest Medicaid managed care company. He wanted to question the company about reports that its Texas subsidiary denied life-sustaining care to sick and disabled children — in one case, leaving a baby in foster care to suffer a catastrophic brain injury.

The meeting with longtime Centene CEO Michael Neidorff did not go well, according to Casey.

“I thought they would try to persuade me that they were going to do better, but they didn’t seem interested in that at all,” Casey told ProPublica and The Dallas Morning News in an interview. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Casey said the Centene official denied providing inadequate care and cast blame for failures on foster parents and nurses.

Centene declined to make Neidorff available for an interview and emailed a brief statement in response to questions about the meeting with Casey.

“Centene and its subsidiaries care deeply about each and every member we serve,” the email read. “We work tirelessly to ensure we provide the appropriate level of care for our members.”

Under Neidorff, Centene has grown from a tiny health network in the Midwest into a $60-billion-a-year health care empire, backed almost entirely with taxpayer money. The company cares for more than 8.5 million Medicaid patients.

The company came under criticism last year after an eight-part investigation published in the Morning News examined whether Centene and other Medicaid managed care companies were skimping on care to bolster profits. The series raised questions about Centene’s Texas subsidiary, Superior HealthPlan, and its handling of the case of D’ashon Morris, a Texas toddler who was born with severe defects and was living in a foster home.

The series, titled “Pain & Profit,” reported that D’ashon was denied 24/7 nursing care and suffered brain damage after a medical incident that occurred while he did not have his nurse around. (Read the full story here.)

The Morning News reported that state health officials had found the Centene subsidiary in violation of state and federal Medicaid rules and recommended the company face steep fines for what happened to the child. But top Texas health officials never assessed those fines, the Morning News reported.

D’ashon’s adoptive mother sued the Centene subsidiary in Texas state court. That case is tied up in the Texas appeals court, where the Centene subsidiary has argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because D’ashon and his mother are stifling the company’s right to free speech.

During hearings in the state Capitol, Superior representatives denied that the company’s refusal to provide 24/7 nursing was improper.

After his meeting with the Centene official, Casey sent a strongly worded letter to Seema Verma, a former health consultant appointed by President Donald Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In the letter, Casey called Centene’s response to questions about D’ashon’s case “callous.”

He also asked Medicaid officials to dig further into Centene’s business practices and to provide documentation on any response to the Morning News investigation.

“It’s another indication that the regulatory approach here by the administration is, at best, suspect,” Casey said.

A CMS spokesman said that Texas officials have shared with the agency an “action plan they intended to take to address the concerns raised,” adding that CMS is in regular communication to ensure the state improves.

“CMS has received Sen. Casey’s letter and will respond to his office directly,” spokesman Brian Leshak said in an email.

Casey’s position as the top Democrat on two Senate panels overseeing federal health programs gives him the standing to raise questions about the Medicaid managed care system.

It’s not unusual for company officials facing a federal audit or investigation to meet with members of Congress to address concerns, but it is unusual for such meetings to spill into public view.

Casey said he sent the letter to CMS because of what he called Centene’s “cold and clinical” defense of what happened in D’ashon’s case. He said it gave him concern about how the company cares for other patients — and what, if anything, regulators are doing when things go wrong.

Last month, more than a year after the Morning News story was published, Centene officials provided Casey’s office with a one-page rebuttal titled: “The Dallas Morning News got it wrong.”

The company’s explanations include that D’ashon’s foster mother was a trained nurse. But, as the Morning News reported, she was on an approved vacation at the time of D’ashon’s injury, and he had been placed in a different foster home.

The company also said D’ashon’s foster mother should have restrained the baby, but the Morning News previously reported that Texas foster care officials confirmed restraints would have required a doctor’s order, which she did not have.

“It was all blame shifting and pointing to other factors,” Casey said of Centene’s letter.

Casey said the meeting left him wondering why federal regulators weren’t doing more.

“It might even be worse than asleep at the wheel,” he said of CMS under Verma’s watch.

