Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 124
January 18, 2024
January 18, 2024
This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.
Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting.
In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.)
This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.
“I always tell people back home beware of bipartisanship," Representative Warren Davidson (R-OH) said on the House floor during the debate. “The most bipartisan thing in Washington, D.C., is bankrupting our country, if not financially, morally…. It’s not just the spending, it’s all the terrible policies that are attached to the spending.”
Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election.
A piece today in the Washington Post by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstadter about the difficulties of reestablishing democracy in Poland after eight years under a right-wing leader illuminates this moment in the U.S. Hockstadter’s description of the party of former Polish leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski sounds familiar: the party “jury-rigged systems, rules and institutions to its own partisan advantage, seeding its allies in the courts, prosecutors’ offices, state-owned media and central bank. Kaczynski’s administration erected an intricate legal obstacle course designed to leave the party with a stranglehold on key levers of power even if it were ousted in elections.”
Although voters in Poland last fall reelected former prime minister Donald Tusk to reestablish democracy, his ability to rebuild the democratic and judicial norms torched by his predecessor have been hamstrung by his opponents, who make up an “irreconcilable opposition” and are trying to retain control over Poland through their seizure of key levers of government.
The U.S. was in a similar situation during Reconstruction, when in 1879, former Confederates in the Democratic Party tried to end the government protection of Black rights altogether by refusing to fund the government until the president, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, withdrew all the U.S. troops from the South (it’s a myth that they left in 1877) and stopped trying to protect Black voting.
At the time, the president and House minority leader James A. Garfield refused to bow to the former Confederates. Five times, Hayes vetoed funding measures that carried the riders former Confederates wanted, writing that the Confederates’ policy was “radical, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” for it would allow a “bare majority” in the House to dictate its terms to the Senate and the President, thus destroying the balance of power in the American government.
In 1879, well aware of the stakes in the fight, newspapers made the case that the government was under assault. American voters listened, the former Confederates backed down, and Garfield somewhat unexpectedly was elected president in 1880 as a man who would champion the idea of the protection of Black rights and the country itself from those who wanted to establish that states were more powerful than the federal government.
Chastened, the leaders of the Democratic Party marginalized former Confederates and turned to northern cities to reestablish the party, beginning the transition to the party that would, fifty years later, usher in the New Deal.
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Notes:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1182/vote_118_2_00012.htm
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202415
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/9/30/23897443/mike-quigley-no-vote-federal-shutdown-stopgap-bill
https://rollcall.com/2024/01/18/senate-passes-stopgap-funding-extension-into-march/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/18/poland-democracy-tusk-kaczynski/
Ari Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 75–78.
January 17, 2023
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton responded this evening to the federal government’s demand that state troops give U.S. Border Patrol agents access to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, the site where three migrants died last week as they tried to cross the Rio Grande.
Aarón Torres and Joseph Morton of The Dallas Morning News reported that Paxton’s letter acknowledged that by law the federal government’s Border Patrol officers are allowed “warrantless access to land within 25 miles of the border, but only ‘for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.’” Paxton claimed that this law doesn’t apply because the current administration’s policies—the law, after all, is written by Congress—are not intended to stop undocumented immigration. “There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens,” he wrote.
Torres and Morton note that, in fact, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 142,000 migrants in 2023 and that Paxton presented no evidence for his claims.
Two weeks ago, House Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) demanded that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testify as part of the House’s impeachment proceedings against him. As Rebecca Beitsch points out in The Hill, testimony from a cabinet secretary is usually arranged several weeks or even months in advance, and Mayorkas said he could not make the date because he will be discussing immigration with a delegation from Mexico at that time but he asked to arrange another time. Mayorkas has testified before the House panel twice in the past year and before Congress 27 times since he took office.
In a letter obtained by Punchbowl News, Green wrote: “Since you continue to decline to come in person, I invite you to submit written testimony for the January 18th hearing record, so that our Committee Members may hear from you directly.”
This evening, an inadvertently circulated internal Republican memo obtained by Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill shows that Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee likely have switched their demand for live testimony to a demand for written answers because they have already committed to impeachment on a tight timeline and cannot wait for the live hearing to be rescheduled.
Green had previously suggested on the Fox News Channel that an impeachment document had already been written even though there had been no impeachment hearings. The memo appears to corroborate that suggestion, saying: “We have scheduled the markup for impeachment articles at 10:00 AM ET on Wednesday, January 31, 2024.”
Republicans argue that Mayorkas lied to Congress because he said the government has operational control over the border. They dispute this characterization because the Secure Fence Act defines operational control as one in which not a single person or object enters the country improperly. This perfect standard has never been met, and yet they apparently decided to impeach over it before even holding hearings.
Republicans are clearly hoping to use the issue of immigration against President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the upcoming election. After insisting in November that immigration was in such a crisis that there could be no more aid to Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan without it, Republicans in December rejected the idea of new legislation and said Biden must handle the issue himself. Then, in early January, 64 Republicans traveled to the border to demonstrate the importance of the issue.
But now that the Senate appears to have hammered out a bipartisan immigration reform measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said this morning: “It’s a complex issue. I don’t think now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform, because we know how complicated that is.” After a meeting at the White House today with President Biden, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and committee heads, Johnson still refused to put the proposed deal up for a vote in the House.
In today’s meeting, Biden emphasized the danger of leaving Ukraine’s defense unfunded. “He was clear,” the White House said, “Congress’s continued failure to act endangers the United States’ national security, the NATO Alliance, and the rest of the free world.”
