Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 128
December 9, 2023
December 9, 2023
Am picking up my knitting by our very own woodstove, and feeling extraordinarily fortunate to be in such a position.
Turning things over tonight to my friend Nadia with a holiday picture she took in Ukraine... before 2022.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Picture by Nadia Povalinska.]
December 8, 2023
December 8, 2023
You all are in trouble, because I am home tonight from ten weeks on the road and am taking the night for myself, writing about one of the Very Cool Things I learned in my travels. I expect there will be more stories along these lines in the next several weeks.
Ninety years ago today, on Friday, December 8, 1933, in the first year of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, the Advisory Committee to the Treasury on Fine Arts met for four hours in Washington, D.C., with museum directors from all over the country and leaders from the art world. For the past nine months, the administration had been building a “New Deal” for the American people, using the government to help ordinary Americans in the midst of the Great Depression.
Together with the Democrats in Congress, the administration had launched the Civilian Conservation Corps that put young men to work planting trees, fighting fires, and maintaining wilderness trails. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided work and cash relief for unemployed workers; the Agricultural Adjustment Administration boosted farm prices by reducing agricultural surpluses, while the Farm Credit Act made it easier for farmers to borrow. The Civil Works Administration put more than 4 million unemployed Americans to work building 44,000 miles of new roads, 1,000 miles of new water mains, and building or improving 4,000 schools.
Now it was time to help artists. Inspired by the 1920s public art movement in Mexico in which young artists were paid to decorate public buildings, FDR’s former classmate George Biddle suggested to the president that artists could be hired to “paint murals depicting the social ideals of the new administration and contemporary life on the walls of public buildings.”
This idea dovetailed with the goal of the administration to tap into the skills of ordinary Americans in rebuilding the country by making sure people had work. After all, FERA administrator Harry L. Hopkins said, artists needed “to eat just like other people.” He promised $1,039,000 to be disbursed by the Treasury “for the purpose of alleviating the distress of the American artists” while decorating public property with world-class art.
At the Washington, D.C., meeting, the attendees discussed how to “carry…forward the world of encouraging the fine arts as a function of the Federal Government.” Their first speaker was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who “expressed her sympathy with the idea of the Government’s employing artists,” and all the other speakers followed suit. The following Monday, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) opened its doors, and artists lined up outside government offices to apply. By Saturday, December 16, artists were receiving checks. When the project ended four months later, 3,749 artists had been on the payroll, producing more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures, and public murals.
The pilot project for the PWAP was Coit Tower in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood, located in the city’s Pioneer Park. The 210-foot Art Deco tower of unpainted concrete had been completed and dedicated in honor of volunteer firefighters on October 8, 1933 (perhaps not coincidentally, the date of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871). When the building was finished, it had 3,691 square feet of blank concrete wall space.
By January 1934, thanks to the PWAP, twenty-six San Francisco artists and nineteen of their assistants were transforming that blank space into frescoes and murals depicting California life. Several of the artists had worked in Mexico with muralist Diego Rivera as part of the socially conscious mural movement of 1920s Mexico and adopted his techniques, creating frescoes in which the colors became part of the wall as they dried. To keep the colors at Coit Tower uniform, one artist-assistant ground the color pigments for all the different frescoes.
But while they admired Rivera’s art, the New Deal artists, for the most part, focused not on revolution, as he did, but on the possibilities of the country’s new approach to government. Roosevelt was backing artists, and they backed him, painting not about revolution but about restoring healthy social and economic conditions in the United States.
By the time the PWAP got under way, the exciting artistic experiments of the early twentieth century that had brought Picasso’s cubism, for example, had begun to seem foreign and alienating, and artists had begun to turn toward representational art in a national style. The government’s requirement that the public art be about the “American scene” in American style for American people built on that shift. Artists in the PWAP painted either as “Regionalists,” who painted rural America, or “Social Realists,” who painted the cities. The Regionalists tended to celebrate the nation, while Social Realists—most of whom came from New York City—tended to critique it, but both groups found intelligence, power, and beauty in the ordinary people and the ordinary scenes they painted.
Coit Tower showed San Francisco’s people: striking workers, farmers, cowboys, travelers reading newspapers, news stenographers, chauffeurs, a rich man being held up at gunpoint, car accidents. People of color and women were underrepresented but not entirely ignored in this celebration of the possibilities of American life under the administration's new policies (one mural had an oil can in a corner to illustrate the government oiling the machinery of the economy for the mechanics in the next panel).
The murals in Coit Tower, and the PWAP that supported them, were such a roaring success that the federal government would shortly launch four more projects to fund artists (including writers), most famously under the Works Progress Administration that operated from 1935 to 1942. Although to a modern eye, many of the fine artists’ depictions of Indigenous Americans and racial and gender minorities are eye-poppingly racist, these colorful presentations of the lives and histories of ordinary Americans that decorated libraries, schools, courthouses, bathhouses, and post offices, honoring community and hard work—and, in the edgier paintings, jabbing at stockbrokers, bankers, and industrialists—celebrated a hopeful, new, progressive America.
For many Americans, who had never had access to fine art and were astonished to see fine art in local buildings, the medium was its own message: they realized their neighbors had talent they had never imagined.