“They may be awake at the wheel but choosing consciously to say, ‘We’re going the other direction.’”

Without commenting on specific cases, the CMS spokesman said the agency routinely monitors states and intervenes when necessary.

Problems with this privatized Medicaid model have grabbed headlines in other states, too. And advocates in those states said they haven’t heard much from CMS, which they say is a shift from the Obama administration.

In Iowa, for instance, The Des Moines Register reported failures to provide care and chronicled patients who had been caught in that state’s broken medical appeals system.

Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor, wrote to state officials in June that two large managed care companies had “significantly harmed” two paraplegic patients by refusing to provide services they needed.

Mary Nelle Trefz, of Iowa’s Child and Family Policy Center, said she’s been shocked to hear nothing about that from CMS.

“I don’t feel, or can’t observe, or point to anything, where CMS has stepped in to provide that oversight and accountability,” she said.

In March, California’s state auditor found that millions of children in that state’s privatized Medicaid system weren’t being provided services that taxpayers had paid for. Auditor Elaine Howle blamed California health officials’ “deficient oversight of the managed care plans.”

Andy Schneider, a researcher at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, and a former top adviser to CMS under the Obama administration, said these episodes come at an inconvenient time for the Trump administration, which is focused on reducing regulation and creating additional eligibility hurdles like work requirements.

CMS has taken a hands-off approach compared with the previous administration, he said.

“These are reports coming from reputable media sources,” he said. “They’re very concerning, they have to do with the operation of the program, they suggest that something is wrong.”

Tom Benning is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Dallas Morning News.

Bernie Sanders Boasts Zero Billionaire Donors

Not a single billionaire to date has donated to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ run for the 2020 Democratic nomination, according to a new analysis, making him unique among primary frontrunners.

“Zero billionaire donors,” wrote Splinter‘s Paul Blest. “None. Nada.”

https://t.co/RdBffjODBk

Number of billionaire donors by candidate:

Pete Buttigieg: 23

Cory Booker: 18

Kamala Harris: 17

Michael Bennett: 15

Joe Biden: 13

John Hickenlooper: 11

Beto O’Rourke: 9

Amy Klobuchar: 8

Bernie Sanders: 0

— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) August 6, 2019

The absence was significant.

“True to his campaign promise to take on the top one percent,” Forbes reporter Giacomo Tognini, who broke the story, wrote, “Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has not received any donations from billionaires.”

Tognini’s reporting is based on FEC data through August 1 which shows South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg in front of the rest of the field with 23 billionaire donors to date. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) comes in second with 18; Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is in third with 17. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), currently polling at around one percent, is fourth with 15 billionaire donors and former Vice President Joe Biden, the polling front runner, wraps the top five with 13.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is also running a progressive campaign aimed at the one percent, has two billionaire donors. 

The donations to Bennet indicated to Boston activist Jonathan Cohn that wealth doesn’t necessarily mean that one makes good decisions.

“The fact that 15 billionaires donated to Michael Bennet, who has zero chance of winning, is a great example of how billionaires don’t spend their money well,” Cohn tweeted.

Sanders was joined in the zero billionaires category by Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro.

A key difference between Sanders and his fellow candidates spurned by the billionaire class, in addition to being a top-tier contender for the nomination, is the Vermont senator’s dominance in small dollar funding. As Common Dreams reported on August 2, Sanders has an overwhelming ead nationwide when it comes to generating individual donations.

That fundraising data, said researcher Kristin Johnson, in showing high strength across the nation for Sanders “contradicts both the mainstream narrative and some national polling data that suggest that only a centrist Democrat could succeed in this political environment.”

Troops Lock Down Kashmir as India Votes to Strip Its Status

NEW DELHI—Indian lawmakers passed a bill Tuesday that strips the statehood from the Indian-administered portion of Muslim-majority Kashmir amid an indefinite security lockdown in the disputed Himalayan territory, actions that neighboring Pakistan warned could lead to war.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist-led government submitted the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill for a vote by the lower house of Parliament a day after the surprise measure was introduced alongside a presidential order. That order dissolved a constitutional provision, known as Article 370, which gave Kashmiris exclusive hereditary rights and a separate constitution.