Johnson is caught between U.S. national security and Trump. On the Fox News Channel tonight, Laura Ingraham told Johnson she had just gotten off a phone call with Trump and Trump had told her that he was against the immigration deal and had urged Johnson to oppose it. “He…was extremely adamant about it,” she said. Johnson agreed and said that he and Trump had been “talking about this pretty frequently.”
Trump needs the issue of immigration to whip up his base for the 2024 election.
Today the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chaired by James Comer (R-KY) held a hearing titled “The Biden Administration’s Regulatory and Policymaking Efforts to Undermine U.S. Immigration Law.” The administration has asked for additional funding for border patrol officers, immigration courts, and so on, but Comer said in his opening statement that the problem is not a lack of resources but rather an unwillingness to enforce the law.
Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) replied: “You know we have failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform up here for decades.” He noted that one of his colleagues had provided statistics showing that President Barack Obama deported more people in each term than Trump did, so “if the border wasn’t a problem until President Biden was elected, then how are we deporting all of these people in administrations before Trump was elected? It’s because this situation has been going on for decades. So stop lying to the American people that none of this happened until President Biden was elected.”
Comer has also used the House Oversight Committee to spread the idea that President Biden is corrupt, but while he has made many allegations on right-wing media channels, the committee has not, in fact, turned up any evidence linking the president to illegal activity. Instead, the investigations there appear to be a continuation of the technique Republicans have used since the 1990s to insinuate that a Democrat has engaged in wrongdoing simply by holding investigations.
Trump employed this technique effectively in 2016 in his constant refrain that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, had illegally deleted emails, and less effectively in 2019 when he tried to strong-arm Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden. It was central to the plan of convincing state legislatures that they could recast their 2020 electoral votes: lawyer Jeffrey Clark wanted to tell them (falsely) that there were voting irregularities that the Department of Justice was investigating.
But this technique has backfired so far in this Congress. After a year of hearing that Biden is corrupt, MAGA Republicans have expected to see him impeached. But Democrats have come to hearings exceedingly well prepared and have pushed back on MAGA talking points, turning the tables on the Republicans so thoroughly that Comer recently was forced to back down, saying, “My job was never to impeach.”
Creating a false reality to trick voters is central to undermining democracy, and it is no secret that autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and China are spreading disinformation in the U.S. But I have always wondered what would happen when the American people finally pushed back against suggestions and innuendo and instead demanded actual evidence and policies designed to address problems, as they did before American politics turned into entertainment.
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Notes:
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/eoy/iceAnnualReportFY2023.pdf
https://punchbowl.news/article/alejandro-mayorkas-testimony-clashes-with-house-republicans/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4414805-mayorkas-impeachment-gop-memo/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4413501-mike-johnson-immigration-reform/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/politics/biden-ukraine-white-house-meeting/index.html
“Moskowitz: MAGA GOP Wants to Politicize the Border, Not Solve It,” on YouTube
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/14/politics/james-comer-impeachment-interview/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/business/media/election-disinformation-2024.html
Twitter (X):
brianstelter/status/1747787486951080048
January 16, 2024
January 16, 2024
[Warning: paragraphs 6–8 talk about rape.]
In yesterday’s Iowa caucus, 51% of Republican caucusgoers chose former president Donald Trump as their preferred candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Twenty-one percent of Republican caucusgoers chose Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Nineteen percent chose former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. Seven percent chose technology entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. These results mean that 20 of Iowa’s 40 delegates will go to Trump; 8 to DeSantis; 7 to Haley; and three to Ramaswamy. An apparent Trump surrogate in the primary debates, Ramaswamy suspended his campaign after the caucus and endorsed Trump.
Turnout was much lower than expected, with only about 110,000 people voting. That’s about 15% of Iowa’s three quarters of a million registered Republicans out of a population of just over 3 million people.
On Friday, January 12, in Des Moines, DeSantis blamed right-wing media for Trump’s continued popularity. “He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media—Fox News, the websites, all this stuff,” DeSantis said, referring to the elite unit of the Roman army that protected the emperor both physically and through intelligence collecting. “They just don’t hold him accountable, because they’re worried about losing viewers and they don’t want to have the ratings go down. And that’s just the reality.”
For his part, true to form, Trump has shared a story that Haley is not eligible to be president because her parents were not citizens when she was born in the U.S. in 1972. This reflects both his “birther” history and his promise to end the birthright citizenship established in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment. Also true to form, he made no accusations of voter fraud or rigged voting last night as he has done in the past when he lost elections; indeed, he told supporters this was his third win in Iowa. The truth is that in 2016 he lost Iowa’s caucus vote to Texas senator Ted Cruz.
The Iowa results pretty much told us what we already knew. Trump remains the dominant leader of the hard-right older Republicans who turn out for caucuses, but is so generally unpopular that 49% of Iowa caucusgoers—the party’s most dedicated supporters in a deeply Republican state—chose someone else. The Trump base is older—entry polls showed that only 27% of yesterday’s voters were under the age of 50—and Trump won most handily in the rural, white counties that look least like the rest of the country. His greatest increase in support since 2016 came among white evangelicals.
That support from those who claim fervent religious beliefs seems an odd fit with the candidate, who was in a federal courtroom in New York City today for the start of a trial to determine the additional damages he owes writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she said he raped her in the 1990s, claiming she was lying to sell books. Carroll sued him in 2019, but the case has been delayed as Trump argued that he had presidential immunity for his comments.
While it was delayed, in May 2023 a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse in a second civil trial known as Carroll II. The jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million. When Trump’s team countersued Carroll for defamation, saying the jury had found him liable not for rape, but for sexual abuse, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Carroll’s words were “substantially true.” Kaplan made it clear that New York law defines rape very narrowly. He said “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact…‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “The jury,” he wrote, “found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina.”
