Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 125
January 12, 2024
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
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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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January 8, 2024
January 8, 2024
With President Joe Biden’s speech today at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, coming after his speech in Pennsylvania on January 5, the election year of 2024 is in full swing. The first Republican caucus will be held on January 15 in Iowa; the first Democratic primary will be held on February 3. (A caucus is held by a political party and can have public voting, by a show of hands or gathering behind a candidate’s team; a primary election is run by the government and uses secret ballots.)
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are laying out the difference between their vision for America and that of the current Republican frontrunner, former president Trump. In Pennsylvania, after a visit to Valley Forge, where General George Washington’s troops camped during the hard winter of 1777–1778, Biden laid out Trump’s assault on American democracy by trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, normalizing violence, and threatening to become a dictator.
On January 6, the day after Biden’s speech, Harris spoke at the annual retreat of the Women’s Missionary Society of the 7th Episcopal District of the AME Church at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where she emphasized the relationship between voting and governance. “In 2020, at the height of an historic pandemic, in the midst of so much loss and uncertainty, you showed up to vote,” Harris told the audience. “And you organized your friends and family members and neighbors to do the same. And it is because of you that Joe Biden is President of the United States and I am the first Black woman to be Vice President of the United States.”
That administration, she said, has meant access to high-speed internet for rural communities, lead-free water, investments in historically Black colleges and universities, the expansion of Medicaid coverage for postpartum care, and more Black women judges appointed than under any other administration in history, “including the first Black woman to ever sit on the highest court in…our land.” “Elections matter; leadership matters; and it makes a difference in the lives of people who, for the most part, many of us may never meet, who, for the most part, may never know our names.”
Democracy, Harris said, “is extremely strong in terms of what it does and the strength that it gives its people in the protection and preservation of individual rights, freedoms, and liberty. Incredibly strong…. And it is, on the other hand, extremely fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”
In South Carolina today, in a historic Black church, Biden visited the site of the 2015 murders of nine church members at Bible study by a white supremacist. Biden condemned white supremacy and warned that some Americans are trying to “steal history” by rewriting it to claim the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, were “a peaceful protest.” That lie is part of a broader attack on the truth, Biden said, in which Trump loyalists try “to erase history and your future: banning books; denying your right to vote and have it counted; destroying diversity, equality, inclusion all across America; harboring hate and replacing hope with anger and resentment and a dangerous view of America.”
“That narrow view of America,” he said, is “a zero-sum view…that says, ‘If you win, I lose. If you succeed, it must be I failed. If you get ahead, I fall behind.’ And maybe worst of all, ‘If I hold you down, I lift myself up.’ But democracy is not a zero-sum game, he said. He called for “lifting up a bigger and broader view of America that holds that ‘If you do well, I do well. We all do well.’”
This year, for the first time, South Carolina will host the Democrats’ first presidential primary, in recognition that Iowa and New Hampshire, the states that previously were first, do not represent either the Democrats’ voter base or the country. South Carolina’s 2020 primary was a major boost for Biden’s candidacy that year, as Representative Jim Clyburn and Black voters got behind him rather than candidates perceived to be less centrist. Biden is expected to win the South Carolina primary this year but would like a strong showing in the Black community that makes up a strong share of the party’s base.
Trump is also gearing up for the Iowa caucus, the first Republican nomination event of the season, on January 15. In Talking Points Memo today, Barbara A. Trish noted that his campaign is far more organized than it was in 2016 (he did not need to fight for the nomination in 2020), looking much more like a traditional political organization.
But Trump is in deep trouble. He is embroiled in many legal cases, his loyalists have run state Republican parties into the ground, and his opponent Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, is building steam in her quest for the nomination.
In the face of such headwinds, Trump is working to cement his evangelical base. Over the weekend, he shared a video titled “God Made Trump” that utterly misrepresented his behavior and portrayed him as a divinely inspired leader.
In the New York Times today, Ruth Graham and Charles Homans explored the self-declared evangelical voters for Trump and reported that their support for Trump is less about religion than it is about “a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.” They are not churchgoers and are looking for what they see as retribution against those they believe are destroying traditional values, those who defend a secular society in which everyone is treated equally before the law.