President Joe Biden has deliberately echoed FDR’s policies of the New Deal in his economic program, promising to build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, even as Republicans have insisted the only way to build the economy is to concentrate wealth on the “supply side” by cutting taxes. Today, there was more evidence that Biden’s policies are paying off for ordinary Americans. The November jobs report showed the economy added almost 200,000 more jobs in November, making the total since Biden took office more than 14 million, while the unemployment rate has stayed below 4% for 22 months in a row and wage growth is strong.
As Harvard professor Jason Furman notes, the U.S. is now 2 million jobs and 2 million employed above the pre-pandemic projections of the Congressional Budget Office. Dan Shafer of The Recombobulation Area observed, “If these numbers were happening during a Republican presidency, the usual business community folks would be celebrating in the streets. But when there’s a D next to the president’s name, it’s tumbleweeds.” Today, on the Fox News Channel, personality Maria Bartiromo noted that “the economy is a lot stronger than anyone understands.”
The president also echoed the New Deal’s promotion of internal improvements today when he announced an investment of $8.2 billion in new funding for ten major passenger rail projects across the country to deliver the nation’s first high-speed rail projects. High-speed rail between California and Nevada, serving more than 11 million people annually; Los Angeles and San Francisco; and the Eastern Corridor, will create tens of thousands of union jobs, build communities, and promote climate-friendly transportation options.
In a speech in Las Vegas, Nevada, announcing the rail plan, Biden called out his predecessor, who “always talked about infrastructure week. Four years of infrastructure week, but it failed. He failed,” Biden said. “On my watch, instead of having infrastructure week, America is having infrastructure decade.”
“Trump just talks the talk. We walk the walk,” he said. “Look. He likes to say America is a failing nation. Frankly, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I see shovels in the ground, cranes in the sky, people hard at work rebuilding America together.”
[Image of Coit Tower painting of striking workers, taken while I was in San Francisco.]
—
Notes:
https://livingnewdeal.org/history-of-the-new-deal/what-was-the-new-deal/timeline/
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015010432469&view=1up&seq=21&skin=2021
https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/07001468_text
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/17/172002686/armory-show-that-shocked-america-in-1913-celebrates-100
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/1934-the-art-of-the-new-deal-132242698/
Steven M. Gelber, “Working to Prosperity: California’s New Deal Murals,” California History 58 (Summer 1979): 98-127.
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December 7, 2023
December 7, 2023
On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.
In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.
Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
That night, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.
The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.
Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.
The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all people as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.
The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.
Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?
Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.
But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.
The once-grand Republican Party has been captured by the right wing. It has lined up behind former president Donald Trump and his cronies, who have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants and children of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, ban Muslims, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists, and end abortion across the country. They will put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.
Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?
When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.
I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.
Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.
—
Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_declaration_of_war_on_the_United_States
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-weaponization-justice-department-political-opponents/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/17/trump-muslim-ban-gaza-refugees
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.html
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-09-24/mcmanus-column-trump-second-term-agenda
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/trump-loyalists-2024-presidential-election
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/politics/trump-kash-patel-journalists.html
December 6, 2023
In the Washington Post today, Marianne LeVine, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Josh Dawsey reported that the Trump camp is eager to get people to stop focusing on Trump’s authoritarian talk, noting that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says the presidential candidate was just joking when he said he would be a dictator on the first day of a return to the White House. While the Republican base appears to like Trump’s threats against the people they have come to hate, two Trump advisers told the reporters that “recent stories about his plans for a second term are not viewed as helpful for the general election.”
Republicans have also moved quickly to cut ties with Florida Republican Party chair Christian Ziegler, who is under police investigation for rape. Ziegler’s wife, Bridget Ziegler, co-founded Moms for Liberty, an organization that has focused on removing from schools books that they find objectionable, generally books by or about racial or ethnic minorities or LGBTQ+ people. Often Moms for Liberty members have implied, or even claimed, that those trying to protect school libraries are sexual predators or “groomers.” Ziegler herself has been active in shaping anti-LGBTQ+ policies in the state.
But the police and court documents about the case revealed that the Zieglers and the woman Ziegler allegedly raped had participated in a three-way sexual relationship in the past. The rape allegedly occurred after they had set up another encounter that Bridget could not make. The woman then canceled, telling Ziegler “I was mainly in it for her.” He went to her home anyway.
The story of a key anti-LGBTQ+ activist engaging in same-sex activity as part of a threesome sent Moms for Liberty hurrying to say that Bridget Ziegler was no longer on their board (although both Zieglers were still on their advisory board) and purge her name from their website. And though no charges have yet been filed, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has called on Christian Ziegler to resign from his position at the head of the state Republican Party.
The Zieglers helped to tie the Republican Party to Moms for Liberty shortly after the organization formed in January 2021, and DeSantis was very much on board, apparently seeing their message of taking the war against “woke” to the schools as a political winner. But, as Amanda Marcotte pointed out in Salon, the 2022 midterms revealed that most voters did not like the extremism of that group and that it was a political liability.
The fact that DeSantis is dropping his former ally Ziegler so fast suggests that DeSantis is eager to divorce himself from both the story and from the extremism of Moms for Liberty.
The Trump Republicans took another hit today as well, when a grand jury in the state of Nevada charged six people who falsely posed as electors in 2020 in order to file fake electoral votes for Trump to replace the state’s real votes for now-President Joe Biden. The six Republicans charged with filing false documents include the chair and the vice chair of the Nevada Republican Party. If convicted, they face up to nine years in prison and $15,000 in fines.