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied Trump’s claim of presidential immunity for his defamation of Carroll and dismissed his argument that his comments weren’t defamatory.
Carroll II established guidelines for the previous case as it finally moved forward. In a pretrial judgment, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan determined that Trump is liable for defamation for his ridicule of Carroll. Trump remains undeterred. As he arrived at the courthouse this morning, Alex Woodward noted in The Independent, his social media account released a flood of “potentially defamatory statements” attacking Carroll.
In Politico, Erica Orden noted that today’s trial is just down the street from the Trump trial for civil fraud that ended last Thursday. In that case, Judge Arthur Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed business fraud. The trial was over fines, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and the Trump Organization’s continuing ability to do business in New York. Trump’s outburst at the end of the trial attacking the judge and New York attorney general Letitia James suggests that he has little faith that he is going to win that case and is instead turning it into a political pulpit as part of his attempt to undermine the American justice system. On Thursday morning, law enforcement officers showed up at Judge Engoron’s house in a “swatting” incident after someone falsely told police a violent crime was being committed there.
Attorney Joe Tacopina filed papers to withdraw himself and his two partners from Trump’s defense team yesterday.
White evangelicals heartily endorse a crook and a rapist apparently because they expect that he will put in place the world they envision, one controlled by white, patriarchal evangelical Christians.
But as even the Iowa caucuses indicated, the idea of replacing American democracy with an authoritarian who will enact Christian nationalism is not generally popular. In the Washington Post on January 11, Philip Bump explored a new poll by YouGov showing that when U.S. adult citizens are presented with 30 of Trump’s declared policies, majorities oppose 22 of them. A majority approved only four of them, and those were the ones the right wing has been hammering: banning hormonal or surgical treatment for transgender minors (57%), legally limiting recognized genders (53%), requiring immigrants to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims are being processed (56%), and—by a narrow majority of 51%—deporting immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
Some of Trump’s signature policies are deeply unpopular. Only 21% of Americans support getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service; only 18% support giving the president control over regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission. Only 31% support sending U.S. troops into U.S. cities to enforce order; only 33% support sending troops into Mexico to fight drug cartels. Only 23% support further cuts to taxes on corporations. Only 29% want to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (which has seen a record 20.5 million Americans enroll so far in the current enrollment period); only 28% support withdrawing from the World Health Organization. Only 38% want to end birthright citizenship, the same percentage as those who want to end U.S. aid to Ukraine.
The YouGov study shows that only 30% of Americans support withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, and a December 2023 CNN poll showed that 73% want the government to do more to address climate change. And yet, today, Scott Waldman of Politico previewed the Trump team’s preparation for ending all efforts to address climate change. Complaining that the people in Trump’s first administration were “weak,” Trump advisor Steve Milloy told Waldman that “The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA.”
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, said last year. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power Day 1 and deconstruct the administrative state.”
Meanwhile, Politico’s roundup of Washington, D.C., news shows that President Joe Biden has invited top congressional leaders of both parties—Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)—and relevant committee chairs to a meeting at the White House tomorrow to discuss the stalled aid package to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the U.S. border. Also today, the Senate is considering the continuing resolution to fund the government before the current continuing resolution ends on Friday.
Speaker Johnson has pushed off House votes until Wednesday out of apparent concern about the snow in Washington today.
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/live/iowa-republican-caucuses-live-updates
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iowa-caucus-2024-updates/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-many-delegates-does-iowa-have-2024/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/16/trump-iowa-evangelical-vote/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump-rape-language-e-jean-carroll
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/11/trump-polling-unpopular-policies/
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-loses-three-lawyers-one-day-1860847
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lets-face-it-trumps-iowa-result-was-pretty-weak
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/12/trump-second-term-climate-science-2024-00132289
https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/payer/aca-enrollment-hits-204m-%E2-and-counting
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/01/16/congress/snow-means-no-house-votes-00135785
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/01/16/congress/bidens-invite-00135857
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/12/desantis-prepares-go-down-swinging-fox-news/
https://www.rawstory.com/trumpts-presidential-immunity-claim-slapped-down-by-d-c-appeals-court/
Twitter (X):
SimonWDC/status/1747117668987974079
Acyn/status/1747111021347512677
danpfeiffer/status/1747072463144718356
January 15, 2024
January 15, 2024
Last night, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced they have agreed to another continuing resolution that will fund the government until March 1 and March 8. Schumer said he will begin the process of passing the continuing resolution when the Senate reconvenes tomorrow.
The first part of the current continuing resolution that funds the government will run out Friday, and Schumer warned that “[t]o avoid a shutdown, it will take bipartisan cooperation in the Senate and the House to quickly pass the CR and send it to the President's desk before Friday's funding deadline.”
Schumer is sending a message to the House, since far-right Republican extremists there threw former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of the speakership for adhering to the budget spending agreement he made with President Joe Biden in June 2023. Now Johnson has agreed to what is essentially the same deal.
It is unclear what actions the funding measure will prompt in the House. According to Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell in the Washington Post yesterday, extremist Republicans remain angry enough at their inability to dictate terms to the government that they are, once again, threatening to halt the House’s business in protest, to challenge Johnson’s speakership, and/or to shut down the government. At the same time, other Republicans are angry that Johnson appears to be caving to the extremists, who have made the House a bit of a laughingstock as they made it almost impossible last year for the House to get anything done. More obstruction, another speakership fight, or a government shutdown would hurt the Republicans’ image even more.
Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that Johnson told the House conference that with Kentucky representative Hal Rogers hospitalized after a car accident on Wednesday, and Louisiana representative Steve Scalise out of Congress until February for a stem cell transplant to treat his blood cancer, the Republican majority is so slim there isn’t time for anything other than a continuing resolution.