Trump and his people appear to be trying to intimidate opponents into either support or silence. After losing two pretrial motions in the upcoming January 16 trial for damages associated with his defamation of E. Jean Carroll, the writer who said Trump raped her in the 1990s, Trump flooded social media with attacks on Carroll.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case, have been harassed with swatting attempts, a dangerous hoax in which someone gets law enforcement officers to rush to a home with claims that a violent crime is underway there.
Trump suggested today that unless he is guaranteed immunity for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, if he is reelected he will use the Department of Justice to make sure Biden is also indicted for his own actions as president. “If I don’t get Immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get Immunity,” he wrote on social media.
Behind Trump’s behavior is a willingness to destroy democracy, as the New York Times editorial board noted on January 6, 2024, when it wrote that Trump “confronts America with a…choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to ‘the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity’ and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution.”
Trump has made it clear that he does not consider himself bound by the country’s electoral system. On Saturday, Dave McKinney of WBEZ Chicago noted that Trump refused to sign an Illinois pledge, traditionally signed by all candidates, that he would not “advocate the overthrow of the government.” In 2016 and 2020, like other candidates, Trump signed it.
On Sunday, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press that she would not commit to respecting the results of the 2024 election. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) called out the comment, saying: “They are promising to steal the election…. Everyone knows they mean it. Be freaked out.”
Indeed, part of lawyer John Eastman’s plan for overturning the 2020 election was to challenge the electoral votes of enough states to deny Biden a majority in the electoral college, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives as outlined by the Twelfth Amendment. There, each state would have a single vote, and since there were more Republican-dominated states than Democratic ones, Trump would become president.
In Myrtle Beach on Sunday, Vice President Harris told the audience, “[A]t this moment in history, I say: Let us not throw up our hands when it’s time to roll up our sleeves. Because we were born for a time such as this.” Today, in Charleston, President Biden made the stakes clear: “[T]his is a time of choosing,” he said, “so let us choose the truth. Let us choose America.”
—
Notes:
https://ballotpedia.org/Caucus
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests-re-elected-biden-indicted-rcna132810
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/02/broke-state-gop-parties-across-the-country-00109387
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/michigan-republicans-vote-gop-chair-kristina-karamo-removal/
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/06/michigan-republicans-chair-00134178
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4389754-trump-haley-latest-new-hampshire-poll/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/us/politics/donald-trump-evangelicals-iowa.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-shares-bizarre-video-declaring-god-made-trump-2024-1
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/us/politics/trump-january-trials-elections.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-mind-melts-down-in-bizarre-e-jean-carroll-posting-blitz
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/08/stefanik-trump-election-results/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/us/politics/judge-tanya-chutkan-swatting-trump.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/20/politics/trump-pence-election-memo/index.html
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-12/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/opinion/trump-2024-campaign-warning.html
Twitter (X): brianschatz/status/1744080808640745705
January 7, 2024
January 7, 2024
Going to take tonight off, as Buddy’s season has ended and he is on vacation so we have been off gallivanting. I need to catch up on some sleep.
One of the good things about hitting the road with a man who is accustomed to getting up at 4:00 is that he tiptoes out in the morning to see the sights while I sleep in, and then comes back to the hotel with coffee and a bagel or pastry.
He also comes back with photos of where he’s been.
It’s a surefire bet I’ll never see the White House just before dawn with my own eyes, but this is a pretty good alternative.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
January 6, 2024
January 6, 2024
Today, three years to the day after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral ballots that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested three fugitives wanted in connection with that attack.
Siblings Jonathan and Olivia Pollock, whose family owns Rapture Guns and Knives, described on its Facebook page as a “christian owned Gun and Knife store” in Lakeland, Florida, and Joseph Hutchinson III, who once worked there, are suspected of some of the worst violence of January 6. The FBI had offered a $30,000 reward for “Jonny” Pollock, while the other two had been arrested but removed their ankle bracelets in March 2023 and fled.
Family members of the fugitives and of other Lakeland residents arrested for their involvement in the January 6 attack on the Capitol insist their relatives are innocent, framed by a government eager to undermine their way of life. The Pollock family has gone so far as to erect a monument “in honor of the ones who lost their lives on January 6, 2021.”