Nevada is the third state to charge the fake electors with crimes. Georgia and Michigan have also done so.
Ten fake electors in Wisconsin today settled a civil lawsuit over their own participation in Trump’s false-elector scheme. The settlement involved correcting the historical record. The ten agreed to withdraw their paperwork with the false information, explain in writing to the federal offices that the filings had been “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results,” and acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election. Going forward, they agreed never again to serve as presidential electors in an election in which Trump is running.
But while there are signs that even leading Republicans recognize that the extremism of the Trump Republicans is unpopular in the country, Trump Republicans are tightening their hold on Congress. Today former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced that he will resign from Congress at the end of this month. Far-right MAGA Republicans ousted McCarthy from the speaker’s chair in October.
Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC), a McCarthy ally who took over as acting House speaker after McCarthy’s removal, announced yesterday that he had changed his plans from earlier this year and will not run for reelection.
While hardly moderates—both refused to work with Democrats either to pass legislation or to elect a speaker—they appear to be ceding ground to the MAGA Republicans.
Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone reported today that one of those MAGA Republicans, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), spoke freely Tuesday night at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., at a celebration for the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. Although the address was being livestreamed, Johnson apparently believed he was speaking privately. He told the audience that the Lord called him to be “a new Moses.”
Johnson, an evangelical Christian, told the audience that the U.S. is “engaged in a battle between worldviews” and “a great struggle for the future of the Republic.” He said he believed far-right Christians would prevail.
The influence of Trump is also evident in the Senate, where there is broad, bipartisan support for supplemental funding for Ukraine, but where Republicans are refusing to pass such a measure without attaching to it an immigration package that overrides current law, replacing it with Trump’s immigration plans. Such plans could not pass on their own, as Democrats would stop them in the Senate. But by attaching them to a bill that is imperative for national security, Republicans hope to force Biden into it.
Democrats have repeatedly called for new immigration legislation, but their refusal to remake immigration policy as the hard-right wants has made Republicans balk. Now Democrats are still offering to negotiate a reasonable package, but as Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said earlier this week: “I think there’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator Schumer and some of our Democratic friends…. This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.”
In a speech this afternoon—just a day after Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) finally permitted the Senate to fill 425 senior positions in the U.S. military and while he is still preventing 11 top-level positions from being filled—President Biden called it “stunning that we’ve gotten to this point…. Republicans in Congress…are willing to give [Russian president Vladimir] Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership not just to Ukraine, but beyond that.”
“If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden warned. “It’s important to see the long run here. He’s going to keep going. He’s made that pretty clear. If Putin attacks a NATO Ally—if he keeps going and then he attacks a NATO Ally—well, we’ve committed as a NATO member that we’d defend every inch of NATO territory. Then we’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops—American troops fighting Russian troops if he moves into other parts of NATO.
“Make no mistake: Today’s vote is going to be long remembered. And history is going to judge harshly those who turn their back on freedom’s cause.”
“Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine’s funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies,” he said.
Biden reiterated that he and the Democrats are eager to pass new immigration legislation, but “Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise. That’s not the answer.... And now they’re willing to literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield and damage our national security in the process.” He begged Republicans to get past partisan divisions and step up to “our responsibilities as a leading nation in the world.”
Hours later, Senate Republicans voted against the supplemental aid package.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2023/12/06/trump-comments-dictator-campaign-president-2024/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/nevada-electors-fake-charged-election-2020
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/six-fake-pro-trump-electors-indicted-in-nevada
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-fake-electors-wisconsin-fff7cd21e3083f300874eccd69141f8d
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/what-a-tangled-web-florida-republicans-gone-wild
https://www.salon.com/2023/11/09/im-so-tired-of-these-psychos-moms-for-liberty-is-now-a-brand/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4342967-patrick-mchenry-not-running-for-reelection/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/26/senate-vote-biden-ukraine-00128631
December 5, 2023
December 5, 2023
A new filing today by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the case United States of America v. Donald J. Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election shows Smith’s office establishing that Trump has a longstanding pattern of refusing to accept election results he dislikes.
As early as 2012, the filing notes, Trump baselessly alleged that voting machines had switched votes intended for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. In the 2016 campaign he “claimed repeatedly, with no basis, that there was widespread voter fraud,” and publicly refused to commit to accepting the results of that election. This pattern continued in 2020, but in that election he took active steps to seize power.
The filing introduced information that Trump, an agent, and an unindicted co-conspirator tried to start a riot at the TCF Center in Detroit as vote counting showed Biden taking the lead. As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo points out, this scheme sounds much like the Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000 that stopped vote counting in Miami-Dade County in Florida. Roger Stone was a participant in the Brooks Brothers Riot; in 2020 he was working to keep Trump in office.
Smith’s team shows how this pattern continued to play out in the 2020 election, with Trump urging supporters like the Proud Boys to back him, falsely asserting that the election had been stolen, and attacking former supporters who denied that the election had been stolen. The pattern has continued until the present, with Trump calling those who were found guilty of offenses related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol “hostages” and claiming they were “treated horribly.”
Smith recounts these facts to establish Trump’s motive and intent on January 6, but his identification of a longstanding pattern indicates it would be a grave mistake to think Trump has any intention of campaigning fairly or accepting any result in 2024 other than his return to the White House.