Perhaps to appease the extremists, on the same call, Sherman reported, Johnson told the conference that the bipartisan immigration measure being negotiated in the Senate was “DOA in House.” House Republicans have insisted they will not pass additional funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan without a measure addressing the border. At the same time, they have also refused Biden’s offer to negotiate, clearly trying to preserve the immigration issue to whip up voters before the 2024 election. Johnson told his conference that Congress “can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected or a Republican is back in the White House.” In Iowa, Trump promised: “As soon as I take the oath of office, I’ll…begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”
We got a taste of what those policies will look like over the weekend when on Friday a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande and two other migrants were in distress after Texas soldiers prevented Border Patrol officers from entering Shelby Park, the area where the migrants were crossing. A lawyer for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on Sunday, demanding that Texas stop blocking Border Patrol officers.
Meanwhile, the image of the migrant woman and children drowning is so damaging that Texas troops claim they didn’t see any distressed migrants and Texas governor Greg Abbott today insisted that the migrants were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping, although that claim does not address the fact that the Texas troops had blocked the Border Patrol’s normal surveillance of the river and had assumed responsibility for it. Abbott tried to argue that the deaths were not his fault but rather Biden’s because, he said, Biden’s policies encouraged migrants to attempt the crossing.
For their part, Senate Republican negotiators pushed back on the news that Johnson was preemptively tanking the immigration measure, saying that rumors about what’s in it are inaccurate and that Republicans should withhold judgment until they see it. Members of the Senate are eager to pass aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Today, Nahal Toosi explored in Politico how the domestic political infighting in the United States is undermining faith in American democracy around the world. Toosi explained that current and former diplomats pointed to concerns that U.S. foreign policy will change based on the demands of a radical base, and they pointed to Trump’s abrupt exit in 2018 from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more popularly known as the Iran nuclear agreement, that significantly restricted Iran’s nuclear development. In the wake of that withdrawal, Iran resumed the previously prohibited uranium enrichment.
“Foreign relations is very much based on trust, and when you know that the person that is in front of you may not be there or might be followed by somebody that feels exactly the opposite way, what is your incentive to do long-term deals?” a former Latin American diplomat asked of Toosi. A former Mexican ambassador told Toosi that if a Republican takes the White House in 2024, countries will not be able to trust the U.S. as a partner but will instead operate transactionally.
“The world does not have time for the U.S. to rebound back,” a former Asian ambassador told Toosi. “We’ve gone from a unipolar world that we’re familiar with from the 1990s into a multipolar world, but the key pole is still the United States. And if that key pole is not playing the role that we want the U.S. to do, you’ll see alternative forces coming up.” Toosi noted that Russian diplomats were “among those delighting in the U.S. chaos (and fanning it).”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/29/us/politics/debt-ceiling-agreement.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-deal-continuing-resolution-government-shutdown/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/14/house-republicans-government-funding-shutdown/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/politics/kentucky-rep-hal-rogers-dc-car-accident/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/05/steve-scalise-house-republicans/
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-iran-nuclear-deal
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/14/politics/immigration-texas-border-dhs-letter-ken-paxton/index.html
Twitter (X):
JakeSherman/status/1746706618362769566
January 14, 2024
January 14, 2024
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024.
[Image of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Buddy Poland.]
–-
Notes:
Dr. King’s final speech:
January 13, 2024
January 13, 2024
Last night a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande that marks the border between the U.S. and Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas.
U.S. Border Patrol agents knew that a group of six migrants were in distress in the river but could not try to save them, as they normally would, because troops from the Texas National Guard and the Texas Military Department prevented the Border Patrol agents from entering the area where they were struggling: Shelby Park, a 47-acre public park that offers access to a frequently traveled part of the river and is a place where Border Patrol agents often encounter migrants crossing the border illegally.
They could not enter because two days ago, on Thursday, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent armed Texas National Guard soldiers and soldiers from the Texas Military Department to take control of Shelby Park. Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Pass, posted a video on Facebook showing the troops and saying that a state official had told him that state troops were taking “full control” over Shelby Park “indefinitely.” Salinas made it clear that “[t]his is not something that we wanted. This is not something that we asked for as a city.”
The Texas forces have denied United States Border Patrol officials entry into the park to perform their duties, asserting that Texas officials have power over U.S. officials.
On December 18, Abbott signed into law S.B. 4, a measure that attempts to take into state hands the power over immigration the Constitution gives to the federal government. Courts have repeatedly reinforced that immigration is the responsibility of federal, not state, government, but now, according to Uriel J. García of the Texas Tribune, “some Texas Republicans have said they hope the new law will push the issue back before a U.S. Supreme Court that is more conservative since three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined it.”
On January 3 the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the new law, saying: “Texas cannot run its own immigration system. Its efforts, through S.B. 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations.”
Abbott and MAGA Republicans are teeing up the issue of immigration as a key line of attack on President Joe Biden in 2024, but while they are insisting the issue is so important they will not agree to fund Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion until it is solved, they are also unwilling to participate in discussions to fund more border officers or immigration courts. Today, once again, Biden reminded reporters that he has asked Congress to pass new border measures since he took office, but rather than pass new laws, Republicans appear to be doubling down on pushing the idea that migrants threaten American society and that an individual state—Texas, in this case—can override federal authority.
Abbott has spent more than $100 million of Texas tax dollars to send migrants to cities led by Democrats. These migrants have applied for asylum and are waiting for a hearing; they are in the U.S. legally. In September 2023, Texas stopped coordinating with nonprofits in those cities that prepared for migrant arrivals.
Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote to Abbott, calling him out for choosing “to sow chaos in an attempt to score political points.” Pritzker noted that Abbott is “sending asylum seekers from Texas to the Upper Midwest in the middle of winter—many without coats, without shoes to protect them from the snow—to a city whose shelters are already overfilled with migrants you sent here.” Chicago’s temperatures are set to drop below zero this weekend, Pritzker wrote, and he “strongly urge[d]” Abbott to stop sending people to Illinois in these conditions. “You are dropping off asylum seekers without alerting us to their arrivals, at improper locations at all hours of the night.”
Pritzker wrote that he supports bipartisan immigration reform but “[w]hile action is pending at the federal level, I plead with you for mercy for the thousands of people who are powerless to speak for themselves. Please, while winter is threatening vulnerable people’s lives, suspend your transports and do not send more people to our state. We are asking you to help prevent additional deaths. We should be able to come together in a bipartisan fashion to urge Congress to act. But right now, we are talking about human beings and their survival. I hope we can at least agree on saving lives right now.”
Speaking on the right-wing Dana Loesch Show last week, Abbott said, “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
On January 13, 1833, President Andrew Jackson wrote to Vice President–elect Martin van Buren to explain his position on South Carolina’s recent assertion that sovereign states could overrule federal laws. “Was this to be permitted the government would lose the confidence of its citizens and it would induce disunion everywhere. No my friend, the crisis must be now met with firmness, our citizens protected, and the modern doctrine of nullification and secession put down forever…. [N]othing must be permitted to weaken our government at home or abroad,” he wrote.
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4404134-abbott-texas-border-shooting-migrants/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1330861/dl
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/20/texas-plane-immigrants-chicago-greg-abbott-busing/
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/11/texas-border-migrants-greg-abbott-interview-shoot/
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mcc.050/?sp=4&st=image&r=0.025,0.022,1.048,0.612,0
Twitter (X): SeanCasten/status/1746199487998050649
January 12, 2024
January 12, 2024
Last week, after President Joe Biden went to Valley Forge and then spoke in Pennsylvania, I got a chance to sit down with him to ask a few questions.
What I wanted to hear from him illustrates the difference between journalists and historians.
Journalists are trained to find breaking stories and to explain them clearly so that their audience is better informed about what is happening in the world. What they do is vitally important to a democracy, and it is hard work. One of the reasons I always try to call out the names of journalists whose articles I’m describing is to highlight that there are real people working hard to dig out the stories we all need to know and that we are all part of a community trying together to figure out what’s happening in this country.
Historians do something different than journalists. We study how and why societies change. We are trained to see larger patterns in the facts we find in documents, speeches, letters, and photographs…and in the work of journalists. Some historians believe that mass movements change society, and so they focus on such movements; others believe that great figures change society, and they focus on biographies. Still others focus on economic change. And so on.
In my case, I am fascinated by the way ideas change society, and I am especially interested in the gap between what people believe and what is actually happening in the real world. That interest means that I always want to know how people think and especially how their worldview informs the way they act. Then I compare that worldview to the real-world policies they are putting into place. I sometimes think of what I study as the place where the rubber of ideas meets the road of the real world.
I have twice now been able to interview President Biden. (And let me tell you, it is an odd experience to have your historical subject be able to talk back to you!) The opportunity to ask a historical figure how he thinks, after I have spent years studying his policies, is mind-blowing.
To that end, I wanted to know why he chose to go to Valley Forge, where General George Washington quartered his Continental Army troops for six months in the hard winter of 1777–1788, to start his 2024 presidential campaign. Valley Forge looms huge in American mythology, but most people probably can’t say why. So what did it mean to him to launch his 2024 presidential campaign from there?
I also was deeply interested in what he means when he says he has great faith in the American people—something he says all the time but usually without much context. So what exactly is it about the American people that gives him such faith?
The answers are important, I think, and I found at least one of them surprising.
As I say, it is an odd thing to have a historical subject who can talk back to you, but in all the right ways: it forces you to adjust your understanding of our historical moment. That’s the sort of information that will make the historical record clearer and that, when today’s society has itself become history, will help historians in the future better understand how and why it changed.
January 11, 2024
“Today, at my direction,” President Joe Biden said this evening, “U.S. military forces—together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands—successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways.”
The strikes came after the Iran-backed Houthi militia launched 27 attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, including merchant shipping vessels that carry about 12% of the world’s oil, 8% of its grain, and 8% of liquefied natural gas, as well as other commodities.
While the Houthis claim their attacks are designed to support the Palestinians in Gaza, they are also apparently angling to continue and spread the Hamas-Israel war into a wider conflict. Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, all nonstate actors backed by Iran, would like very much to extend and enlarge the war to enhance their own power and win adherents to their ideologies.
The Arab states do not want the conflict to spread. Neither does the U.S. government, and Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked hard to make sure it doesn’t, sending two carrier groups to the region, for example, to deter enthusiasm for such an extension.
On October 19, shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Houthis launched cruise missiles and drones designed by Iran at Israel, but when the USS Carney and Saudi Arabia shot the weapons down, they turned to attacking shipping. Fifty or so ships use the Red Sea waterway every day.
On November 19, Houthis seized a Japanese-registered vessel, the Galaxy Leader, along with its 25-member international crew, prompting the United Nations Security Council to condemn “in the strongest terms” the “recent Houthi attacks” and “demanded that all such attacks and action cease immediately.” The Security Council “underlined the importance of…international law.”
On December 3, Houthis struck another three ships.