But it does not honor the law enforcement officers who were killed or injured. It honors the insurrectionists: Ashli Babbitt, shot by a law enforcement officer as she tried to break into the House Chamber through a smashed window (her family today sued the government for $30 million for wrongful death), and three others, one who died of a stroke; one of a heart attack, and one of an amphetamine overdose.
The monument in Lakeland, Florida, is a stark contrast to the one President Biden visited yesterday in Pennsylvania. Valley Forge National Park is the site of the six-month winter encampment of the Continental Army in the hard winter of 1777–1778. After the British army captured the city of Philadelphia in September 1777, General George Washington settled 12,000 people of his army about 18 miles to the northwest.
There the army almost fell apart. Supply chains were broken as the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the soldiers, and wartime inflation meant the Continental Congress did not appropriate enough money for food and clothing. Hunger and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny.
Even if they didn’t quit, they weren’t very well organized for an army charged with resisting one of the greatest military forces on the globe. The different units had been trained with different field manuals, making it hard to coordinate movements, and a group of army officers were working with congressmen to replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the war.
By February 1778, though, things were falling into place. A delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley Forge and understood that the lack of supplies made the army, and thus the country, truly vulnerable, and they set out to reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned that France had signed a treaty with the American states in February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of American independence. When the soldiers broke camp in June, they marched out ready to take on the British at the Battle of Monmouth, where their new training paid off as they held their own against the British soldiers.
The January 6 insurrectionists were fond of claiming they were echoing these American revolutionaries who created the new nation in the 1770s. The right-wing Proud Boys’ strategic plan for taking over buildings in the Capitol complex on January 6 was titled: “1776 Returns,” and even more famously, newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6, she wrote: “Today is 1776.”
Trump has repeatedly called those January 6 insurrectionists “patriots.”
Biden yesterday called Trump out for “trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election.”
Indeed. The insurrectionists at the Capitol were not patriots. They were trying to overthrow the government in order to take away the right at the center of American democracy: our right to determine our own destiny. Commemorating them as heroes is the 21st century’s version of erecting Confederate statues.
The January 6th insurrectionists were nothing like the community at Valley Forge, made up of people who had offered up their lives to support a government pledged, however imperfectly in that era, to expanding that right. When faced with hunger, disease, and discord, that community—which was made up not just of a remarkably diverse set of soldiers from all 13 colonies, including Black and Indigenous men, but also of their families and the workers, enslaved and free, who came with them—worked together to build a force that could establish a nation based in the idea of freedom.
The people at the Capitol on January 6 who followed in the footsteps of those who were living in the Valley Forge encampment 246 years ago were not the rioters. They were the people who defended our right to live under a government in which we have a say: those like the staffers who delayed their evacuation of the Capitol to save the endangered electoral ballots, and like U.S. Capitol Police officers Eugene Goodman, Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, and Aquilino Gonell and Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, along with the more than 140 officers injured that day.
Fanone, whom rioters beat and tasered, giving him a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack, yesterday told Emily Ngo, Jeff Coltin, and Nick Reisman of Politico: “I think it’s important that every institution in this country, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a.) Donald Trump does not succeed and b.) the MAGA movement is extinguished.”
Unlike the violence of the January 6th insurrectionists, the experience of the people at Valley Forge is etched deep into our national identity as a symbol of the sacrifice and struggle Americans have made to preserve and renew democracy. It is so central to who we are that we have commemorated it in myths and monuments and have projected into the future that its meaning will always remain at the heart of America. According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Federation Excelsior-class starship USS Valley Forge will still be fighting in the 24th century… against the Dominion empire.
—
Notes:
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/additional/jonathan-pollock/@@download.pdf
https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_be6205ad-ee31-42e8-843f-9fbeb156b25a
Twitter (X): laurenboebert/status/1346439502454288388?lang=en
https://www.cpr.org/2021/01/12/rep-lauren-boebert-remains-defiant-in-face-of-calls-to-resign/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/us/politics/enrique-tarrio-jan-6-document.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/january-6-riot-capitol-fugitives-arrested-florida/
https://www.nps.gov/vafo/learn/historyculture/valley-forge-history-and-significance.htm
Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War (University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 190-245.
