Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 115
March 15, 2024
March 15, 2024
Today, more prominent Republicans rejected Trump as the apparent Republican presidential nominee. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence said he would not endorse Trump for president, and President George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney (the father of former Wyoming Republican representative Liz Cheney), released a video opposing Trump’s presidential run, warning: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
Three years ago, I wrote about a similar effort in the 1850s that brought a coalition together to stop a small group of men from taking over the country.
I’m reposting that piece tonight, partly because I have been traveling all day and need a decent night’s sleep, and partly because I love this story. It’s the one that first got me interested in history in college and then introduced me to my doctoral advisor, the great David Herbert Donald. And it encompasses so much of what we are doing in America today.
I have wondered lately if the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision isn’t our era’s version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sparking a countrywide backlash.
Just a thought.
Anyway, a little backstory: the man who taught me to use a chainsaw is real—together we cleared a field gone to alders in summer 1978. An adze is a woodcutting tool. And Hannibal Hamlin is one of the few topics Buddy and I could find to talk about on our tongue-tied first date.
So, here is the story of why March 15 is an important day in U.S. history. As I wrote three years ago:
March 15 is too important a day to ignore. As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”
He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.
Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a “free state”—one that did not permit slavery—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.
They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.
But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.
The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at slavery where it could—by, for example, outlawing slave sales in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.
There was also another powerful way in which the conditions of the state’s entry into the Union would affect American history. Mainers were angry that their statehood had been tied to the demands of far distant slave owners, and that anger worked its way into the state’s popular culture. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that Maine men, who grew up steeped in that anger, could spread west.
And so they did.
In 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.
Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, had also moved west from Maine. Owen saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. "I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother's blood," he declared. He turned to politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln.
Lovejoy and Lincoln were also friends with another Maine man gone to Illinois. Elihu Washburne had been born in Livermore, Maine, in 1816, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. He was one of seven brothers, and one by one, his brothers had all left home, most of them to move west. Israel Washburn Jr., the oldest, stayed in Maine, but Cadwallader moved to Wisconsin, and William Drew would follow, going to Minnesota. (Elihu was the only brother who spelled his last name with an e).
Israel and Elihu were both serving in Congress in 1854 when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturning the Missouri Compromise and permitting the spread of slavery to the West. Furious, Israel called a meeting of 30 congressmen in May to figure out how they could come together to stand against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. They met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson, of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, they left with one sole principle: to stop the Slave Power that was turning the government into an oligarchy.
The men scattered for the summer back to their homes across the North, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. In the fall, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates were sweeping into office—Cadwallader Washburn would be elected from Wisconsin in 1854 and Owen Lovejoy from Illinois in 1856—and they would, indeed, create a new political party: the Republicans. The new party took deep root in Maine, flipping the state from Democratic to Republican in 1856, the first time it fielded a presidential candidate.
In 1859, Abraham Lincoln would articulate an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans standing together against the oligarchs of slavery, and when he ran for president in 1860, he knew it was imperative that he get the momentum of Maine men on his side. In those days Maine voted for state and local offices in September, rather than November, so a party’s win in Maine could start a wave. “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” the saying went.
So Lincoln turned to Hannibal Hamlin, who represented Maine in the Senate (and whose father had built the house in which the Washburns grew up). Lincoln won 62% of the vote in Maine in 1860, taking all eight of the state’s electoral votes, and went on to win the election. When he arrived in Washington quietly in late February to take office the following March, Elihu Washburne was at the railroad station to greet him.
I was not a great student in college. I liked learning, but not on someone else’s timetable. It was this story that woke me up and made me a scholar. I found it fascinating that a group of ordinary people from country towns who shared a fear that they were losing their democracy could figure out how to work together to reclaim it.
Happy Birthday, Maine.