“After five years, seeing development in J&K (Jammu and Kashmir) under the leadership of PM Modi, people of the valley will understand drawbacks of Article 370,” Indian Home Minister Amit Shah said just before the bill was passed.

Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan and both claim the region in its entirety, although each of them controls only parts of it. Two of the three wars the nuclear-armed neighbors have fought since their independence from British rule were over Kashmir.

How the 7 million people in the Kashmir Valley were reacting was unclear, because the Indian government shut off most communication with it, including internet, cellphone and landline networks. Thousands of troops were deployed to the restive region amid fears that the government’s steps could spark unrest in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Tensions also have soared along the Line of Control, the volatile, highly militarized frontier that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

Hundreds of people in various parts of Pakistan and in its part of Kashmir rallied against Modi, burning him in effigy and torching Indian flags to condemn India’s moves.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said in an address to Parliament on Tuesday night that he feared the Kashmiri people, angered over India’s decision to strip the region of its special status, could attack Indian security forces and that New Delhi could blame Pakistan for it.

“If India attacks us, we will respond,” Khan said. “We will fight until the last drop of blood.”

In February, a bombing in Indian-controlled Kashmir killed 40 Indian troops. India responded with an airstrike inside Pakistan, blaming a Pakistani group for the attack.

On Tuesday, the Pakistani military was on high alert following reports that New Delhi was continuing to send additional troops to the region. Pakistan’s top military commanders met in the garrison city of Rawalpindi to discuss the changes in Kashmir.

China, which also lays claim to a portion of Kashmir, is “seriously concerned” about the situation, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.

“China’s position on the Kashmir issue is clear and consistent. It is also an international consensus that the Kashmir issue is an issue left from the past between India and Pakistan. The relevant sides need to exercise restraint and act prudently. In particular, they should refrain from taking actions that will unilaterally change the status quo and escalate tensions,” she said.

India’s lower house ratified the bill, which strips the status of Jammu and Kashmir from a state to a union territory with a legislature, and carves out Buddhist-majority Ladakh, a pristine, sparsely populated area that stretches from the Siachen Glacier to the Himalayas, as a separate union territory without a legislature.

The upper house approved the bill by a two-thirds majority, with many opposition lawmakers voting with the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

Indian TV news channels in Srinagar, Kashmir’s main city, showed security personnel including armed soldiers in camouflage standing near barbed wire barricades in the otherwise empty streets.

Jammu and Kashmir Director General of Police Dilbagh Singh said Srinagar was “totally peaceful,” the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged all parties to show restraint, said spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

“We are following with concern the tense situation in the region,” Dujarric said. “We’re also aware of reports of restrictions on the Indian side of Kashmir, and we urge all parties to exercise restraint.”

___

Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed.

Is the Pentagon Behind the Rise in Lyme Disease?

What follows is a conversation between “Bitten” author Kris Newby and Jacqueline Luqman of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Hi, I’m Jacqueline Luqman with The Real News Network.

A new book published in May has raised questions about the origins of Lyme disease, which affects 400,000 Americans each year. And this book has caught the attention of Congress, prompting some to ask the question, did the Pentagon weaponize ticks and unleash them on an unsuspecting public? Here to talk about this is Kris Newby, the author of Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons. Kris is an award-winning science writer at Stanford University and the Senior Producer of the Oscar shortlisted documentary on Lyme disease, Under Our Skin. Thank you so much for joining me today, Kris.

KRIS NEWBY: Thank you for the invitation.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So Lyme disease is not a new phenomenon, right? It’s not new. It’s been around for a long time. But what is it about Lyme disease that has turned more attention on this issue now?

