Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 105
May 7, 2024
May 6, 2024
In the New York Times today, Amy Qin and Patricia Mazzei reported on the new Florida law that prohibits many Chinese citizens from buying property in Florida, especially near important infrastructure like airports, refineries, and military installations. Qin and Mazzei note that more than three dozen states either have enacted or are crafting laws to restrict the purchase of land, businesses, or housing by Chinese nationals, even if they have legal residence in the United States. The justification for the laws is that Chinese investment in the U.S. is a national security risk, although Chinese nationals own less than 400,000 acres in the United States.
It was an odd echo, for on this day in 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese workers, but not scholars, businessmen, or diplomats, from immigrating to the United States for ten years. This was the first federal limitation of voluntary immigration to the United States, and it would be extended for more than 60 years.
Chinese migrants had first come to California Territory after the discovery of gold there in 1848. Those who joined the rush to “Gold Mountain” were escaping the devastation of the First Opium War of 1839–1842, hoping to make money in America and then return to China, from which they could not legally emigrate. Expecting to go home again, they retained their languages, their culture, and their clothing. They tended to work the mines Americans had cleaned of their biggest deposits, focusing on meticulous reworking of the gravel, and they did better than native-born Americans thought they should.
With the sudden influx of miners to the region, Congress scrambled to turn California into a state. In 1850 a legislature charged with establishing the legal framework for the proposed state adopted the federal law enacted a half-century earlier, in 1802, that limited citizenship to “free white persons.” The state legislature then went on to impose a foreign miner’s tax on Chinese and Mexican miners; then, in 1854, the state courts agreed that Chinese nationals could not testify in court against white Americans. In 1855 the legislature tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by passing a $50 tax on shipmasters for each person ineligible for citizenship they brought to the state.
The creation of different legal systems for native-born Americans and immigrants in California mirrored the same distinctions in eastern states, prompting members of the new Republican Party like New York’s William Henry Seward and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois to worry that the principle of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was being left behind.
During the Civil War, congressmen were dismayed that European nations were not inclined to support the United States over the Confederacy, and they began to insist the U.S. must turn away from Europe and toward Asia for a new future. In 1867, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner suggested that increased trade with China would expand human freedom, but he was not blind to the commercial possibilities. “All are looking to the Orient…China and Japan, those ancient realms of fabulous wealth,” he said. “To unite the east of Asia with the west of America is the aspiration of commerce….”
In 1868 the United States ratified a treaty with China—the Burlingame Treaty—designed to promote the exchange of people and trade between the two countries. It recognized the right of Chinese to immigrate to the United States “for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.”
Trade between China and the United States picked up, with new ships, called “Down-Easters,” speeding across the waters of the Pacific to bring coal, oil, mechanical equipment, and consumer goods to China and bringing back Chinese sewing chests, shells, and fans that decorated upper-class homes, as well as passengers. In 1869, in his annual message to Congress, President U. S. Grant noted that manufactures were booming. “Through the agency of a more enlightened policy than that heretofore pursued toward China,” he said, “the world is about to commence largely increased relations with that populous and hitherto exclusive nation.”
That vision of global prosperity spread across the East Coast, where shipping towns thrived as their workmen built the schooners that traveled the Pacific trade, but it did not reach to the West Coast.
The same year the Senate ratified the Burlingame Treaty, the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution should have overridden state discrimination against Chinese immigrants. But a loophole that confirmed as citizens “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” allowed western legislatures to fall back on the 1802 naturalization laws that limited citizenship to free white persons. Legislators assumed Chinese immigrants were excluded from citizenship, and in 1870, Congress bowed to that interpretation when it passed a new naturalization law.
A recession that hit California in the wake of the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 exacerbated white inhabitants’ rejection of their Chinese neighbors. Railroad workers moved back to West Coast cities just as the connection to the markets of the East tanked prices in places like San Francisco and threw men out of work. At the same time, the Burlingame Treaty brought more Chinese immigrants to the same cities, convincing white men that they were losing their jobs to an influx of Chinese competitors.
In San Francisco, Irish-born drayman Denis Kearney had built a successful business moving goods around the city by wagon. But he could go only so far because the leading businessmen who ruled San Francisco controlled the freight-moving business, and they refused to fix the street’s potholes. In 1877, Kearney began to organize workingmen, urging them to rise up. Initially, Kearney praised Chinese workers, but he quickly began to blame them for white workingmen’s economic problems. He began to demand that employers fire all their Chinese workers, using the slogan: “The Chinese must go.”