—
Notes:
March 14, 2024
March 14, 2024
This morning, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one of the highest-ranking Jewish officials in the U.S. government, said Israelis need to call new elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, Schumer said, “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” Schumer, who is a strong ally of Israel and who also blamed Hamas for the crisis in the Middle East, warned that the deadly toll on civilians in Gaza under the policies of Netanyahu’s government is “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
Netanyahu needs to hold his far-right coalition together to escape the corruption trial in which he is currently at risk, and that coalition wants continued attacks on Hamas. Netanyahu has announced that Israel’s forces are planning to invade the city of Rafah, where about 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering, despite President Joe Biden’s warning that such an invasion must have a plan to protect civilians “that was actually planned, prepared and implementable.”
Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is so bad that the U.S. and other countries are conducting airdrops of essential relief—airdrops are a poor substitute for land-based aid—and Netanyahu’s government has rejected the call of neighboring Arab states, the U.S., and the European Union for a real path to a Palestinian state, instead trying to prevent such a state by pushing more settlements in the West Bank. On a hot mic at the State of the Union address last Tuesday, Biden told Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Senator Michael Bennett (D-CO): “I told him, Bibi…you and I are going to have a come to Jesus meeting,” slang for a moment that precipitates a major change.
Netanyahu’s far-right government is deeply unpopular in Israel. In January, only 15% of Israelis wanted him to keep his job after the war on Hamas ends, and three days ago the U.S. intelligence community assessed in its annual report on the threats facing the United States that “[d]istrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections.” It concluded: “A different, more moderate government is a possibility.” Centrist political rival Benny Gantz has visited the U.S. and the U.K. recently.
“As a democracy, Israel has the right to choose its own leaders, and we should let the chips fall where they may,” Schumer said. “But the important thing is that Israelis are given a choice.”
Netanyahu has forged strong ties in the U.S. with Republicans; in 2015 he spoke before Congress at the invitation of Republicans in an attempt to undermine then-president Barack Obama’s negotiations with Iran to stop that country’s development of nuclear weapons. Today, Republicans slammed Schumer’s speech. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said: “We need to be standing with Israel. We need to give our friends and allies our full support.”
In Hungary today, the U.S. ambassador launched a similar pushback against a far-right leader whose personal interests are driving his country’s policies.
Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hungary’s joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). U.S. Ambassador David Pressman used the occasion to warn Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán that the United States has lost patience with his embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, his undermining of support for Ukraine, and his open advocacy of Trump’s return to the White House.
Pressman noted that the U.S. and Hungary have long historic ties, reaching all the way back to the American Revolution and the influence of revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth—who is one of two foreign leaders whose busts are in the U.S. Capitol—on the defense of democracy in the years before the Civil War. “What unites these connections between our two nations is the shared longing of our peoples for liberty and democracy,” Pressman said.
When Hungary joined NATO in 1999, Pressman noted, Viktor Orbán was prime minister, and he was proud of the country’s democratic future aligned with a transatlantic community of democracies. Now, he said, Hungary’s choices are increasingly isolating it from its friends and allies.
“We cannot ignore it when the Speaker of Hungary’s National Assembly asserts that Putin’s war in Ukraine is actually ‘led by the United States,’” Pressman said. “We cannot ignore a sitting minister referring to the United States as a corpse whose nails continue to grow. We can neither understand nor accept the Prime Minister identifying the United States as a ‘top adversary’ of our Ally, Hungary. Or his assertion that the United States government is trying to overthrow the Hungarian government—literally, to ‘defeat’ him.”
“While the Hungarian government’s wild rhetoric in state-controlled media may incite passion, or ignite an electoral base, the choice to issue, on a daily basis, dangerously unhinged anti-American messaging is a policy choice, and it risks changing Hungary’s relationship with America,” Pressman said.
The ambassador called out Orbán’s “systematic takeover of independent media,” the use of government power to “provide favorable treatment for companies owned by party leaders or their families, in-laws, or old friends,” and law defending “a single party’s effort to monopolize public discourse.” “[T]his is not something we expect from allies,” Pressman said. The U.S. seeks to engage through dialogue and is willing to speak honestly, he said, but he warned that the U.S. is ready “to act in response to choices the government is making.”