January 5, 2024
January 5, 2024
President Joe Biden launched his reelection campaign today with a speech at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. He spoke after a visit to nearby Valley Forge, where General George Washington quartered his troops from December 1777 to June 1778 during the Revolutionary War in which the former colonies sought to establish their independence from Great Britain.
Biden began the speech by outlining what the soldiers in the Continental Army quartered at Valley Forge had fought for. “America made a vow,” Biden said. “Never again would we bow down to a king.”
A “ragtag army made up of ordinary people” fought for what Washington called “a sacred cause,” he said: “Freedom, liberty, democracy. American democracy.” Valley Forge, he said, “tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America.”
Three years ago, he said, when insurrectionists tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021, “we nearly…lost it all.”
“Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions,” Biden said. “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?... This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.”
“And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”
Biden described Trump’s attack on American democracy and warned that “Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you.” Biden remembered the “smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police” of January 6. He recalled the rioters erecting a gallows while the crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” hunting for then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and injuring more than 140 police officers.
Like the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Biden emphasized that while the whole world was watching the attack in horror and disbelief, and even as staff, family members, and Republican leaders pleaded with Trump to do something, the former president watched events unfold on the television in a little room off the Oval Office and “did nothing.”
Biden repeated the condemnation of former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) when he called that refusal to act “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history.”
The president went on to explain how Trump continued to lie that he had won the 2020 presidential election despite losing recounts and 60 court cases. For those lies, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was ordered last month to pay $148 million to election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for defamation, and the Fox News Corporation agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for lying that their machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden.
Then, when he had exhausted all his legal options, Trump urged his supporters to assault the Capitol. Since then, more than 1,200 people have been charged with crimes related to the events of that day; nearly 900 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
Trump has called those insurrectionists “patriots” and has promised to pardon them if he is returned to office. But normalizing violence as part of our political system destroys the reasonable debate and peaceful transition of power that is at the heart of democracy. Biden identified this danger, warning: “Political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States political system—never, never, never. It has no place in a democracy. None. You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.”
Biden noted that Trump has promised to continue to assault democracy, threatening “a full-scale campaign of ‘revenge’ and ‘retribution’...for some years to come.” Trump has said he “would be a dictator on day one,” called for the “termination of all the rules, regulation, and articles, even those found in the U.S. Constitution,” and echoed the language used in Nazi Germany by calling those who oppose him “vermin” and talking about the blood of Americans being poisoned by immigrants.
“There’s no confusion about who Trump is and what he intends to do,” Biden said.
Immediately after January 6, 2021, “even Republican members of Congress and Fox News commentators publicly and privately condemned the attack,” he said. “But now…those same people have changed their tune…. [P]olitics, fear, money, all have intervened. And now these MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump on January 6th have abandoned the truth and abandoned democracy.”
“They made their choice,” Biden said. “Now the rest of us—Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans—we have to make our choice. I know mine. And I believe I know America’s. We will defend the truth, not give in to the Big Lie. We’ll embrace the Constitution and the Declaration, not abandon it. We’ll honor the sacred cause of democracy, not walk away from it.”
“Today, I make this sacred pledge to you,” he said. “The defense, protection, and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.”
“America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear,” Biden said. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.” “The alternative to democracy is dictatorship—the rule of one, not the rule of ‘We the People.’”
“Together, we can keep proving that America is still a country that believes in decency, dignity, honesty, honor, truth,” he said. “We still believe that no one, not even the President, is above the law…. [T]he vast majority of us still believe that everyone deserves a fair shot at making it. We’re still a nation that gives hate no safe harbor…. We still believe in ‘We the People,’ and that includes all of us, not some of us.”
In “that cold winter of 1777,” Biden said, referring back to the soldiers at Valley Forge, “George Washington and his American troops…waged a battle on behalf of a revolutionary idea that everyday people—like where I come from and the vast majority of you—…that everyday people can govern themselves without a king or a dictator.”
Americans “take charge of our destiny,” Biden said. “We get our job done with…the help of the people we find in America, who find their place in the changing world and dream and build a future that not only they but all people deserve a shot at.”
“This is the first national election since [the] January 6th insurrection placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy,” Biden said. “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: Who are we? That’s what’s at stake. Who are we?”