In 1879, Republican senator James G. Blaine, who had an instinctive sense of which way the political winds were blowing and a desperate hunger for the presidency, backed the idea of ending Chinese immigration. Fellow eastern Republicans lambasted him for giving up on democratic principles of human equality, but the 1880 presidential election shocked them into his camp. Republican James Garfield won the election, but by only slightly more than 8,000 votes out of more than 9 million cast. Party leaders had to figure out how to win more states in 1884, and California was a good place to start. Garfield had lost there by only 144 votes out of 164,218 cast.
In 1882, Republicans bowed to western sentiments and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Harper’s Weekly lamented Republican willingness to prohibit “the voluntary immigration of free skilled laborers into the country, and…to renounce the claim that America welcomes every honest comer.” In the following years, western states passed laws prohibiting intermarriage of Chinese with whites and prohibiting “aliens” from owning property.
In 1885, Chinese immigrant Saum Song Bo wrote a letter for a missionary magazine explaining his outrage upon being asked to contribute money to the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. “[T]he word liberty makes me think of the fact that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese,” he wrote. “I consider it as an insult to us Chinese to call on us to contribute toward building in this land a pedestal for a statue of Liberty. That statue represents Liberty holding a torch which lights the passage of those of all nations who come into this country. But are the Chinese allowed to come? As for the Chinese who are here, are they allowed to enjoy liberty as men of all other nationalities enjoy it? Are they allowed to go about everywhere free from the insults, abuse, assaults, wrongs and injuries from which men of other nationalities are free?”
It was not until 1943, in the midst of a war in which China and the U.S. were allies, that the U.S. Congress overturned the Chinese Exclusion Act to permit quotas of Chinese immigrants to come to the U.S.
Today, lawmakers justify laws against Chinese property ownership on the grounds of national security, and the Chinese government is indeed known to use espionage to weaken its geopolitical rivals. But New York Times reporters Qin and Mazzei note that national security experts say “that the specific threat posed by Chinese people owning homes has not been clearly articulated.”
For his part, University of Florida professor Zhengfei Guan, a Chinese national with lawful permanent residency in Florida, is suing the state over another new Florida law, this one banning state universities from working with people from “a country of concern,” including China. The law has created “a culture of fear,” a faculty member told Siena Duncan of Politico, and, if he loses his lawsuit, Guan is thinking of leaving. “My thought is this is not a place for me anymore,” he said.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/us/florida-land-law-chinese-homes.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/us/politics/china-restrictions-distrust.html
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm
Charles Sumner, “The Cession of Russian America to the United States,” (Washington: Congressional Globe Office, 1867), pp. 11–12.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/1880
Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (University of Georgia Press, 1997).
Harper’s Weekly, May 20, 1882, pp. 306–307.
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/29/chinese-professors-florida-ban-00154616
May 6, 2024
May 5, 2024
May 5, 2024
In 1776, as British colonists in North America were contemplating how to construct a new nation, Massachusetts lawyer John Adams famously wrote to friends about the relationship between government and the law. A republic, he wrote, “is an Empire of Laws and not of Men: and therefore…that particular Arrangement…which is best calculated to Secure an exact and impartial Execution of the Laws, is the best Republic.”
In 1787 the framers of the Constitution set out to create a nation built on the rule of law. The next year, the states ratified their new framework, and in 1789, the Constitution went into effect. One of the first acts of the newly seated Congress was to establish a federal court system. The Judiciary Act of 1789 set out the different courts and their jurisdictions. And in 1868, with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans explicitly wrote into the Constitution the principle that all U.S. citizens must be equal before the law. Two years later, they established the Department of Justice to make sure that principle would be honored across the country.
In the past three years, the Biden administration has worked to confirm that the U.S. is a nation of laws. That work has borne fruit. In the past few days, several cases have jumped out in which the administration has used the law to protect ordinary Americans.
On Tuesday, April 30, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenged more than 300 junk patent listings for drugs that treat diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and that help people lose weight, including Ozempic. Bogus patent listings prevent generic drugs from entering the market, keeping brand-name drug prices high. The FTC gives the manufacturer 20 days to withdraw or amend the listing or certify, under penalty of perjury, that they are correct. In November the FTC successfully challenged junk patents on asthma inhalers, reducing their price to $35.