“Hungary’s allies are warning Hungary of the dangers of its close and expanding relationship with Russia,” Pressman said. “If this is Hungary’s policy choice—and it has become increasingly clear that it is with the Foreign Minister’s sixth trip to Russia since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with his next trip to Russia scheduled in two weeks, following his engagement with Russia’s Foreign Minister earlier this month, and the Prime Minister’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in China—we will have to decide how best to protect our security interests, which, as Allies, should be our collective security interests.”
Pressman called out Orbán for his open support for Trump—Orbán visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week and has repeatedly expressed his hope that he will be returned to the White House—and his active participation in U.S. partisan political events. Orbán is a darling of the far right and has appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) more than once.
“While Hungary attempts to wait out those it disagrees with, whether in the United States or the European Union, the rest of the world is moving forward,” Pressman said. “While the Orbán government may want to wait out the United States Government, the United States will certainly not wait out the Orbán administration. While Hungary waits, we will act,” he said.
“[W]e want what polls consistently show the vast majority of Hungarians want: a close relationship between the United States and Hungary, rooted in democratic values and shared security and prosperity. Exactly what the Prime Minister said he wanted 25 years ago,” he said. “And that is what we still want today.”
The U.S. has pledged to defend member states in the family of democracies, Pressman said, and while Hungary tied itself to those democracies 25 years ago, “this government’s actions and rhetoric make it sound like it does not feel so firmly anchored. The United States would not be acting as your ally if we did not forthrightly express concern about the course Hungary is charting, through rough seas of its own choosing. We anchored together 25 years ago as democratic Allies; it remains our hope that we sail forward together as part of a stronger, and now larger, democratic Alliance—a choice that remains up to Hungary, its government and its people.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/04/world/netanyahu-corruption-trial-resumes/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gantz-netanyahu-gaza-war-5174c723b53747229cc43b254f1768a7
https://www.americanhungarianfederation.org/news_AHFHistory_Kossuth_Capitol.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/11/biden-netanyahu-call-rafah-hostages/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/politics/us-intelligence-report-netanyahu/index.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/biden-and-netanyahu-rush-to-a-breach
March 13, 2024
March 13, 2024
After yesterday’s primary contests, we appear headed toward a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. But this year’s election is an entirely different kettle of fish than that of 2020.
In 2020 there were plenty of red flags around Trump’s plans for a second term, but it was not until after it was clear he had lost the election that he gave up all pretense of normal presidential behavior. Beginning the night of the election, he tried to overturn that election and to install himself as president, ignoring the will of the voters, who had chosen Joe Biden. His attack on the fundamental principle of democracy ended the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power established in 1797 when our first president, George Washington, deliberately walked behind his successor, John Adams, after Adams was sworn into office.
Trump then refused to step aside for his successor as all of his predecessors had done, and has continued to push the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. His loyalists in the states have embraced that lie, undermining faith in our electoral system, although they have never produced any evidence for their claims of voter fraud. (Remember the Cyber Ninjas who handled the election “audit” in Arizona? The company went out of business in 2022.)
Then, a year after he left office, news broke that Trump had compromised the country’s national security by retaining highly classified documents and storing them in unsecured boxes at Mar-a-Lago. When the federal government tried to recover them, he hid them from officials. In June 2023 a grand jury in Miami indicted Trump on 37 felony counts related to that theft.
Trump is not the same as he was in 2020, and in the past three years he has transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle for Christian nationalism.
In 2016 the Republican Party was still dominated by leaders who promoted supply-side economics. They were determined to use the government to cut taxes and regulations to concentrate money and power among a few individuals, who would, theoretically, use that money and power to invest in the economy far more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Before 2016 that Reaganesque party had stayed in office thanks to the votes of a base interested in advancing patriarchal, racist, and religious values.
But Trump flipped the power structure in the party, giving control to the reactionary base. In the years since 2020, the Republican Party has become openly opposed to democracy, embracing the Christian nationalism of leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who maintains that the tenets of democracy weaken a nation by giving immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women the same rights as heterosexual, native-born white men.
Rather than calling for a small federal government that stays out of the way of market forces, as Republicans have advocated since 1980, the new Trump Party calls for a strong government that enforces religious rules and bans abortion; books; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and so on. In 2022, thanks to the three extremists Trump put on the Supreme Court, the government ceased to recognize a constitutional right that Americans had enjoyed since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision: the right to abortion.