And then he answered his own question, concluding with his characteristic faith in the American people. “After all we’ve been through in our history, from independence to Civil War to two world wars to a pandemic to insurrection,” he said, “I refuse to believe that, in 2024, we Americans will choose to walk away from what’s made us the greatest nation in the history of the world: freedom, liberty.”
“Democracy,” he said, “is still a sacred cause.”
—
Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219048410/giuliani-defamation-trial-money-georgia-election-workers
https://www.axios.com/2022/03/20/cheney-jan-6-criminal-penalties-trump
January 4, 2024
January 4, 2024
The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today released a 156-page report showing that when he was in the presidency, Trump received at least $7.8 million from 20 different governments, including those of China, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Malaysia, through businesses he owned.
The Democrats brought receipts.
According to the report—and the documents from Trump’s former accounting firm Mazars that are attached to it—the People’s Republic of China and companies substantially controlled by the PRC government paid at least $5,572,548 to Trump-owned properties while Trump was in office; Saudi Arabia paid at least $615,422; Qatar paid at least $465,744; Kuwait paid at least $300,000; India paid at least $282,764; Malaysia paid at least $248,962; Afghanistan paid at least $154,750; the Philippines paid at least $74,810; the United Arab Emirates paid at least $65,225. The list went on and on.
The committee Democrats explained that these payments were likely only a fraction of the actual money exchanged, since they cover only four of more than 500 entities Trump owned at the time. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January 2023, Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) stopped the investigation before Mazars had produced the documents the committee had asked for when Democrats were in charge of it. Those records included documents relating to Russia, South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil.
Trump fought hard against the production of these documents, dragging out the court fight until September 2022. The committee worked on them for just four months before voters put Republicans in charge of the House and the investigation stopped.
These are the first hard numbers that show how foreign governments funneled money to the president while policies involving their countries were in front of him. The report notes, for example, that Trump refused to impose sanctions on Chinese banks that were helping the North Korean government; one of those banks was paying him close to $2 million in rent annually for commercial office space in Trump Tower.
The first article of the U.S. Constitution reads: “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument [that is, salary, fee, or profit], Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The report also contrasted powerfully with the attempt of Republicans on the Oversight Committee, led by Comer, to argue that Democratic Joe Biden has corruptly profited from the presidency.
In the Washington Post on December 26, 2023, Philip Bump noted that just after voters elected a Republican majority, Comer told the Washington Post that as soon as he was in charge of the Oversight Committee, he would use his power to “determine if this president and this White House are compromised because of the millions of dollars that his family has received from our adversaries in China, Russia and Ukraine.”
For the past year, while he and the committee have made a number of highly misleading statements to make it sound as if there are Biden family businesses involving the president (there are not) and the president was involved in them (he was not), their claims were never backed by any evidence. Bump noted in a piece on December 14, 2023, for example, that Comer told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that “the Bidens” have “taken in” more than $24 million. In fact, Bump explained, Biden’s son Hunter and his business partners did receive such payments, but most of the money went to the business partners. About $7.5 million of it went to Hunter Biden. There is no evidence that any of it went to Joe Biden.
All of the committee’s claims have similar reality checks. Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian wrote that after nearly 40,000 pages of bank records and dozens of hours of testimony, “no evidence has emerged that Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current or previous role.”
Still, the constant hyping of their claims on right-wing media led then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to authorize an impeachment inquiry in mid-September, and in mid-December, Republicans in the House formalized the inquiry.
There is more behind the attack on Biden than simply trying to even the score between him and Trump—who remains angry at his impeachments and has demanded Republicans retaliate—or to smear Biden through an “investigation,” which has been a standard technique of the Republicans since the mid-1990s.
Claiming that Biden is as corrupt as Trump undermines faith in our democracy. After all, if everyone is a crook, why does it matter which one is in office? And what makes American democracy any different from the authoritarian systems of Russia or Hungary or Venezuela, where leaders grab what they can for themselves and their followers?
Democracies are different from authoritarian governments because they have laws to prevent the corruption in which it appears Trump engaged. The fact that Republicans refuse to hold their own party members accountable to those laws while smearing their opponents says far more about them than it does about the nature of democracy.
It does, though, highlight that our democracy is in danger.