FTC chair Lina Khan said: “By challenging junk patent filings, the FTC is fighting these illegal tactics and making sure that Americans can get timely access to innovative and affordable versions of the medicines they need.”
On Thursday, May 2, Yvette Wang, the chief of staff to Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire businessman who works with Trump associate Steve Bannon (in 2020, law enforcement officers arrested Bannon on Guo’s yacht on charges of fraud), pleaded guilty to conspiring with Guo in a massive fraud scheme that involved wire fraud and money laundering and netted more than $1 billion. Wang personally will forfeit $1.4 billion to the United States and faces up to ten years in prison. The trial for Wang and Guo is scheduled to start on May 20. Guo has pleaded not guilty.
On Friday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the auditing firm for Trump’s social media company and its owner with “massive fraud.” The SEC called BF Borgers a “sham audit mill” and said it “deliberately systemically failed to conduct” audits and reviews that were filed with the SEC between January 2021 and June 2023. Those reports are supposed to inform investors about the value of companies. The SEC fined the company $14 million and banned it from practicing accounting. Its owner, Benjamin Borgers, did not admit wrongdoing but accepted the judgment.
Also on Friday, the Department of Justice released a grand jury’s indictment of Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) and his wife, Imelda, alleging that beginning no later than 2014 and until at least November 2021, they accepted close to $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil and gas company and a Mexican bank and then laundered the payments through Imelda’s company. In exchange, the indictment says, Cuellar agreed to adjust U.S. policy toward Azerbaijan, especially its oil industry, and to oppose laws that would curb money laundering and regulate the payday lending industry.
On Friday, at former president Trump’s fraud trial for interfering in the 2016 election by paying $130,000 to buy the silence of adult film actress Stormy Daniels and falsifying business records to hide the payment, former White House aide Hope Hicks established that Trump had indeed intended to silence Daniels in order to stop voters from hearing her information before the election. Appearing reluctant to testify against Trump, Hicks nonetheless described a conversation with Trump in 2018, after Daniels’s story became public. Trump told her that “it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”
The rule of law protects ordinary Americans and defends their right to elect a government of their choice. But in 2024, it is under attack.
Trump continues to insist that the stories about his extramarital affairs are false, but his main strategy for addressing his many legal troubles is to insist that the justice system is rigged against him. This continues a pattern he began as soon as he took office, when he unsuccessfully pressured FBI director James Comey to drop the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s interaction with Russian operatives. Although FBI directors are supposed to be virtually untouchable during their ten-year term, Trump fired Comey and then spent the rest of his term accusing the FBI of persecuting him.
That attack on our judicial system expanded to sweep in all the judges who ruled against his campaign operatives and his extremist policies on immigration. He called the courts a “joke” and a “laughingstock” and attacked the Justice Department as a whole and judges personally.
Those attacks increased after Trump left office and was indicted for his efforts to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. An analysis by NBC News of more than 14,000 Trump posts and reposts from April 2022 to January 6, 2024, showed that in some periods he attacked the judicial system more than he promoted his campaign. He aimed his attacks most often at special counsel Jack Smith, as well as New York attorney general Letitia James; Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over Trump’s Manhattan fraud trial; Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg; and Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis—all of whom are in charge of cases against Trump.
Reporters Dareh Gregorian and Jasmine Cui wrote: “The posts generally portray Trump as the victim of a Democratic scheme designed to derail his presidential bid, with an array of judges and prosecutors working against him at the behest of President Joe Biden, and all part of a partisan ‘witch hunt,’ a term he used about 250 times during that time period.”
At a meeting for donors at Mar-a-Lago Saturday, Trump complained about the criminal charges against him, calling Jack Smith a “f**king a**hole,” and accused President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration,” a reference to the German secret police that crushed opposition and rounded up Jews, Roma, LGBT individuals, and other targeted groups during World War II.
Trump has vowed to take control of the Justice Department and make it serve his interests. Chris Geidner of Law Dork noted today that the federal courts already favor Republicans, and a second Trump presidency would allow him to fill multiple court vacancies, probably including some on the Supreme Court, with his extremists. They would cement the ideology of MAGA Republicans into our laws for the foreseeable future.
Trump’s war on the Department of Justice over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has already progressed into an attempt to delegitimize the results of the 2024 election, suggesting he does not believe he will win in a free and fair election.