Last week, Trump formally took over the apparatus of the Republican Party, installing loyalists—including his daughter-in-law—at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and purging the organization of all but his own people. Indicating its priorities, the RNC has hired Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, former correspondent at the right-wing media outlet One American News Network and promoter of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, as senior counsel for election integrity.
In Congress, far-right Trump supporters are paralyzing the House of Representatives. The Republicans took power after the midterm elections of 2022 and have run one of the least effective congresses in history. Far-right members have refused to agree to anything that didn’t meet their extremist positions, while first Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and then Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to reach out to Democrats to pass legislation except for must-pass laws like appropriations, when Democrats provide the majority of the votes that keep the government functioning.
The result has been a Congress that can get virtually nothing done and instead has focused on investigations of administration officials—including the president—which have failed spectacularly. Republican members who actually want to pass laws are either leaving or declining to run for reelection. The conference has become so toxic that fewer than 100 members agreed to attend their annual retreat that began today. "I'd rather sit down with Hannibal Lecter and eat my own liver," a Republican member of Congress told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios.
Meanwhile, Trump has promised that if he returns to office, he will purge the nonpartisan civil service we have had since 1883, replacing career employees with his own loyalists. He has called for weaponizing the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, and his advisors say he will round up and put into camps 10 million people currently living in the U.S., not just undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers but also those with birthright citizenship, tossing away a right that has been enshrined in the Constitution since 1868.
Internationally, he has aligned with dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and has threatened to abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security pact that has protected the U.S. and like-minded nations since 1949.
If Trump has descended into authoritarianism since 2020, Biden has also changed. For all his many decades of public service, it was unclear in 2020 what he could actually accomplish as president, especially since Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had weaponized the filibuster to stop Congress from passing anything on the Democrats’ wish list. But on January 5, 2021, in a special election, Georgia voters elected Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and the Democrats took control of the Senate as well as of the House.
In Biden’s first two years—with the help of then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who managed a squeaky-small House majority—Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic majority, and on occasion, a few Republicans set out to demonstrate that the government could work for ordinary Americans. They passed a series of laws that rivaled President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s.
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan rebuilt the economy after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic; the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) is rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges; the $280 billion Chips and Science Act invests in semiconductor manufacture and scientific research; the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act enables the government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and invests in programs to combat climate change. Projects funded by these measures are so popular that Republicans who voted against them are trying to claim credit.
Biden, Harris, and the Democrats have diversified the government service, defended abortion rights, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, relieved debt by enforcing the terms of student loans, passed a gun safety law, and reinforced NATO.
They set out to overturn supply-side economics, restoring the system on which the nation had been based between 1933 and 1981, in which the government regulated business, maintained a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. The result was the strongest economic recovery from the pandemic of any country in the world.
“Now, the general election truly begins, and the contrast could not be clearer,” Harris wrote after Biden secured the nomination. “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and our fundamental freedoms. He is proud of his role in overturning Roe, and has talked openly about plans for a nationwide abortion ban. He routinely praises authoritarian leaders and has himself vowed to be a dictator on Day One. Just this week, he said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare would be on the table if he receives a second term. Each of these stances ought to be considered disqualifying by itself; taken together, they reveal the former President to be an existential danger to our country.
“With his State of the Union speech last week, President Biden passionately presented our alternative vision. We will reduce costs for families, make housing more affordable, and raise the minimum wage. We will restore Roe, protect voting rights, and finally address our gun violence epidemic. The American people overwhelmingly support this agenda over Donald Trump’s extreme ideas, and that will propel our campaign in the months ahead.”
It appears that Biden and Trump will square off again in 2024 as they did in 2020, but the election is not a replay of four years ago. Both candidates are now known quantities, and they have clearly laid out very different plans for America’s future.