New House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has endorsed Trump for president and was a key organizer of the congressional effort to keep Trump in office, has promised to release all the surveillance footage from the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Trump supporters insist that the full tapes will reveal that the attack was not as bad as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol showed. Johnson said that the tapes must be shared publicly for “transparency.”
Today, Johnson supported Trump’s message about January 6 when he said that he was making sure the faces of rioters are blurred in the surveillance footage. "We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ [Department of Justice] and to have other, you know, concerns and problems," he said. Johnson’s spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, saying Johnson meant to say that faces were blurred to prevent “all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors.”
Also today, Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s national security team and is widely expected to return in a second Trump administration, expanded the authoritarian threats Trump people have been making to include the media. On former Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel promised that the Trump team would fill government positions from top to bottom with loyalists and would use the Department of Justice to go after those perceived to be Trump’s enemies.
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Yesterday, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is promoting her new book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, called out Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for his continuing hold on military appointments that kept more than 450 routine promotions from taking effect over the past ten months. Tuberville claimed his refusal to permit the nominees’ confirmations was an attempt to change Pentagon policy of permitting leave for service members in states that ban abortion to obtain abortion care elsewhere. But on NPR yesterday, Cheney wondered: “Why is Tommy Tuberville doing that? Is he holding those positions open so that Donald Trump can fill them?”
Today, under great pressure from members of his own party who worried the Democrats would change the rules to weaken the power of the Senate minority, Tuberville released his hold on most of the nominees. The Senate promptly confirmed 425 of them.
Still, Tuberville retained holds on 11 officers of the most senior rank. According to congressional reporter for Punchbowl News Andrew Desiderio, the positions left vacant are commander of Pacific Air Forces, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Air Component Command for the United States Indo-Pacific Command, commander for Air Combat Command, the head of the Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program, the head of Northern Command (which defends the United States and coordinates defenses with Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas), the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, vice chief of staff of the Army, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, vice chief of Space Operations, and vice chief of Naval Operations.
Last night, Cheney explained to political commentator and television host Rachel Maddow exactly what a second Trump presidency would look like, Cheney said: "He would take those people who are the most radical, the most dangerous, who had the proposals that were the most dangerous, and he will put them in positions of supreme power. That's a risk that we simply cannot take."
Mark Joyella of Forbes took note of Maddow’s introduction last night, in which the host stressed the importance of protecting democracy. She began by emphasizing how much she and Cheney disagreed about everything in politics, so much so that it was as if they were on different planets at war with each other.
Maddow made that point, she said, because “in civic terms, in sort of American citizenship terms, I think it's really important how much we disagree. It's important how far apart we are in every policy issue imaginable. It is important that Liz Cheney is infinity and I am negative infinity on the ideological number line. It's important because that tells you how serious and big something has to be to put us, to put me and Liz Cheney, together on the same side of something in American life.”
The Rachel Maddow Show was the most watched news show on cable television last night, with 3.15 million viewers. The Fox News Channel’s show Hannity, hosted by personality Sean Hannity, had just under 2 million viewers.
It seems clear Americans are waking up to Trump’s threats to stack the government with loyalists, weaponize the Justice Department and military, deport 10 million people, and prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies in politics and the media. Interviewing Trump tonight, Hannity tried to downplay Trump’s statements about his authoritarian plans for a second term by getting him to commit to staying within the normal bounds of a president should he be elected in 2024. The first time he was asked, Trump sidestepped the question. So Hannity asked again. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” he asked.
“Except for day one,” Trump responded.
—
Notes:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mike-johnson-walks-back-blurring-jan-6-footage/story?id=105394429
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.176.0_6.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/politics/trump-kash-patel-journalists.html
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December 4, 2023
When my friend Joanne Freeman and I were hosting the Now & Then podcast, it became a joke at our weekly planning meetings that I almost always suggested we should focus the following week’s episode on tax policy. Since it appeared that other people have a lower tolerance for tax policy than I do, we usually didn’t end up landing on that topic.
But I remain fascinated by it. Tax policy shows what a society values.
Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of Moore v. United States. The case illustrates today’s Supreme Court’s tendency to hear cases based on fictional stories in order to shape society to a right-wing ideology.
As Lisa Needham points out in Public Notice today, the plaintiffs in the case, Charles and Kathleen Moore, have presented themselves as “minority shareholders without any role in” the management of an Indian company that works to provide power tools to small farmers in India. But according to Ann E. Marimow and Julie Zauzmer Weil of the Washington Post, Charles Moore was a director of the company from April 2012 until March 2017, had contributed about $250,000 to the company and been repaid at 12% interest, and in 2019, the year after he filed the lawsuit, sold about 20% of his holdings for close to $300,000.
The court is supposed to decide cases based only on facts, not fiction, but this court has shown a willingness to overlook fictions that enable actions the majority wants to take. As Needham notes, earlier this year it decided 303 Creative v. Elenis protecting a web designer from having to make a wedding website for a gay couple, even though it turned out that the alleged gay client in the case was actually a man who had been married to a woman for years, had never asked anyone to design a website for a wedding, and had no idea he had been named in the case.
Such lies permit these test cases to get before the court, Needham writes, teeing up court decisions to change the United States.