On December 19, the U.S., the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a group representing 44 allies and partner nations condemned the Houthi attacks, noting that such attacks threatened international commerce, endangering supply chains and affecting the global economy. Also on December 19, the U.S. and partners announced a naval protection group for maritime shipping in the waterway, dubbed Operation Prosperity Guardian.
When the attacks continued, the governments of the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom warned the Houthis on January 3, 2024, that their attacks were “illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing,” delaying the delivery of goods and “jeopardizing the movement of critical food, fuel, and humanitarian assistance throughout the world.” They called for an end to the attacks and the release of the detained vessels and crew members, and they warned that the Houthis would bear responsibility for the “consequences” if the attacks continued.
“We remain committed to the international rules-based order and are determined to hold malign actors accountable for unlawful seizures and attacks,” the statement said.
Administration officials told the press the U.S. would strike the Houthis militarily if the attacks didn’t stop, although Biden has not wanted to destabilize Yemen further than it already is after a decade of civil war. “The president has made clear the U.S. does not seek conflict with any nation or actor in the Middle East,” John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said. “But neither will we shrink from the task of defending ourselves, our interests, our partners or the free flow of international commerce.” An administration official said: “I would not anticipate another warning.”
On Tuesday, January 9, the Houthis launched 21 drones and missiles in the most significant attack yet—one that directly targeted U.S. ships—and on January 10 the U.N. Security Council passed UNSCR 2722, a resolution condemning the attacks “in the strongest terms.” Eleven members voted in favor and none opposed it. Four countries—China, Russia, Algeria, and Mozambique—abstained, but neither China nor Russia, both of which have veto power, would veto the resolution.
Today the U.S. and the U.K., with coalition support, responded. Military strikes came from the air, ocean, and underwater, according to a defense official, and they hit weapons storage areas and sites from which the Houthis have been launching drones and cruise missiles.
The governments of Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, the U.K, and the U.S. announced the “precision strikes,” saying they were “in accordance with the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, consistent with the UN Charter” and “were intended to disrupt and degrade the capabilities the Houthis use to threaten global trade and the lives of international mariners in one of the world’s most critical waterways.”
“Our aim remains to de-escalate tensions and restore stability in the Red Sea,” the statement read, “but let our message be clear: we will not hesitate to defend lives and protect the free flow of commerce in one of the world’s most critical waterways in the face of continued threats.” Biden’s statement sounded much the same but added: “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.”
As the January 3 statement from the governments of the U.S., Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and the U.K. made clear, one of the key things at stake in standing against the Houthi attacks is the international rules-based order, that is, the system of international laws and organizations developed after World War II to prevent global conflicts by providing forums to resolve differences peacefully. A key element of this international system of agreements is freedom of the seas.
Also central to that rules-based international order is partnerships and allies. Two days ago, one of Europe’s leading politicians revealed that in 2020, former president Trump told European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen: “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” According to the politician, Trump added that “NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO,” a threat he has made elsewhere, too.
In contrast, as soon as he took office, President Biden set out to support and extend U.S. alliances and partnerships. While that principle shows in the international support for today’s strike on the Houthis, it has also been central in the administration’s response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, managing migration, supporting African development, building the Indo-Pacific, and reacting to the Middle East crisis in general.
Today, Secretary of State Blinken finished a week-long trip to Türkiye, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank, Bahrain, and Egypt, where he met with leaders and reaffirmed “the U.S. commitment to working with partners to set the conditions necessary for peace in the Middle East, which includes comprehensive, tangible steps toward the realization of a future Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel, with both living in peace and security.”
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Notes:
https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-on-houthi-attacks-in-the-red-sea/
https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15513.doc.htm
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-houthi-attacks-red-sea-threaten-global-shipping
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145382
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-led-coalition-warns-houthis-to-stop-ship-attacks-cfd490df
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240112-us-uk-launch-airstrikes-on-yemen-s-houthi-rebels
https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-says-its-working-major-new-agreement-with-iran-2023-12-12/
https://news.usni.org/2024/01/11/us-strikes-houthi-targets-in-yemen-from-air-surface-and-subsurface
https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part7.htm
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-vow-never-help-europe-attack-thierry-breton/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/us/politics/us-houthi-missile-strikes.html
January 11, 2024
January 10, 2024
The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives was back in session for business today. The day’s events did not bode well for the House’s managing to accomplish more in 2024 than it did in 2023.
Top on the list of things that must get done, and done fast, is funding the government. The continuing resolution currently in place to fund the government expires in two phases: one on January 19 and the other on February 2. The far-right Freedom Caucus Republicans have refused to agree to funding measures without far deeper cuts than former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to in a long-ago deal with President Joe Biden as part of a package to raise the debt ceiling until 2025. They also want to attach far-right cultural demands to the measures, although traditionally appropriations are kept clean.
On Sunday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced they had reached a $1.66 trillion agreement to fund the government in 2024. Appropriations break down with about $886.3 billion for defense and about $772.7 billion for nondefense. The measure includes cuts of $20.2 billion to funding the Internal Revenue Service, which Republicans have demanded since Democrats put money for the IRS into the Inflation Reduction Act, and cuts to emergency spending accounts.
Aidan Quigley of Roll Call calculates that “the framework allows for a very slight overall increase in nondefense funding, about 0.2 percent above the previous year or a little more than $1 billion,” while “[d]efense and security-related spending would rise by nearly $28 billion, or more than 3 percent.” It is essentially the deal McCarthy agreed to last year and that the far right used to throw him out of the speaker’s chair (he has since resigned from Congress).