—
Reminder: These letters are available in a free audio version at Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/politics/rnc-trump-takeover-lawyers-election/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/trump-documents-investigation-timeline-087f0c9a8368bb983a16b67dd31dcd4c
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/12/house-republican-retreat-infighting
https://punchbowl.news/article/never-ending-impeachment-inquiry/
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March 12, 2024
March 12, 2024 (Tuesday)
Today, Democratic voters in Georgia gave President Joe Biden enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president when the Democratic National Convention is held in August. Republican voters in Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington gave Trump enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination, although former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race last week, continues to win voters—more than 21% in Washington.
Also today, Special Counsel Robert Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee about his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents in his possession from his years as vice president. The hearing appeared to show that the Democrats have finally found a way to defang the tactic Republicans have been using since the 1990s. For decades now, under the guise of the important function of congressional oversight, Republicans have weaponized congressional hearings to smear Democrats in the media.
In this Congress, and especially today, rather than accept the framework the Republicans advance as they try to craft a narrative for right-wing media, Democrats have pushed back with facts and their own story.
In January 2023, apparently wishing to avoid accusations that the Department of Justice was favoring Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur, a partisan Republican whom Trump had appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland, to oversee the investigation into whether Biden had mishandled classified documents.
In his final report, released last month, Hur concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter...even if there was no policy against charging a sitting president.” But then Hur went on for more than 300 pages to offer a picture of Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Notably, Hur reported that Biden did not remember the date of his son Beau Biden’s death.
The media ran with that editorializing rather than the fact that Hur had concluded that criminal charges were not warranted. Stories about Biden’s age swamped the media. Judd Legum of Popular Information found that in the four days after Hur’s report appeared, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal together published 81 articles about Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory, suggesting that Biden was sliding into dementia and should not be running for reelection.
Republicans immediately demanded the transcriptions of Biden’s interviews with Hur and his staff, saying they needed more information for their case for impeaching Biden. Republican House leadership issued a statement that “[a] man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”
House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen.
But while Republicans clearly designed their plans for this Congress’s investigations to seed smears of Democrats in the public mind, Democrats have come to hearings exceedingly well prepared to turn the tables back on the Republicans. That strategy was obvious today as it quickly became clear in the hearing that it was not Biden who was on the hot seat.
Hours before the hearing was about to begin, the Department of Justice released a transcript of Biden’s interviews, held in the two days after Hamas attacked Israel as he rushed to respond to that crisis. The transcripts belied Hur’s portrayal of Biden’s answers; among other things, he clearly knew the exact date Beau died.
The transcript also revealed a pointed contrast between Trump and Biden, with the president telling investigators he didn’t “own a stock or a bond that I’m aware of…. I never wanted to have any argument…. The thing I valued most my whole life, my reputation and integrity. So I never wanted to have anything that someone said, you bought that stock and it went up because you traded. Never did that.”
Democrats came to the hearing prepared to turn it into a hearing on Trump. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) called out Hur for unprofessional behavior in disparaging the president after finding the matter should be dismissed. Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) suggested Hur was angling for an appointment in a second Trump administration and asked him to demonstrate his credibility by pledging that he would not accept such an appointment. Hur declined to do so.
The hearing was covered live on various television channels, and the Democrats used that media time to show videos of Trump slurring his words, forgetting names, and speaking in word salad, getting their own sound bites to voters. They got Hur to spell out the clear contrast between Trump’s theft of documents and Biden’s cooperation with the government.
Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.
In other news today, pressure on House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring up the national security supplemental bill that includes aid for Ukraine continues to increase. Although the administration says it has found an additional $300 million from Pentagon cost savings to supply artillery rounds and munitions for Ukraine, national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters:
“It is nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine's battlefield needs and it will not prevent Ukraine from running out of ammunition."
House Democrats are working to get enough signatures on a discharge petition to force Johnson to bring up a vote on a supplemental bill—which is expected to pass if it makes it to a vote—and today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) also added pressure, encouraging Johnson to bring up the measure that passed the Senate in mid-February. “Allow a vote,” he said. “A vote. Let the House speak.”
Johnson’s control of the House, such as it is, got a little weaker today as Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) announced he is leaving Congress at the end of next week. “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress and having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress,” Buck told CNN’s Dana Bash. “But I’m leaving because I think there’s a job to do out there…. This place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people.”