These cases, based on fictional accounts, dovetail with the fictional history in amicus briefs. These are so-called friend-of-the-court briefs from someone who is not a party in the case to offer analysis of the issues. Yesterday, Heidi Przybyla of Politico showed how right-wing lawyers connected to Leonard Leo, co-chair of the board of the activist right-wing Federalist Society, have filed amicus briefs that invent a past that the right-wing justices then lift into the decisions themselves to shape modern society.
The Moore v. U.S. case concerns the federal government’s ability to tax wealthy people. The Moores argue that the federal government cannot tax wealth until it has been “realized.” That is, increased value of stock, for example, cannot be taxed until it is realized through that stock’s sale.
According to Ian Millhiser of Vox, what is really at stake is the ability of the government to tax the wealthy to begin to address the extremes of wealth that have expanded since 1981.
Forestalling the use of tax policy to address how drastically our laws have redistributed wealth upward fits with Republican lawmakers’ exclusive focus on addressing the nation’s budget deficit by cutting services. At last month’s Republican presidential primary debate, for example, the candidates expressed support for cutting Social Security benefits, with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley telling the audience that “any candidate who tells you that they’re not going to take on entitlements is not being serious.”
But it is tax cuts, primarily those of presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, that have been the primary drivers of the budget deficit, so it would seem logical to end them, especially since they have never boosted the economy as promised. And yet, rather than ending them, the Republicans are eager to extend them. They embrace the idea that the best course for the nation is to slash taxes and services and to concentrate wealth at the top of the economy.
Ironically, it was the early Republican Party that set out the blueprint for rejecting that idea. When the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 created a crisis in the cash-strapped U.S. Treasury, Republicans in Congress invented the nation’s first national income tax.
Initially, they levied a 3% tax on income over $800; in 1862, concerned that the level of taxation necessary to pay for the war would be too much for most Americans to bear, they created a progressive income tax, taxing income over $600 at 3% and income over $10,000 at 5%. “The weight must be distributed equally,” Representative Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) said, “not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.” In 1864, Congress revised those numbers upward.
Morrill claimed that the federal government had a right to “demand” 99% of a man’s property for an urgent necessity. When the nation required it, he said, “the property of the people…belongs to the Government.”
With their money behind the war effort, Americans became more and more committed to their nation. As the war costs mounted, far from objecting to taxes, Americans concerned about the growing national debt asked their congressmen to raise them. In 1864, Senator John P. Hale (R-NH) said: “The condition of the country is singular…I venture to say it is an anomaly in the history of the world. What do the people of the United States ask of this Congress? To take off taxes? No, sir, they ask you to put them on. The universal cry of this people is to be taxed.”
The Civil War income tax expired in 1872, and by the 1890s, after money had concentrated at the top of the economy, wealthy industrialists and others thriving in the new economy rejected their earlier understanding of tax policy.
In 1894, in the midst of a depression that was crushing farmers and workers, Democrats in Congress levied a 2% tax on incomes over $4,000. Immediately, Republicans said the measure was unconstitutional because it gave too much power to the federal government and would force states like New York, which had financial centers, to pay more in taxes than states like Mississippi. “The income tax was born of a mixture of sectionalism, communism, and demagogy,” wrote the Pittsburgh Gazette.
In 1895 a staunchly pro-business Supreme Court agreed with opponents of the tax, deciding in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company that the income tax was unconstitutional, giving far too much power to the federal government. In 1909, as Democrats and progressive Republicans continued to call for an income tax to address the concentration of wealth, those hoping to kill the idea once and for all proposed a constitutional amendment for one, thinking it could never be ratified.
They were wrong. State legislatures backed the Sixteenth Amendment, which became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1913, an important symbol of the Progressive Era.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/27/supreme-court-tax-case-offshore-earnings/
Public NoticeSCOTUS is making major decisions based on outright liesRead morea day ago · 236 likes · 4 comments · Lisa Needhamhttps://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/03/supreme-court-amicus-briefs-leonard-leo-00127497
https://www.vox.com/scotus/23845702/supreme-court-fifth-circuit-term-cfpb-guns-voting-chevron
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/11/27/23970859/supreme-court-wealth-tax-moore-united-states
https://twitter.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/1730257627173486846
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211715610/third-republican-debate-miami
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/business/federal-budget-deficit-trillion.html
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/16th-amendment
Justin Smith Morrill, Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd session, p. 1194.
December 3, 2023
December 3, 2023
It’s been a while since a night off, so let’s take one.
I’m still on the road, but back home, traps are coming up as winter comes into view....
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
December 2, 2023
December 2, 2023
On Wednesday, November 29, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a landmark speech on American antisemitism, inspired by the fact that protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza after the October 7 attack by Hamas have descended into an embrace of Hamas’s stated goal of the complete destruction of Israel. From there it has, for some people, been a short step to attacking Jewish people in general.
“I feel compelled to speak because I am the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America; in fact, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official ever in American history,” Schumer said. “And I have noticed a significant disparity between how Jewish people regard the rise of antisemitism, and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it. To us, the Jewish people, the rise of antisemitism is a crisis—a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished. For so many other people of good will, it is merely a problem, a matter of concern. Today, I want to use my platform to explain why so many Jewish people see this problem as a crisis.”
Schumer anchored his speech in the long history of civil rights advocacy on the part of American Jews. In 1909, New York Jew Henry Moskowitz was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Jack Greenberg, whose family fled pogroms in Europe, served 23 years at the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after its founder, famous Black jurist Thurgood Marshall, stepped down.