Yesterday, Charlie Spies, the Republican Party’s top lawyer, resigned after Trump turned on him for his public statements that the 2020 election was not stolen. Spies was one of three lawyers the Trump team hired in March after it took over the Republican National Committee (RNC). An establishment Republican lawyer, Spies was paired with MAGA lawyer and former right-wing One America News Network anchor Christina Bobb to oversee the RNC’s so-called election integrity unit. Now Spies is out and Bobb, who has been indicted for election fraud for her participation in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, remains.
In an astonishing exchange on Meet the Press this morning, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), who is angling to become Trump’s vice presidential pick, refused six times to say he would accept the results of the 2024 election if Trump didn’t win. Host Kristen Welker asked: “Will you commit to accepting the election results of 2024?” Scott responded: “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump.” Welker followed up: “Yes or no, will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter who wins?” Scott answered: “That is my statement.”
When Welker continued to push the question, Scott accused NBC of working for the “Democrat Party” but refused ever to agree to the peaceful transition of power, which, as Welker noted, is the hallmark of the democratic republic people like John Adams established in 1789.
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Notes:
https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/PJA04dg2
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/federal-judiciary-act
https://time.com/6974644/bf-borgers-charged-fraud-trump-media/
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/gkpldnoolpb/05032024wang_plea.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/04/trump-rnc-spies-election-fraud/
https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/republicans-prepare-a-new-wave-of-legal-attacks-on-voting/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24636508-cuellar-indictment
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/03/trump-hush-money-trial-hope-hicks-testimony/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/his-own-words-presidents-attacks-courts
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-trials-attacks-judges-rcna131916
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/04/trump-indictments-attacks-democrats-gestapo/
Law DorkSix months out: The dangers to — and from — the courts in a second Trump administrationElection Day is six months away. Donald Trump’s election to a second term would, at its least harmful, lead to the appointment of scores of more, younger, and potentially even more extreme judges. It would lead to the end of his federal prosecutions and arguments that remaining state prosecutions cannot proceed while he is president. And, Trump would, yet again, wield the powers of the executive branch…Read more12 hours ago · 42 likes · 4 comments · Chris GeidnerTwitter (X):
RpsAgainstTrump/status/1787167295288008745
kylegriffin1/status/1787137740900913154
May 4, 2024
May 4, 2024
I’ve worked my way out to the West Coast over the past several days, and in the process, stopped by this vernal pool in Michigan. Not my usual haunts, but it said “Spring” just as clearly as the peepers do in Maine.
Headed to bed before an early wake up call tomorrow to head back to the other coast.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
May 3, 2024
It has been quite a week of news, and I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who’s tired. So I figure it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to look elsewhere for a bit of a break. Tomorrow is the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, and in its honor, I'm posting a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on Ten Famous American Horses. It has no deep meaning...it’s just fun. And it was totally fun to research, too: I watched hours and hours of Mr. Ed and reading television history to try to figure out what made it such a popular show. This remains one of my favorite things I ever had a hand in writing.
1) Traveller
General Robert E. Lee rode Traveller (spelled with two Ls, in the British style) from February 1862 until the general’s death in 1870. Traveller was a grey American Saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches, and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee’s hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveller with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University. Traveller died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the safe ride program still uses his name.
2) Comanche
Comanche was attached to General Custer’s detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden and that he would always be paraded, draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral (the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s). Comanche’s taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University Of Kansas.
3) Beautiful Jim Key
Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how Beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated ten million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia—buttons, photos, and postcards—or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step. Dr. Key insisted that he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key’s popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged: “I promise always to be kind to animals.”
4) Man o’ War
Named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who was overseas in World War I, Man o’ War is widely regarded as the top Thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early twentieth century. His one loss—to “Upset”—came after a bad start. Man o’ War sired many of America’s famous racehorses, including Hard Tack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.
5) Trigger
Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the palomino Trigger from five rented horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a Styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made: it is “Bucky the Bronco,” which rears above the Denver Broncos stadium south scoreboard.
6) Sergeant Reckless
American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a land mine. The marines named her Reckless after their unit’s nickname, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide: on one notable day she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war, when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.
7) Mr. Ed
Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name. At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Allan “Rocky” Lane, who made dozens of “B” westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle, homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show.
8) Black Jack
Black Jack, named for John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, was the riderless black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse, with boots reversed in the stirrups, symbolized a fallen leader, while Black Jack’s brands—a U.S. brand and an army serial number—recalled the army’s history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors; the only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche.