KRIS NEWBY: The Lyme disease bacterium was discovered or announced that it was discovered in ’81, and the tick-borne disease problem has just continued to increase since that time. What my book shows is not that the Lyme disease bacterium is a bio weapon, but the epidemic of tick-borne diseases. There was three new tick-borne diseases sort of noticed in 1968, and those may be related to a biological weapons accident associated with the weaponization of ticks that may have had multiple germs inside of them.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Now, that’s the secret history of Lyme disease that you talk about in your book— that people obviously don’t know anything about— that ties Lyme disease to the Pentagon and the creation of bio weapons or using ticks and other insects as bio weapons possibly. Can you explain for us what that alleged program was about?

KRIS NEWBY: Well, ticks were used as basically eight-legged soldiers. And the military, the bio weapons headquarters in Fort Dietrich, Maryland, figured out how to put dangerous diseases inside the ticks. And then they had a program where they would drop those ticks on enemy territory from a plane, and then those ticks would be like stealth soldiers and it would be hard to protect yourself from them and they would bite people. And they would either transmit fatal or incapacitating diseases to the local population that would make it easier for an invading army who had been vaccinated to take over the area and less destructive than traditional bombs.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Now, I know that for some people watching this, they may say, “Okay, this sounds really ridiculous. Weaponized ticks? Come on now.” But there is a key figure referenced in your book who actually lends credence to this idea because this is not something, from what I understand, that you discovered. This was something that you were given information on from this key figure. So who was this person and why is he important to not just this program of weaponized ticks and insects, but also to the history of Lyme disease? Who was this person?

KRIS NEWBY: This person was Willy Burgdorfer, a medical zoologist who came over from Switzerland in 1951, landed in the Public Health Service in Hamilton, Montana— that was the number one spot for tick research—and he was very shortly enlisted in the biological weapons program headquartered in Frederick, Maryland. His job was to weaponize fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes by putting dangerous diseases in them so that they could be dropped on the enemies. Now, in 2013, he told a filmmaker and me pieces of the story where he admitted that he had been in the biological weapons program for over 10 years and no one had known that. And he’s also the discoverer of Lyme disease, and that’s what really made him world-renowned. So for him to say that, that he had been covering this up for so many years, makes it somewhat credible.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Now, the Representative from New Jersey, Chris Smith, who is a Republican and has introduced an amendment to have the Department of Defense’s Inspector General investigate whether this program actually did exist and whether the Pentagon has weaponized ticks and other insects and unleashed them on the public, has just been voted on and it was proved to be – I think the next step is that it would be reconciled to the Senate bill and it may not make it through the full and final defense budget, but it is true that there has been a rise in Lyme disease cases over the past decade or so.

So these two events have coincided, the release of your book and also the rise in Lyme disease cases, which for some people does cause some alarm. As a matter of fact, the CDC has documented this rise in their recent study called “Lyme and Other Tick-Borne Diseases Increasing.” Now, they cite that the new germs contributing to Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases have been identified. The geographic range of the tick population is expanding, and that can be contributed to over-development of wooded areas, destroying the ecosystems of insects and also climate change. But can those contributing factors account for the entirety of the rise in Lyme disease cases? I guess what I’m asking is, can we rule out the possibility that the Pentagon may have unleashed weaponized ticks and other insects onto the American public or in some areas and it got out of hand?

KRIS NEWBY: I think it’s absolutely proven that there was a tick weapons program. The outstanding question is, was there an accident where some of the infected ticks got out? And maybe they didn’t know they were infected and they were. And there was also aerosolized programs where germs that can be caused by ticks were sprayed over in open air conditions, and did that enter the ecosystem that way? So it can’t be ruled out. And there has been a mystery as to why these three new dangerous virulent tick-borne diseases showed up around Long Island Sound. That’s New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, in 1968, around 1968. And so, in nature, it would be highly unusual for three brand new pathogens to just show up unless there was some sort of manmade intervention.