In 1958, in a speech to the American Jewish Congress, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.”
Five years later, the president of the American Jewish Congress, New Jersey rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz, spoke before King at the March on Washington. “I speak to you as an American Jew,” he told the crowd. “As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice which make a mockery of the great American idea. As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience—one of the spirit and one of our history…. It…is not merely sympathy and compassion for the Black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.”
It was that painful historic experience and an attempt to make oppression impossible that led Jewish activists to support the civil rights movement. In the Freedom Summer of 1964, half the civil rights workers who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish, including Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, murdered alongside Black activist James Chaney outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
That history of Jewish support for civil rights is written across the landscape of our country: the main bridge dominating the Boston skyline is named for civil rights worker Leonard P. Zakim in memory of his work to “build bridges of understanding between different ethnic, racial, and religious groups,” as his wife said at the bridge’s dedication.
In his speech, Schumer tied into that history, saying that “bigotry against one group of Americans is bigotry against all” and noting that he had worked to protect Asian-Americans and Arab-Americans, as well as to protect houses of worship for all religions from extremists. He also noted, at some length, that it is possible both to abhor Hamas and to deplore the destruction that has rained down on the Palestinian people.
But Schumer expressed dismay that as hatred toward American Jews is rising dangerously—the Anti-Defamation League estimates that antisemitic incidents have increased nearly 300 percent since October 7—some Americans, people that Jews believed were “ideological fellow travelers,” are celebrating the October 7 attack as an assault on “colonizers.”
“Not long ago,” Schumer said, “many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all. But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”
“Many, if not most, Jewish Americans, including myself, support a two-state solution,” he said, “We disagree with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his administration’s encouragement of militant settlers in the West Bank, which has become a considerable obstacle to a two-state solution.” But “the most extreme rhetoric against Israel has emboldened antisemites who are attacking Jewish people simply because they are Jewish.”
These attacks, Schumer said, conjure up the history of millennia in which Jews were slaughtered. “[W]hen Jewish people hear chants like ‘From the river to the sea,’ a founding slogan of Hamas, a terrorist group that is not shy about their goal to eradicate the Jewish people, in Israel and around the globe, we are alarmed.”
“More than anything, we are worried—quite naturally, given the twists and turns of history—about where these actions and sentiments could eventually lead. Now, this is no intellectual exercise for us. For many Jewish people, it feels like a matter of survival, informed once again by history.”
“Can you understand why Jewish people feel isolated when we hear some praise Hamas and chant its vicious slogan?” Schumer asked. “Can you blame us for feeling vulnerable only 80 years after Hitler wiped out half of the Jewish population across the world while many countries turned their back? Can you appreciate the deep fear we have about what Hamas might do if left to their own devices? Because the long arc of Jewish history teaches us a lesson that is hard to forget: ultimately, that we are alone.”
Schumer begged the American people “of all creeds and backgrounds” to defend the “pluralistic, multiethnic democracy” that has enabled Jewish people in the United States “to flourish alongside so many other immigrant groups.”
He asked them to “learn the history of the Jewish people, who have been abandoned repeatedly by their fellow countrymen—left isolated and alone to combat antisemitism—with disastrous results,” and to “reject the illogical and antisemitic double standard that is once again being applied to the plight of Jewish victims and hostages, to some of the actions of the Israeli government, and even to the very existence of a Jewish state.”
Schumer asked all Americans “to understand why Jewish people defend Israel.” They do not “wish harm on Palestinians,” he said, but instead “fear a world where Israel is forced to tolerate the existence of groups like Hamas that want to wipe out all Jewish people from the planet. We fear a world where Israel, the place of refuge for Jewish people, will no longer exist. If there is no Israel,” he said, “there will be no place, no place for the Jewish people to go when they are persecuted in other countries.”
In view of history and of rising antisemitism, Jewish Americans are afraid of what the future might bring, Schumer said. “And perhaps worst of all,” he said, “many Jewish Americans feel alone to face all of this, abandoned by too many of our friends and allies in our greatest time of need.”
He implored “every person and every community and every institution to stand with Jewish Americans and denounce antisemitism in all of its forms.”
“We are stewards of the flames of liberty, tolerance, and equality that warm our American melting pot, and make it possible for Jewish Americans to prosper alongside Palestinian Americans, and every other immigrant group from all over the world,” he concluded.
“Are we a nation that can defy the regular course of human history, where the Jewish people have been ostracized, expelled, and massacred over and over again?” he asked. Then he answered his own question: “Yes. And I will do everything in my power—as Senate Majority Leader, as a Jewish American, as a citizen of a free society, as a human being—to make it happen.”
“Ken Y-hi Ratzon,” he concluded. “May it be his will.”
—
Notes:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/blog/justice-department-recognizes-jewish-american-heritage-month
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/29/schumer-antisemitism-speech/
December 1, 2023
December 1, 2023
Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, died today. Named to the court by President Ronald Reagan to honor a campaign promise, O’Connor was known as a pragmatist who paid attention to the real-world consequences of the court’s decisions and who was willing to rethink her positions.
Traditionally, this understanding of how court decisions affect lives has come from justices who have held elective office before their elevation, and O’Connor fit the bill: she served in the Arizona state senate for 5 years, eventually becoming majority leader. Since she stepped down in 2006, there have been no judges on the court with that elective experience, and the court has swung hard to the right.