9) Khartoum
Khartoum was the prize stud horse of Jack Woltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. In one of the film version’s most famous scenes, after Woltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone to cast singer Johnny Fontane in a movie, Woltz wakes up to find Khartoum’s head in bed with him… and agrees to use Fontane in the film. In the novel, Fontane wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to old Hollywood rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
10) Secretariat
Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989, an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sportswriter Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning; Charlie Hatton replied, “The trees swayed.”
May 3, 2024
May 2, 2024
More than 2,000 people have been arrested at protests on college and university campuses around the country opposing Israel’s military strikes on Gaza since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, and the subsequent humanitarian crisis there. It is unclear how many of the protesters are students, as many of those arrested have not been affiliated with the universities, or how many of the arrests will result in charges—sometimes arrests at protests are designed simply to clear an area.
The roots of today’s protests lie in an investigation by the Republican-dominated House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The committee announced the investigation on December 7, two days after its members spent more than five hours grilling then-president of Harvard University Claudine Gay, then-president of University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill, and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sally Kornbluth on how their universities were handling student protests against Israel over its military response to Hamas’s attack of October 7.
Led by Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Republicans on the committee insisted that the universities were not protecting Jewish students. The university presidents responded that they deplored antisemitism, that students had the right to free speech, and that they took action against those who violated policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation. But in their defense of free speech, they admitted both that hate speech against Jews and others is sometimes protected and that they had sometimes made bad calls.
The Republicans’ interest in protecting Jewish students on campus overlapped with their opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that they associate with Democrats. Burgess Owens (R-UT) said DEI initiatives protect Black students at the expense of others. “I just remember a couple of years ago when we were dealing with Black Lives Matter,” he said. “Try to talk about Blue Lives Matter, Jew Lives Matter, Arab Lives Matter—they call it racist. It’s time for us to focus on what’s happening on your campuses.”
Stefanik called the testimony “pathetic” and, along with 74 other members of Congress, demanded that Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resign. On January 2, following accusations she had plagiarized scholarly work, she did. Her resignation followed that of Liz Magill. “TWO DOWN,” Stefanik wrote on social media.
Two days after the university presidents’ testimony, Stefanik announced that the House Education and Workforce Committee would be investigating universities. “We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage,” she said.
On February 12 the committee informed Columbia it was next up. Columbia University president Nemat "Minouche" Shafik had been unable to testify with the other presidents in December and gave her testimony to the committee on April 17, along with co-chairs of the Board of Trustees Claire Shipman and David Greenwald and former dean David Schizer over the university's response to antisemitism.
In an April 16 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Shafik wrote that “antisemitism and calls for genocide have no place at a university…but that leaves plenty of room for robust disagreement and debate.” She said she prioritizes “the safety and security of our community” and that while the attack of October 7 had a "deep personal impact" on the Jewish and Israeli communities, there was also a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza, and the war was "part of a larger story of Palestinian displacement." She explained that Columbia had defined a space for protests to enable those they upset to avoid them.
Opening the hearing, committee chair Foxx said: “Since October 7, this Committee and the nation have watched in horror as so many of our college campuses, particularly the most expensive, so-called elite schools, have erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate.” Stefanik called out tenured professor Joseph Massad of the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department, who called the October 7 attack a “stunning victory.”
Shafik responded by condemning the professor’s statements. “Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months…. We do not, and will not, tolerate antisemitic threats, images, and other violations…. We have enforced, and we will continue to enforce, our policies against such actions,” she said.
Ilhan Omar (D-MN) questioned Shafik about discrimination against pro-Palestinian protesters. She noted that Israel-born assistant professor Shai Davidai was accused of harassing pro-Palestinian students; Shafik said they have had more than 50 complaints about him and he is under investigation.
On April 17, the same day the Columbia officials testified, pro-Palestinian protesters organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a self-described “coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation”), Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace set up a camp at the university. It garnered little attention; the April 18 New York Times did not mention it. According to Sharif, the school warned protesters they would be suspended if the encampment was not removed. They stayed. On April 18, according to New York mayor Eric Adams, Columbia officials called in New York City police to disband the protest. They arrested more than 100 people, including Representative Omar’s daughter, a Columbia student. The arrests were peaceful.