The Internal Revenue Service today launched a pilot program in 12 states to enable taxpayers to file their federal tax returns directly, for free. The Treasury Department estimates that about one third of all tax returns are simple enough to use this new system and that about 19 million taxpayers could use it this season.
—
Notes:
Popular InformationManufacturing a political crisisRobert Hur, the Republican special prosecutor assigned to investigate President Biden, is a lawyer, not a doctor. On Thursday, Hur issued a lengthy report that came to the legal conclusion that charges against Biden for mishandling classified materials were not warranted. In the report, Hur also opined, based on a few hours of interviews, that Biden had…Read morea month ago · 705 likes · 181 comments · Judd Legumhttps://www.mediamatters.org/joe-biden/political-press-runs-hurs-scurrilous-partisan-attack
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/debatingourdestiny/1984.html
https://www.cnn.com/2012/10/02/politics/debate-moments-that-mattered/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/politics/ken-buck-leaving-congress-early/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/irs-direct-file-taxes-98dbc44cc764972991072efbf40f2291
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report-from-special-counsel-robert-k-hur-february-2024.pdf
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March 11, 2024
March 11, 2024 (Monday)
Authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary visited former president Trump in Florida on Friday, and on Sunday, Orbán assured Hungarian state media that Trump “will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” Russian state media gloated at the news, and that Trump’s MAGA allies in Congress are already helping him end support for Ukraine.
President Joe Biden and a strong majority of lawmakers in both chambers of Congress, as well as defense officials, support appropriating more aid to Ukraine, believing its defense is crucial to America’s national security. Today, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once again called such aid “critical.”
The Senate passed a national security supplemental bill early in the morning on February 13, by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. The bill would be expected to pass the House, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, refuses to bring it up for a vote.
Trump loyalists have been obstructing aid to Ukraine since President Joe Biden asked for it in October 2023. Their insistence that they would not address the national security needs of the U.S. in Ukraine until they were addressed at the border now sure looks like a smokescreen to help Russian president Vladimir Putin take Ukraine, a plan that would explain why Trump urged Republicans to kill the national security supplemental bill even when it included a strong border component that favored Republican positions.
It appears as though Trump is deliberately undermining the national security of the United States.
In excerpts from his forthcoming book that appeared on the CNN website today, journalist Jim Sciutto reported conversations with Trump’s second chief of staff, General John Kelly, and Trump’s third national security advisor, John Bolton, in which the men recounted Trump’s fondness for dictators. “He views himself as a big guy,” Bolton told Sciutto. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.” “He’s not a tough guy by any means, but in fact quite the opposite,” Kelly said. “But that’s how he envisions himself.”
Kelly noted that Trump praised Hitler and what he thought was the loyalty of Hitler’s generals (some of whom actually tried to assassinate him), but both Kelly and Bolton noted that he “most consistently lavished praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Certainly, Trump prizes loyalty to himself: today Alex Isenstadt of Politico reported a “bloodbath” at the Republican National Committee as the incoming Trump loyalists are pushing out more than 60 RNC officials and staffers to make sure everyone is “aligned” with Trump.
An exclusive interview today by Katelyn Polantz, Kaitlan Collins, and Jeremy Herb of CNN revealed that Brian Butler, who worked at Mar-a-Lago for twenty years, has come forward to give the public the same information he told to investigators looking into Trump’s theft of classified documents. On June 3, 2022, the day Trump and his family were scheduled to fly to New Jersey for the summer, Trump’s aide Walt Nauta asked Butler if he could borrow a car from the Mar-a-Lago car service, although Butler and his valets usually handled getting the Trump family luggage onto the plane. June 3 was the same day Trump and his lawyer were meeting with officials from the Department of Justice at Mar-a-Lago to arrange for Trump to turn over national security documents.
Butler loaded a vehicle with the luggage, then met Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira—at the time a close friend of Butler—driving a vehicle loaded with bankers boxes, at the West Palm Beach airport. Butler says he didn’t know the bankers boxes contained anything unusual, and he helped Nauta load the plane with the boxes as well as the luggage. “They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler added.