—
Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2022/09/01/house-oversight-committee-trump-financial-documents
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/26/biden-republicans-impeachment-inquiry-2023/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/14/biden-impeachment-inquiry-comer-evidence/
January 3, 2024
January 3, 2023
If yesterday was a news storm, today was a lot of follow-up.
Tensions in the Middle East continue to tighten with the explosion of two bombs at a ceremony today honoring prominent Iranian general Qassem Soleimani on the fourth anniversary of his death from a U.S. drone strike in Iraq. At least 95 people were killed. No one has claimed responsibility for the bombings. Iran-backed militias, including Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are aligned against Israel.
Meanwhile, today the U.S. and twelve allies warned the Houthis to stop attacking ships in the Red Sea or face military action. Since December 19, Houthi rebels have hit more than 23 ships in the crucial passage. “Let our message now be clear: we call for the immediate end of these illegal attacks and release of unlawfully detained vessels and crews,” the countries said. “The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways.”
The European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell today said that the world must “impose” a solution to the Middle East war before it expands.
At home, at least eight U.S. state houses had to evacuate today. According to Andy Rose of CNN, an emailed bomb threat was sent to state officers in 23 states. Law enforcement officers found no explosives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has called the threats a hoax. It is not clear who was behind the threats.
Aside from today’s threats, the dramatic rise of violence in our politics since former president Trump entered political life is reshaping the country. In Vox yesterday, Zach Beauchamp noted that mayors, federal judges, public health officials, election workers, and even school board members, officials who previously had gone about their business without much attention, are facing unprecedented threats. Before 2020, threats against election workers were virtually nonexistent, Beauchamp notes; now they are so frequent that 11% of election workers surveyed by the Brennan Center for Justice are “very or somewhat likely” to leave their jobs before the 2024 election.
While attacks on election workers and political officials show Trump’s attempt to erode faith in our electoral system, Beauchamp notes that another key aspect of today’s violence has been to threaten Republicans to fall in line behind Trump. The fear of physical violence from Trump supporters kept certain Republicans from voting to convict him after his impeachments. MAGA Republican threats against other Republicans insufficiently supportive of Trump have led party members to swing publicly behind a leader that many of them privately oppose.
That pressure has reduced the formerly grand old Republican Party to a vehicle for promoting Trump.
Today, Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN), whose bid for the House speakership Trump torpedoed just weeks ago, became the latest to endorse Trump for president as party leadership lines up behind him.
The decision of the right-wing Fifth Circuit today illustrated what the Trump leadership of the MAGA party means for the majority of the country. Three Republican judges, two appointed by Trump, ruled that hospital emergency rooms don’t have to perform life-saving abortions in states that have passed antiabortion laws.
After the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services reminded hospitals that accept Medicare money that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), they had to provide care to stabilize patients in a medical emergency, including abortion care, regardless of state law.
Texas sued, and the Fifth Circuit has agreed, saying that the EMTALA does not preempt Texas law.
Today’s news also highlighted the MAGA plan for immigration. House leaders have refused to pass legislation providing additional funds to help Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion until the measure also contains their own immigration policies, patterned on Trump’s. Although President Biden has asked for additional funding for the border since he took office and has said he will offer significant concessions in negotiations even though those concessions will anger progressive Democrats, House Republicans say they will reject any compromise and will insist on their own policies.
Those measures include significantly narrowing asylum programs or even ending them altogether, outlawing the electronic application system the Biden administration put in place to require appointments to apply for asylum, ending parole programs for Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, and taking private property to build a border wall. Their plan has no provision for creating a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers, those brought to the U.S. as children, although a strong majority of Americans support such a pathway.
Now House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says the House conference does not want and will not accept a compromise, such as the one senators are working on; they want a complete change of policy. That is, the Republicans in the House, who have a majority of two, are bowing to their far-right members and insisting that until that faction’s policies are put in place over those of the Senate and the president, they will refuse to fund Ukraine, whose defense from Russian aggression is key to our own national security.
It’s a wild power grab. And it is apparently being done with an eye to 2024. Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) said to Manu Raju, Melanie Zanona, and Lauren Fox of CNN, “Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating.”
As CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto noted, “This would leave Ukraine—currently under its worst bombardment since the start of the Russian invasion—very much out in the cold.”