University faculty and community members were shocked by the resort to law enforcement at a place known both for learning and debate and for its history. In April 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, a week of protests after students learned of Columbia’s support for weapons research and its plan to construct a seemingly segregated gym in a nearby community had led New York City police to crush the demonstrations with violence.
In the days after the current arrests, nearly a dozen student and faculty groups released statements or open letters objecting to the police presence on campus and supporting students’ rights to free speech and peaceful protest. The protest encampment sprang back up.
At the same time, Jewish leaders warned that antisemitism was increasing. Rabbi Elie Buechler, of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel and Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, urged Jewish students to return home for Passover, which began April 22, and to stay there for their own safety.
In the next weeks, protests sprang up around the country, with protesters generally demanding that university administrators divest from investments in Israel or in companies that sell weapons, technology, or construction equipment to Israel, and cut ties to Israeli universities. They have tended to turn their anger against President Joe Biden and his administration, whom they blame for what they call a genocide in Gaza. Universities have responded in a variety of ways, from discussion to armed law enforcement officers.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have insisted that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas and have continued to provide Israel with military defenses, whose importance in stopping the war from spreading showed on April 14, when those defenses shot down virtually all of the weapons Iran launched at Israel. They are working hard for a ceasefire, with Blinken currently in the Middle East and a proposal on the table that Israel has accepted but Hamas has not.
The administration has also stood against the initial policy of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration to cordon off Gaza without food, water, or electricity, and has pressured Israel into permitting humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has also firmly opposed Israeli plans to attack Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter, and has stood firmly in favor of a Palestinian state, which the protesters have not indicated they endorse.
On April 24, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) visited Columbia, where he called for Shafik to resign. On Monday, April 29, he and Republican leadership met to discuss how they might reenergize the party and gain traction now that their impeachment effort against Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has flopped, the conference is bitterly split, their control of the House of Representatives has resulted in one of the least productive congresses in American history, and their presumptive presidential nominee is being tried for election interference that involved paying off women with whom he had extramarital sex. They settled on campus antisemitism—although Trump’s open embrace of white nationalists makes this problematic—and the campus protests as a sign that Democrats are the party of disorder.
On that same day, 21 House Democrats wrote a letter to Columbia’s trustees demanding they “act decisively, disband the encampment, and ensure the safety and security of all of its students.” That night, protesters took control of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where they broke windows and vandalized furniture. About twenty hours later, police in riot gear arrested them. Arrests across the country climbed.
Yesterday, Representative Foxx announced that her committee’s antisemitism investigation will expand into a Congress-wide crackdown on colleges. In a press conference, she said she had a clear message for “mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders. Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of duty to your Jewish students. American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back.”
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that right-wing politicians jumped on the Kent State shootings of May 1970 to defund colleges and universities, while a “law and order” backlash helped to give Republican president Richard M. Nixon a landslide reelection in 1972.
Today, President Biden addressed the protests, saying they “test two fundamental American principles. The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.”
Biden called for lawful, peaceful protests and warned: “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations—none of this is a peaceful protest…. Dissent is essential to democracy,” he said, “But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education…. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”
When asked, he told reporters he did not think the National Guard should be involved in suppressing the protests.
Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu of the New York Times reported today that Russia, China, and Iran are amplifying the protests “to score geopolitical points abroad and stoke tensions within the United States,” as well as to “undermine President Biden’s reelection prospects.”
It is unclear if the protests will continue during the summer, when fewer students will be on campus.
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/college-presidents-testifying-campus-antisemitism-00130277
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/claudine-gay-resign-harvard/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/university-of-pennsylvania-president-resigns.html
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/9/congress-resignation-calls/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/03/sally-kornbluth-mit-president/72099065007/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/07/colleges-anitsemitism-house-education-committee-00130666
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/columbia-antisemitism-house-testimony/index.html
https://electronicintifada.net/content/just-another-battle-or-palestinian-war-liberation/38661
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/columbia-antisemitism-house-testimony/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2022/04/18/todays-new-york-times
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68939445
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/24/politics/johnson-columbia-university-president/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/02/politics/johnson-gop-agenda-college-campus-protests/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/business/media/campus-protests-russia-china-iran-us.html
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/26/1247527512/columbia-university-protests-1968-2024-history
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/02/middleeast/us-saudi-treaty-israel-palestinian-statehood-intl
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/nyregion/columbia-students-hamilton-hall.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/columbias-hamilton-hall-takeover-photos-from-inside.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/30/nyregion/columbia-protests-college
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May 2, 2024
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