Members of the Freedom Caucus immediately panned the agreement, putting Johnson in the same pinch McCarthy found himself in last fall. If he relies on Democrats to pass the deal, he runs the risk of a challenge to his speakership, while he cannot get the Freedom Caucus on board without significant concessions in the form of poison pills that would dictate their hard-right policy positions, concessions that would kill the measure in the Senate. In addition, in the Senate, members of both parties wanted more, not less, spending.
Juliegrace Brufke of Axios reported this afternoon that in a meeting today, Johnson asked his Republican colleagues to “stop criticizing him and his budget negotiations on social media.” But as Nicole LaFond of Talking Points Memo notes, Johnson has indicated he is worried about his standing with the extremists and has tried to shore up that standing by appealing to Trump. On a right-wing radio show this morning, Johnson told listeners that he was planning to call former president Trump to get him behind the deal.
This afternoon the extremist Republicans made their anger clear when 12 of them opposed the procedural steps required to begin the process of considering three other bills, signaling that they were willing to stop House business to get their way. Further House votes were canceled for the day, but so far, at least, there does not seem to be momentum for removing Johnson from office, at least in part because there is no one else to take his place. “I’m kind of sick of the chaos,” said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a key extremist and firebrand who opposes the funding deal. “I came here to be serious about solving problems, not to produce clickbait.”
Both the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the House Judiciary Committee voted today on whether President Biden’s 53-year-old son Hunter should be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to sit for a private deposition in the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Biden. It did not go well for the Republicans leading the committees. The Democrats came prepared and ready to push back on Republican lawmakers, who seemed more accustomed to appearing on right-wing media channels, where their assertions are not challenged, than to debating colleagues.
Democrats on the committees called out Republicans’ hypocrisy over Biden’s subpoena by noting that various Republicans in Congress had entirely ignored subpoenas themselves. In the Judiciary Committee, Eric Swalwell (D-CA) noted that committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) had been out of compliance for his own House subpoena for 608 days.
In the Oversight Committee, Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) entered into the record the House subpoenas for Republicans Jordan, McCarthy, Scott Perry (R-PA), Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ). Moskowitz told the Republicans on the committee: “You vote to add those names and show the American people that we apply the law equally, not just when it’s Democrats…. It’s a crime when it’s Democrats, but when it’s Trump and the Republicans it’s just fine? No, show that you’re serious and that everyone’s not above the law. Vote for that amendment and I’ll vote for the Hunter Biden contempt.”
Hunter Biden has offered to testify publicly but does not want to testify behind closed doors after Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) misrepresented in public what Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer said in private. The Oversight Committee meeting took a dramatic turn when, while the committee was discussing holding him in contempt for not answering the subpoena, Hunter Biden showed up in person. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) promptly attacked him, saying: “[Y]ou are the epitome of white privilege. Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a Congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here.” CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju noted that Mace’s attack on Biden prompted Biggs to tell his colleagues to “not act like a bunch of nimrods.”
Biden walked out when Greene, who showed naked pictures of him in a previous committee meeting, began to speak. The television cameras followed him rather than recording her speech. Former talk show host Geraldo Rivera posted on social media: “Hunter walks out after hazing. It’s a sh*t show that reveals the Committee is (as [former] President Trump is fond of saying) a witch hunt.”
Astonishingly, that was not the end of congressional Republicans’ performance today. The House Homeland Security Committee today held its first impeachment hearing on Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas as Republicans try to turn immigration into their central election issue.
Only one Cabinet secretary has ever been impeached in U.S. history—Secretary of War William Belknap, in 1876, in the midst of a searing financial scandal—but Republicans maintain that Mayorkas’s adherence to Biden’s border policies is reason to remove him. And yet, despite their focus on the border, House Republicans have rejected Senate negotiations over increased funding. At first they said they would accept only their own policy, put forward in an extreme border measure passed last year that Senate Democrats and President Biden rejected, and then they said they would not pass legislation at all and that the border issue must be solved by the president.
Meanwhile, today former New Jersey governor Chris Christie dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination, digging at his colleagues for refusing to denounce Trump, and Trump backers in Wisconsin filed a petition to recall Assembly speaker Robin Vos from office for not adequately supporting Trump and not impeaching the state’s top elections official, a nonpartisan officer who conspiracy theorists insist was part of a plan to rig the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, and who will oversee the 2024 election.
And news broke today that thanks to the efforts of Biden and the Democrats, a record 20 million Americans enrolled for health care through the Affordable Care Act for this year.
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Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/affordable-care-act-record-enrollment-20-million-americans-2024/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/07/congress-budget-deal/
https://rollcall.com/2024/01/07/deal-reached-on-appropriations-toplines-sources-say/
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/mike-johnson-budget-republicans-social-media
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/johnson-forced-to-beg-for-trumps-mercy
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/us/politics/congress-spending-deal.html
https://rollcall.com/2024/01/10/republicans-defeat-another-rule-in-house-over-spending-deal/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/10/politics/speaker-johnson-funding-fight-right-flank/index.html
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Devon-Archer-Transcript.pdf
https://www.meidastouch.com/news/speaker-mike-johnson-is-in-trouble
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/01/10/hunter-biden-house-walkout-gop-reax-nc-vpx.cnn
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/us/politics/chris-christie-drops-out.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/10/politics/house-impeachment-hearing-mayorkas/index.html
Twitter (X):
RepSwalwell/status/1745155792137822636
RonFilipkowski/status/1745129729013768277
JakeSherman/status/1745167943401373801
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January 9, 2024
January 9, 2024
On the docket today in front of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was the question of whether former presidents can be prosecuted for things they did while in office. The issue at hand is whether Trump can be tried for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but Trump has also been charged in three other criminal cases: a national case over his mishandling of national security documents, a state case in Georgia for interfering with the 2020 election there, and a state case in New York for paying hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. He is also facing a number of civil cases.