Butler was also present during conversations about hiding evidence from federal authorities.
While Trump opposes aid to Ukraine, President Joe Biden pushed for it once again when he released his fiscal year 2025 budget today. (There is overlap this year between funding fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025 because House Republicans have been unable to agree to last year’s appropriations bills. Those are supposed to be done before October 1, when the new fiscal year starts.)
In addition to funding for Ukraine, the president’s $7.3 trillion budget covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits, all of which are mandatory, and expands investment in health care, child care, and housing. Biden would pay for all this—and reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over the next ten years—with higher taxes on those making more than $400,000 a year and on corporations.
In his defense of the middle class as the engine of economic growth and his declaration that the days of trickle-down economics are over, Biden sounds much like Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he ushered in the New Deal in the 1930s. In that era, Roosevelt and his Democratic allies replaced a government that worked for men of property with one that worked for ordinary Americans.
There were other echoes of the FDR administration today as Trump’s undermining of aid to Ukraine has become clear. Ukraine stands between an aggressive Russian dictator and a democratic Europe.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. had to decide whether to turn away from those standing against dictators like Hitler, or to stand behind them. There was a strong isolationist impulse in the United States. Some people resented that war industries had made fortunes supplying the devastating weaponry of World War I. Others believed that Hitler’s advance in Europe was a distraction from Asia, where their business interests were entwined. Congress passed laws to keep the U.S. from entanglement in Europe until Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Then Congress allowed other nations to buy munitions from the U.S. so long as they carried them away in their own ships.
The following year, FDR promised the American people he would not send troops into “any foreign wars.” But in July 1940, newly-appointed British prime minister Winston Churchill asked the U.S. for direct help after Britain lost eleven destroyers in ten days to the German Navy. Roosevelt exchanged 50 destroyers for 99-year leases on certain British bases, but that would not be enough. He asked Congress to provide military aid.
On this date in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.” The new law gave the president wide-ranging authority to sell, give, lease, or lend war supplies to “any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”
The law defined “war supplies” generously: they ranged from aircraft and boats to guns and tools, to information and technical designs, to food and supplies. The law also gave the president authority to authorize U.S. companies to manufacture such war supplies for other countries whose defense was important to the United States.
This law is the one we know as the Lend-Lease Act, and it was central to the ability of the Allied Powers—those standing against Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito—to fight off the Axis Powers who were trying to take over the globe in the 1940s. By the time the law ended on September 20, 1945, supplies worth more than $50 billion in 1940 dollars—equivalent to more than $770 billion today—had gone to the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, China, and other allies.
Four days after he signed the Lend-Lease Act into law, on March 15, 1941, FDR told journalists at the White House Correspondents’ Association, “The big news story of this week is this: The world has been told that we, as a united Nation, realize the danger that confronts us—and that to meet that danger, our democracy has gone into action.”
FDR noted the “superb morale” of the British, who he said were “completely clear in their minds about the one essential fact—that they would rather die…free…than live as slaves.” He continued: “The British people and their Grecian allies need ships. From America, they will get ships. They need planes. From America, they will get planes. From America they need food. From America, they will get food. They need tanks and guns and ammunition and supplies of all kinds. From America, they will get tanks and guns and ammunition and supplies of all kinds….
“And so our country is going to be what our people have proclaimed it must be—the arsenal of democracy…. Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worth while.”
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Notes:
https://rollcall.com/2024/02/13/senate-passes-security-supplemental-but-house-prospects-murky/
https://www. Kk cnn.com/2024/03/11/politics/trump-despots-advisers-sound-alarm
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/politics/trump-employee-5-classified-documents-mar-a-lago/index.html
https://budget.house.gov/about/budget-framework/time-table-budget-process/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/11/biden-budget-proposal
https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/55/STATUTE-55-Pg31.pdf
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/lend-lease-act
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/treasures_of_congress/text/page20_text.html
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-churchill
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-15-1941-lend-lease
https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-donald-trump-wont-give-a-penny-to-ukraine-if-elected
https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/55/STATUTE-55-Pg31.pdf
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-15-1941-lend-lease
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/politics/us-intelligence-report-netanyahu
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