So that’s the hypothesis of my book. And I go through and present evidence of the development of the tick-borne research program, tick-borne disease research program, accidents that have happened in the past with the ticks, and then Willy’s confession and supporting information to that admission that he thought the outbreak was due to a bio weapons release. He never said it was the Lyme bacteria per se. He intimated it was a different bacterium. But that may be why it’s been confusing to scientists and we need to look into it now with this new information, and that would speed up our development of diagnosis, treatment and cures.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So you’re saying that people are kind of conflating ideas. People are saying, or making the, I guess accusation, that you’re saying that Lyme disease itself was the result of a weaponized tick program from the Pentagon. But you’re saying that there were other pathogens that were discovered at the same time that the Lyme pathogen was discovered and in a scientific process, that’s unheard of. So these other-

KRIS NEWBY: Unlikely. Unlikely.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Unlikely. So the appearance of these other pathogens at the same time that are related, point to something outside of just a natural occurrence.

KRIS NEWBY: Right. And also, strange new species of ticks out of their natural habitat. For example, the Lone Star tick, which is very aggressive and man-biting and spreads disease faster than the traditional native ticks in and around Long Island. So there are documented reports about Lone Star ticks being released in Norfolk, Virginia on the coast, and a year after those experiments, they’re around Long Island. And so it appears that birds helped spread them farther north.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN:  Now, the interesting thing about this story is that as fast as it has come out and there has been attention given to it, some in the more established media circles have already come out and tried to discredit, not necessarily your book. They have not tried to do that directly, but they’ve tried to discredit interestingly enough, Dr. [Burgdorfer]. In a Washington Post article, they quote a scientist who says this of Dr. [Burgdorfer]. The scientist is Michael T. Osterholm, the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. And he said of Dr. [Burgdorfer] that there’s just no credible evidence behind the stories about weaponizing ticks … or Burgdorfer’s … I’m sorry, I mispronounced his name … Dr. Burgdorfer’s involvement with such a project. What do you say to this claim that there is no credible evidence behind the man who you admitted, you said yourself identified the Lyme pathogen, also saying that the Pentagon was weaponizing ticks with not just that pathogen but others?

KRIS NEWBY:    Well, I have him on video saying he weaponized ticks and I have a plethora of documents confirming that, including a progress report to the NIH Director saying Willy Burgdorfer is an outstanding employee and he’s been for three years working on classified programs for the Army that involves ticks. So I would say to Dr. Osterholm, I hope you read the book and then perhaps you’ll be convinced.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN:  So you have a paper trail proving that Dr. Burgdorfer was an employee of the Department of Defense and that he was a part of this program and worked on this program.

KRIS NEWBY:   He was an employee of the NIH, but he had contracts from Fort Dietrich, Maryland to do many, many biological weapons experiments. So I have quite a long paper trail to that, and it’s all posted publicly on the various archives.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: And it’s all in your book?

KRIS NEWBY: Yeah, I mean, the key evidence. There’s much more, as you can see behind me. It’s all there.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So ultimately, let’s go back to this amendment that representative Chris Smith has introduced, which he says is partially inspired by your book, not entirely, but partially inspired by your book and other articles on this subject. As I said, this amendment has to be reconciled to the Senate defense bill. It may not make it into the final approved bill for the Department of Defense, and if that doesn’t happen, if there’s no investigation into this issue, what do you want people to understand about this issue? Is this just another one of those kind of general, “Don’t trust the government,” conspiracy theories or is there really something here that we should take very seriously?

KRIS NEWBY: Well, I’ve been working on this book for five years and then through the documentary that’s another five years, I can say with some authority that the tick-borne epidemic in the US is reaching really serious levels, and the CDC certainly has come out this year to support that premise. I think everybody now knows somebody who has Lyme disease and they have a horror story. And so this denialism—I have to be really clear, it’s not just Lyme disease. It’s the co-infections, too. So when you have the Lyme bacteria plus the co-infections, which may or may not have bio weapons’ ancestry, you get this really bad chronic disease. We need to quit denying that this is a problem and start trying to understand what’s in the ticks, where are they spreading, and we need to develop treatments for the people with the chronic forms of tick-borne diseases. I mean, for Lyme disease alone, there’s only been I think five to seven randomized treatment trials. The last one was 18 years ago, and that’s not good enough for the rate at which these diseases are spreading.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So people are suffering from a disease that is spreading far rapidly than the research for the treatment or even the attention that the medical community should be paying to it, is keeping pace with it.