For the sixth time in U.S. history, the House of Representatives today voted to expel one of its members, Representative George Santos (R-NY). Expulsion requires two thirds of the House. The resolution to expel Santos passed by a vote of 311 to 114, with 105 Republicans voting with all but four Democrats (two voted no and two voted present).
Representative Max Miller (R-OH) told his colleagues that Santos’s campaign had charged both Miller’s credit card and that of his mother for contributions that exceeded legal limits and of which they were both unaware. “You, sir, are a crook,” he told Santos.
But the top four members of the Republican leadership—Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY)—and more than 100 other Republicans voted against expelling Santos, who is under criminal indictment and by whom a House Ethics Committee report suggested even more “uncharged and unlawful conduct.”
Santos was a reliable right-wing vote, and losing him will make the Republicans' majority even slimmer than it already was, suggesting that Republican leadership and much of the rank and file were more interested in power than concerned about criminal behavior among their conference.
“To hell with this place,” Santos said after the expulsion.
The quest for power also showed up this week when a federal appeals court released secret text messages from Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) to other participants in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, revealing his frantic attempts to end the right of the American people to choose their president.
In that attempt, Perry communicated with Justice Department attorney Jeff Clark, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, many of Trump’s lawyers, and numerous Pennsylvania state lawmakers including Doug Mastriano, none of whom contacted authorities about the attempt to overthrow our democratic system.
Perry also contacted other Republican representatives, including Jody Hice (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chip Roy (R-TX), and representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about the effort. They didn’t alert anyone to the anti-democratic effort, either.
Stopped by a gag order from attacking the staff of Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the fraud trial of the Trump Organization in Manhattan, former president Trump has turned to attacking Engoron’s family. Trump has alleged on social media that Engoron’s wife has been posting about him on social media, but she has not: the posts Trump has identified are not from her, although blog posts by far-right extremist Laura Loomer said they were.
Trump seems to be trying to get out from under the legal cases against him by threatening participants in the legal system and by delaying the trials until next year’s election. It is his position that if he wins the presidency in 2024, Trump’s lawyer told a judge in Georgia today, Trump cannot be tried as part of the racketeering case of those who tried to overturn the 2020 election until at least 2029.
In the Washington Post yesterday, neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan warned that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” and today in The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last agreed. He pointed to a conversation neoconservative thinker William Kristol had this week with journalist Jonathan Karl, in which Karl described a dystopian future painted not by Democrats but by former Trump employees: a government full of Trump loyalists who understand “that they are free to break the law because they will be pardoned” as Trump seeks retribution against those he sees as his enemies.
“The storm is coming,” Last warned readers. “The world looks normal right now, but it is not. Forces are in motion that will bring us to a point of national crisis one year from now.”
And yet, in Washington, D.C., the federal judge overseeing the case concerning Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election today rejected Trump’s request to throw the case out on the grounds that, as president, he had absolute immunity for anything he did while in office.
Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote that being president “does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.” Trump’s “four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” she added.
Trump is not exactly going out of its way to attract voters, either. He has once again embraced the idea of getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. More than 40 million Americans get their health coverage under the ACA, and as many as one out of every two people too young for Medicare have a pre-existing health condition that, without the protection of the ACA, could make healthcare insurers discriminate against them.
Trump says he will replace the ACA with something better, but his advisors acknowledge that they have no plans to do more than chip away at the existing law.
President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders are calling attention to Trump’s threats against the ACA and today are touting that under Democratic governor Roy Cooper, North Carolina has become the 40th state to expand Medicaid under the ACA. This means that 600,000 North Carolinians are now eligible for healthcare coverage.
“Despite this progress, MAGA Republicans still want to get rid of the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said, “just like my predecessor tried and failed to do repeatedly.”
Other Republican leaders don’t seem terribly worried about attracting anyone but their base, either. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was in the news today for having written the foreword for and promoted a book that advanced conspiracy theories against Democrats and attacked poor voters as “unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency.”
And perhaps even the base will be dismayed by news out of Florida, where the chair of the state Republican Party, Christian Ziegler, is under investigation for sexual battery and rape. Ziegler is married to Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty; she has said public schools are “indoctrination centers for the radical left,” and that she wants to bring “religious values” into them.
The Florida Center for Government Accountability, which broke the story, calls the Zieglers “one of Florida’s top political power couples,” close to both governor Ron DeSantis and Trump.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/01/politics/george-santos-expel-resolution-vote/index.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gop-congressman-says-roughly-400-donors-were-ripped-off-by-santos
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/29/scott-perry-texts-unsealed-00129195
https://themessenger.com/politics/trump-judge-engoron-wife-social-media-posts
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/12/01/congress/new-leadership-fury-00129614
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/01/trump-georgia-trial-date-00129669
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/
The BulwarkThere’s a storm coming. We all know it. And yet Americans are pretending that everything is normal.I want to connect the dots running from the monster Bob Kagan piece that Charlie talked about this morning to Bill Kristol’s interview with Jonathan Karl. It’s dark and it’s urgent. Buckle up…Read more21 hours ago · 311 likes · 490 comments · Jonathan V. Lasthttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/us/florida-republican-party-christian-ziegler.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/30/trump-obamacare-repeal-00129223
https://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Forms-Reports-and-Other-Resources/preexisting
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/30/trump-obamacare-repeal-00129223
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/us/sandra-day-oconnor-dead.html
November 30, 2023
November 30, 2023
Although the original truce deal between Hamas and Israel ended this morning, negotiations kept it going for another day. The extension was hard won after Hamas could not produce a list that had ten women and children on it, a condition of the deal. Israel rejected a list of seven living women and children and the bodies of three more Hamas claimed were killed by Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli government did agree to accept the two Israeli-Russian hostages who were released yesterday as part of Thursday’s list.