Finally, today is the 65th anniversary of Alaska’s joining the Union as the 49th state. In order to convince Congress and the president to make their territory a state, Alaskans had to overcome concerns on the part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower that, because the territory bordered the Soviet Union, its admission as a state might compromise national security.
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-soleimani-explosion-kerman-2524cfed1d040370bf98000e2b53ad5a
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024/01/03/central-maine/maine-state-house-evacuated-bomb-threat/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/03/us/state-capitols-threats/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/state-capitol-threat-evacuation-lockdown-dfef5fbb98ec6572474807c260533b05
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/election-worker-threats-drive-exodus-from-profession.html
https://www.vox.com/23899688/2024-election-republican-primary-death-threats-trump
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/02/texas-abortion-fifth-circuit/
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59151
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/03/politics/senate-immigration-negotiations-congress/index.html
Twitter (X) jimsciutto/status/1742662911737110568
https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/alaska-statehood
January 2, 2024
January 2, 2024
The new year has hit with news flying in from a number of quarters.
At home, minimum wage increased in nearly half of U.S. states; it has been 14 years since the last increase in the federal minimum wage, the longest stretch since 1938 according to the AFL-CIO. NPR correspondent David Gura quoted Goldman Sachs’s chief equity strategist to note, ”The S&P 500 index returned 26% including dividends in 2023, more than 2x the average annual return of 12% since 1986.”
Representative Bill Johnson (R-OH) today submitted his resignation, effective January 21, to become the president of Youngstown State University. This shaves the Republican majority in the House of Representatives even thinner. With the recent expulsion of George Santos (R-NY) and resignation of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republicans will control just 219 seats, permitting them a margin of only two seats to pass legislation when the House returns on January 9.
The Republican House has been one of the least effective in history, and it has its work cut out for it in the new year. The first phase of the continuing resolution Congress passed in November to fund the government expires on January 19, ending funding for transportation, housing, energy, agriculture, and veterans’ affairs. The second phase expires on February 2. Much of the 2018 Farm Bill that covers food and farm aid expired in 2023. As of yesterday, January 1, the items usually covered in farm bills fall under a hodge-podge of fixes, with some old provisions from the 1930s and 1940s going back into force.
Also outstanding is the measure to provide supplemental funding for Israel, Ukraine, and the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico, as well as providing humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
House Republicans refused to pass that measure unless it included their own extreme anti-immigration measures, but they have refused to participate in efforts to hash out legislation, clearly preferring to keep the issue hot to use against the Democrats in 2024. Since President Joe Biden took office, he and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have asked Congress for additional funding for Customs and Border Patrol officers and additional immigration courts, but despite Republicans’ own demand for such legislation, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote to Biden in December demanding that he impose stricter immigration rules and build a border wall through executive action. Today, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) echoed the idea that Biden, not Congress, should deal with the border.
Meanwhile, Emily Brooks and Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill reported today that about 60 House Republicans are planning to visit the border in Texas to emphasize the issue. They are also preparing to impeach Mayorkas on the grounds that he has failed to meet the requirements of the Secure Fence Act, “which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country.” As Brooks and Beitsch point out, “not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection.” House Republicans plan to hold hearings on impeaching Mayorkas, but Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) has suggested to the Fox News Channel that the articles of impeachment are already written.
At the intersection of domestic and foreign affairs, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), whom federal prosecutors have already indicted for using his office to work for Egypt, was charged again today with using his political influence to work for the government of Qatar. This is a big deal: at the time, Menendez was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a key position in the U.S. government. Two Republican operatives are pleading guilty to evading lobbying laws in their own work for Qatar; their activities appear to have been much more limited than Menendez’s.
The turn of the new year has also produced lots of news in foreign affairs.
On February 4, 2021, just after Secretary of State Antony Blinken took office, Biden spoke at the State Department and said “the message I want the world to hear today” is that “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” In a New York Times article from December 31, Peter Baker, Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, and Isabel Kershner emphasize that Biden and his team have been engaged constantly in diplomacy with Israel, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. Since the October 7, 2023, attack by Iran-backed Hamas on Israel, Biden has spoken with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu 14 times and visited Israel; Blinken has traveled to the region three times and visited Israel five times.