A federal grand jury working under Special Counsel Jack Smith brought four criminal charges against the former president on August 1. Trump’s lawyers have argued not that he didn’t do what he is accused of, but that his position as president at the time gives him immunity from prosecution for breaking laws. In this case, they are arguing that he cannot be tried now because he has already been impeached and acquitted for his actions. They argue that a president can be charged criminally only if he has been impeached and convicted.
A quick reminder: Impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. A president could be impeached simply for watching TV all day, which is not a crime but which would make it impossible to do the job. Another reminder: as NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard documented today, in Trump’s second impeachment trial, his own lawyer Bruce Castor assured the Senate that “the text of the Constitution…makes very clear that a former President is subject to criminal sanction after his presidency for any illegal acts he commits.”
A number of Republican Senators—including then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)—agreed, saying they would acquit Trump but expected him to answer to the law rather than the political system. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” McConnell said. “We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
Interestingly, Trump’s argument that he cannot now be charged with crimes makes the Republican senators who voted to acquit him complicit. It’s an acknowledgement of what was clear all along: they could have stopped him at any point, but they repeatedly chose not to. Now he is explicitly suggesting that their behavior shields him from answering to the law.
Today, Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer told the court that so long as he was not impeached and convicted for his actions, a president could do virtually anything. "Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival?" Judge Florence Pan asked. "That's an official act: an order to SEAL Team Six.” Sauer answered that Congress would have to impeach and convict that president before he could be charged with a crime. "But if he weren't, there would be no criminal prosecution, no criminal liability for that?" Pan asked. Sauer again emphasized that Congress would have to act before any indictment could take place. “So your answer is no,” Pan said.
In his brief to the court opposing Trump’s claim, Special Counsel Smith pointed out that there is nothing in history to support Trump’s argument and that Nixon’s accepting a pardon “reflects the consensus view that a former President is subject to prosecution after leaving office.”
Trump’s approach, Smith wrote in a hard-hitting paragraph, “would grant immunity from criminal prosecution to a President who accepts a bribe in exchange for directing a lucrative government contract to the payer; a President who instructs the FBI Director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a President who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a President who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, because in each of these scenarios, the President could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as Commander-in-Chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy. Under the defendant’s framework, the Nation would have no recourse to deter a President from inciting his supporters during a State of the Union address to kill opposing lawmakers—thereby hamstringing any impeachment proceeding—to ensure that he remains in office unlawfully.”
While presidential immunity is a crucially important question, it seems unlikely that any court will conclude that a U.S. president can act however they wish without any accountability before the law. Certainly the framers of the Constitution never intended such a thing (if you listen closely, you can hear them spinning in their graves). More recently, in 1974, the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon ruled unanimously that President Richard Nixon could not use claims of executive privilege to withhold evidence from a criminal prosecution. Even more recently, on December 29, three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that Trump does not have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits.
But the more pressing immediate question is when the court can resume progress on the case, which is stalled during appeals. The case is scheduled for trial on March 4, and Trump has been trying to drag it out—as he has all his trials—with the evident hope that it can be delayed until after the election. When Trump appealed the decision of the district court that he was not immune, Special Counsel Smith tried to move things along by taking the case directly to the Supreme Court, but the court declined to take it at that point. The case will almost certainly end up there again, at which time the justices could let the appeals court decision stand or agree to take it up. If they take it up, they could decide it quickly or delay it until after the election.
Today, in The Bulwark, nineteen former Republican members of Congress called on the courts, especially the Supreme Court, to move the case forward as quickly as possible. Calling out “Trump’s gambit to escape accountability altogether: assert an unprecedented claim of absolute presidential immunity from criminal prosecution and use the appellate process to delay the trial until after the November election,” they defended the public’s right to have “critical information they need before they cast their ballots in November.”
Noting that as former members of Congress, they were “not persuaded that the argument [for presidential immunity] has any basis in law or history,” they said that whatever the courts decide, they should do it quickly. “Permitting delay would…undermine the rule of law [and] the integrity of the 2024 election,” they wrote.
Although it is unusual for a defendant to attend such a hearing, Trump was at court today, clearly intending to use the case as part of his campaign. Perry Stein of the Washington Post noted that Trump recently lied to supporters that President Joe Biden was “forcing me into a courtroom in our nation’s capital” to weaken his campaign.
Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/20/1185762259/trump-criminal-civil-cases-lawsuits
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-2020-election-probe-08-01-23/index.html
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Trump Files a Motion to Hold Jack Smith in ContemptToday, Donald Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Chutkan to hold Jack Smith in contempt. They want her to require Smith to “show cause” for why he didn’t violate the stay in the case while Trump’s immunity motion is on appeal. The full pleading is here. It’s important to understand what is and isn’t at stake with this motion. It has no bearing on the ultimate …Read more5 days ago · 1745 likes · 295 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/09/trump-immunity-hearing-takeaways/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/us/politics/trump-immunity-case-whats-next.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.40415/gov.uscourts.cadc.40415.1208583920.0.pdf, pp. 8, 28–29.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/13/politics/mitch-mcconnell-acquit-trump/index.html
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2023/trump-criminal-investigations-cases-tracker-list/
The BulwarkRepublican Former Members of Congress: Courts Should Move ‘As Quickly As Possible’ to Resolve Trump Cases“EQUAL JUSTICE BEFORE THE LAW” IS A BEDROCK PRINCIPLE of our legal system and our democracy. It is rooted in a fundamental proposition of this country’s founding: That we are a nation of laws, not of men, and accordingly no man is above the law. As former members of Congress, all of us Republicans, we dedic…Read morea day ago · 103 likesTwitter (X): \
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