Israel has agreed to extend the truce so long as Hamas produces ten living women and children a day, but negotiators think that Hamas will not be able to meet that requirement much longer. When it cannot, Israel says it will recommence the war.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is currently in Israel for the fourth time since the October 7 attack, said today that he is there to work “to extend the pause so that we can continue to get more hostages out of Gaza and more assistance in.” After describing the pressing needs of the Palestinians in Gaza, he asserted that the government of Israel “agrees with the imperative of humanitarian assistance and the need to sustain it.”
Blinken noted that Israel “intends to resume its military operations against Hamas when Hamas stops releasing hostages,” and he said the United States agrees that “Israel has the right to do everything it can to ensure that the slaughter Hamas carried out on October 7th can never be repeated.” That means, he said, “Hamas cannot remain in control of Gaza,” and he pointed to an attack this morning on a Jerusalem bus stop, for which Hamas claimed responsibility, that killed three Israeli citizens and wounded at least six others, including two American citizens.
But, Blinken continued, “the way Israel defends itself matters. It’s imperative that Israel act in accordance with international humanitarian law and the laws of war, even when confronting a terrorist group that respects neither.” Blinken said that when he met today with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli officials, “I made clear that before Israel resumes major military operations, it must put in place humanitarian civilian protection plans that minimize further casualties of innocent Palestinians.”
They must, he said, protect Gazans by designating places in central and southern Gaza where they are out of the line of fire. They must avoid more displacement of citizens in Gaza and allow those already displaced to return as soon as conditions permit. They must avoid further damage to “life-critical infrastructure, like hospitals, like power stations, like water facilities.”
Even though Hamas embeds itself with civilians, “Israel has…one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world,” Blinken said. “It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men, women, and children. And it has an obligation to do so. Ultimately, that’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also in Israel’s security interest.”
Blinken said that Netanyahu and the members of the Israeli war cabinet “agreed with the need for this approach.” Blinken added that he had “underscored the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south. As I told the prime minister, intent matters, but so does the result.”
Blinken noted that Hamas, too, could defuse the situation. It could release the remaining hostages immediately, “stop using civilians as human shields and stop using civilian infrastructure to stage and launch terrorist attacks.” It “could lay down its arms, surrender the leaders who are responsible for the slaughter, the torture, the rapes of October 7th. Hamas could renounce its stated goal of eliminating Israel, killing Jews, and repeating the atrocities of October 7th again and again and again.”
He added that “everyone around the world who cares about protecting innocent civilians, innocent lives, should be calling on Hamas—indeed, demanding of Hamas—that it immediately stop its murderous acts of terror and deplorable use of innocent men, women, and children as human shields.”
Blinken reiterated that he had discussed with both Israel and Palestinian leaders in the West Bank the need to keep the conflict from spreading, “whether to the West Bank, to Israel’s northern border, or to the broader region.” To that end, he expressed “our deep concerns about steps that could escalate tensions in the West Bank, including extremist settler violence and proposals from parts of the Israeli coalition government to further expand settlements,” both key policies of the Netanyahu government. “I made clear our expectations about addressing these issues,” he said.
He clarified for a reporter that the U.S. is “looking to the Israeli Government to take some additional steps to really put a stop to this. And at the same time, we’re considering our own steps.”
Breaking the cycle of violence in order to ensure Israel’s security, he said, “demands improving the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in immediate, tangible ways, and providing them with a credible path toward their legitimate aspiration for statehood.” To a reporter’s question, Blinken answered that the administration does, in fact, hope to see a revitalized Palestinian Authority that can speak for the Palestinians.
This was an extraordinarily strong statement, delivered in Tel Aviv itself, and a far cry from Blinken’s usual diplomatic language, which was on display at a press opportunity with Israeli president Isaac Herzog before the two began their meeting. Herzog eulogized “a giant, a titan—Dr. Henry Kissinger,” expressing admiration for the former secretary of state, who died yesterday, and praising the “peaceful results” of his “great decisions…and processes” (likely referring to Kissinger’s work to end the 1973 Mideast war after Syria and Egypt attacked Israel).
But for all that Herzog and others praised Kissinger, his pragmatic view of diplomacy meant that he oversaw the coup that deposed popularly elected Chilean president Salvador Allende and replaced him with vicious right–wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet, prolonged the war in Vietnam, supported the secret bombing of Cambodia, and so on, becoming responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and, for many people, becoming the face of American arrogance in foreign affairs, a legacy Biden’s State Department is still working to overcome.
Blinken answered: “Few people were better students of history—even fewer people did more to shape history—than Henry Kissinger.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/30/politics/israel-and-hamas-truce-extension
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/jerusalem-bus-stop-shooting-attack-killed-injured
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-a-press-availability-43/
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