On December 22, in the Christian Science Monitor, Arab political journalist Taylor Luck and correspondent Fatima AbdulKarim reported that Arab Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, the U.S., and the European Union have created “[a] massive postwar reconstruction plan…for the besieged Gaza Strip.” The plan is to “rebuild the coastal strip, unite and overhaul Palestinian governance, and create a Palestinian security force in Gaza to ensure Palestinian and Israeli security.”
Arab diplomats insist the reconstruction of southern Gaza, including alleviating suffering, rebuilding housing and infrastructure, and restoring jobs, must be “rapid”; Gulf states have set $3 billion a year for ten years as the first budget. The plan calls for a “revamped and revitalized” Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza and the West Bank with current president Mahmoud Abbas as a figurehead and an apolitical unity government running affairs.
The plan is still developing, but already the main obstacles are Israel’s governing coalition, led by Netanyahu, who refuses the ideas of a two-state solution and of a Palestinian Authority in charge of Gaza, and Hamas, which Gulf states as well as the U.S. reject as a participant in the future governance of Gaza. Other Iran-backed militias also oppose such a solution.
From the beginning of the Hamas-Israel war, the Biden administration has been very clear that its first goal was to make sure the conflict didn’t spread, with Lebanon’s Iran-allied Hezbollah and other proxy militias joining in fully. Biden immediately sent two carrier groups to the region and promised “to move in additional assets as needed.” On October 10 he warned: “Let me say again—to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t.”
The New York Times piece by Baker, Wong, Barnes, and Kershner revealed that Biden and his national security team, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan, also warned Netanyahu against launching a preemptive strike on Hezbollah. Israel and Hezbollah have been attacking each other with drones, missiles, and air strikes along the countries’ border.
Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen have attacked ships in the Red Sea, which is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, handling about 12% of global trade and about 8.2 million barrels of crude oil and oil products every day. On December 31, four small boats attacked the Hangzhou, a container ship from the Danish shipping giant Maersk sailing under a Singapore flag, and then fired on the U.S. Navy helicopters that responded to the Hangzhou’s distress call. The helicopter crews sank three of the boats, killing their crews; the fourth fled.
Today, Iran sent a naval frigate to the Red Sea, and Maersk announced it would stop using the Red Sea route until further notice. Hezbollah media said that an Israeli drone strike in Beirut, Lebanon, killed Saleh Arouri, the deputy political head of Hamas and a founder of its military wing. Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate.
Also today, in response to calls from Israeli cabinet members for the resettlement of Palestinians outside Gaza, the U.S. State Department issued a “rejection” of both the language and the idea. “We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.”
And in today’s Washington Post, Lebanon’s former prime minister Fouad Siniora and former Lebanese lawmaker Basem Shabb noted that “[d]espite the ferocity of the bombing and the great loss of innocent civilian lives in Gaza, the conflict remains largely contained to an Israeli-Palestinian confrontation—and more specifically, is broadly understood in the Arab world to be a conflict with Hamas, a non-state actor,” but warned the conflict must not spread. They noted that in November, “[i]n a first, 57 Arab and Islamic countries…called for a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on a two-state solution,” the same concept embraced by the Biden administration.
“In response to Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the Arab world responded with denunciation—but, more importantly, with diplomacy. No military threats were issued by any of the Arab states toward Israel,” the Lebanese lawmakers pointed out. They urged Israel to embrace the two-state solution “and, in doing so, usher in a new era in the Middle East.”
Lots of pieces moving around the board on this second day of January 2024.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/12/houthis-rebels-yemen-israel-ships/
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-would-red-sea-attacks-affect-gas-shipping-2023-12-19/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/31/us/politics/us-israel-hamas-war.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/02/fara-barry-bennett-douglas-watts-qatar/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/nyregion/robert-menendez-qatar-influence.html
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4373378-gaza-death-toll-20000/
https://www.threads.net/@aflcio/post/C1m_NwQR8Nx/
https://www.threads.net/@davidgura/post/C1maRGWu_9w/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4382103-house-gop-to-begin-2024-with-focus-on-border/
Twitter: senronjohnson/status/1742234228736119067
https://www.politico.eu/article/iran-warship-red-sea-suez-canal-yemen-houthi/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/02/arab-israeli-peace-palestinians-gaza/
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