KRIS NEWBY: Right. I think there’s been a hyper focus on Lyme disease only and the scientists who have all the grants to study it are saying, “Oh, Lyme disease is easy to treat, easy to cure, and if you have lingering symptoms, then you’re a hypochondriac or you have an autoimmune disease.” And I’m hoping that the book opens their eyes to look at the co-infections that might be worsening the original Lyme infection in these people.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Well, we will be fascinated to see what will happen with this amendment that has been introduced by Representative Chris Smith that was partially inspired by the book Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weaponsthat was written by Kris Newby. Thank you so much, Kris, for joining me to talk about your book and this issue today. It was a wonderful conversation and fascinating.

KRIS NEWBY:    Thanks so much.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN:  And thank you for watching. This is Jacqueline Luqman and this is The Real News Network in Baltimore.

The Sinister Legacy of the Second Amendment

While, in the wake of the El Paso murders, the media and most of our politicians are acting shocked—“shocked, I tell you!”—that there are armed racists in America who are trying to terrify people of color, the reality is that it’s pretty much always been that way here in the United States. And until white Americans and the media they control acknowledge that simple history, we won’t be able to do the things we must to change it.

While we need rational gun control, this isn’t a gun control issue.

While we need economic security to be more widely shared, this isn’t an economic issue.

While we need universal, free, high-quality K-PhD education, this isn’t an education issue.

While the Republican Party needs to repudiate the “Southern Strategy” that has animated their racist base since 1968, this isn’t a political issue.

Encompassing all of the above, what we are confronting in America right now is the continuation of policies put into place by white people, to control and exploit Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, since the arrival of Africans in 1619 and the codification of slavery into North American law in 1662.

The institution of slavery can only exist in a police state. Without a constantly vigilant and well-armed force of men (and the rare, occasional woman) patrolling the towns and roads, slaves will rebel and put an end to their own enslavement.

As Sally Hadden notes in her brilliant book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, slaveholding regions had institutionalized police-patrol systems specifically to “regulate” enslaved persons more than 100 years before American independence.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, the colonial government passed laws in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their white male employees to be members of the Georgia militia and those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who might be planning uprisings.

As Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Davis Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”

James Madison even rewrote the Second Amendment into its current form during the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Convention in response to that state’s largest slaveholder, Patrick Henry, demanding that Virginia’s slave patrols be explicitly protected.

While slavery as an institution was abolished after the Civil War by the 13th Amendment (“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”), the organized and systematic domination of people of color for the benefit of whites continues to this day. And the enforcers of that system—both formal and informal—are still very much with us.

State prisons legally enslaving “duly convicted” persons of color; Klan riders and lynching “parties”; cops killing black men for selling loose cigarettes or murdering black children for playing with toy guns; mass shooters raving about “invasion” by Hispanics; white men enforcing segregation by killing black men and boys who look ator date white women: These are the modern incarnations of the old slave patrols that most Americans recognize.

Less easily recognized is the patrolling of America’s economic racial divide, from Trump employees marking “C” for “colored” on rental applications so people of color could be denied residence, to the rigorous application of property tax funding for schools to keep poor districts poor, millions of individual corporate actions and thousands of state and local laws still conspire to “patrol” people of color.

Like his presidential hero Andrew Jackson (nickname: “Indian Killer”), who owned enslaved people and bragged about murdering Native American women and children, Donald Trump speaks to an exclusively white audience, in this era via Twitter and a TV network that, judging from the ratings, programs exclusively to white people.

From “very fine people” who are literally Nazis and white supremacists, to “I’ll pay for your lawyer” calls for violence, to barely speaking in code with words like “invasion” and “infestation,” Trump has cranked up a new generation of white men who, in previous centuries on this continent, would have been enthusiastic members of the police state that protected slavery from rebellion.

The slave patrols never really went away. And the slave patrollers are finding in Trump the president they’ve been missing since Andrew Jackson passed away.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.


Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.