Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 130
January 22, 2024
January 22, 2024
Last night, Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and promptly endorsed former president Trump. DeSantis had tried to present himself as the alternative to Trump, but he put so little daylight between himself and the former president that he could never get traction.
DeSantis appeared to use his power as the governor of Florida to push measures he thought would boost his candidacy, many of which followed the pattern of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has used his government to destroy democracy and assume autocratic powers. DeSantis pushed anti-LGBTQ+ laws, book bans, and the idea that businesses like Disney must answer to the moral positions of the government rather than market forces, and he flew migrants who were in the U.S. legally to Martha’s Vineyard in an apparent attempt to stand out as an anti-immigrant crusader.
But DeSantis never broke free of Trump’s orbit.
The Miami Herald editorial board noted that while DeSantis’s presidential bid had ended, “the damage of the laws he has pushed through in Florida, as he landed more appearances on Fox News, will live on. Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be ‘Don’t say gay,’ woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars. These were efforts to appeal to Trump’s base but his supporters refused to leave the former president, especially after he was indicted.”
The New Hampshire primary is tomorrow, with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley squaring off against Trump. It is not at all clear what daylight exists between the two of them, either, although Haley is perceived as the representative of the pre-Trump corporate Republican Party. Still, the contest is revealing the future in at least one way: today, New Hampshire voters are reporting that they have received robocalls with a deepfake of President Joe Biden’s voice telling them not to vote.
Republican party officials worry that while Trump is taking up tons of oxygen, the party itself has nothing to run on. Since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have very little to show for it except a lot of infighting. The last congressional session was “historically unproductive,” as Sahil Kapur of NBC News put it today. House Republicans’ investigations of President Joe Biden, hyped before the media, have fizzled, and now, after insisting that they would not pass funding for Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan until the “crisis” at the border was addressed, they have backed off and now say they will not pass border legislation.
Meanwhile, radicals appear to be manufacturing a crisis on the border. On January 11, Michael Scherer and Dylan Wells of the Washington Post reported that political ads had used the word “border” 1,319 times since the start of the year, more than any other word including “approve” and “message,” standard disclaimer terms for political ads.
On Wednesday, January 17, state authorities began to arrest migrants at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s attempt to take control of immigration away from the federal government. When the government told Texas to stop blocking federal officials from the stretch of the Rio Grande where three migrants died last week, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s office responded: “Texas will not surrender.”
Today the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the federal government is authorized to remove the razor wire Texas has installed across the U.S.-Mexico border, although considering the federal government’s authority over border security is very well established, the fact that the vote was 5–4 is surprising. Far-right lawmakers were outraged nonetheless. Representative Chip Roy of Texas urged his House colleagues to defund the Department of Homeland Security, and Louisiana representative Clay Higgins said on social media that the federal government was “staging a civil war” and that “Texas should stand their ground.”
Meanwhile, on Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted Mexican Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena to follow up on migration discussions the two countries had in meetings on December 27, 2023, in Mexico. In September 2023, Mexico eclipsed China as the largest trading partner of the U.S., and in the December meeting, Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, and National Security Council Coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration Katie Tobin discussed cooperation to manage the border safely and humanely while also combating the drug smuggling and conditions that have been driving migration.
On January 8, Julia Ainsley of NBC News explained that the Biden administration has been pressuring Mexico to increase enforcement on its own southern border with Guatemala, deport more migrants from within Mexico, and take in more non-Mexican migrants back across the U.S. southern border. In exchange, Ainsley says, Mexico’s president—who is on the defensive at home because of corruption charges—has proposed that the U.S. invest more money in Latin America and Caribbean countries, suspend its blockade of Cuba, ease sanctions against Venezuela, and make it easier for migrants to work legally in the U.S.
On Friday, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. said that the coordinated efforts were having a positive effect on migration as officials have cracked down on smuggling networks, trains, and bus routes. “Migration is a hemispheric challenge,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “The United States is committed to work hand in hand with Mexico and countries across the region to address the root causes of migration and advance economic opportunities in the spirit of Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection,” a landmark 2022 agreement in which the heads of twenty of the countries in the Americas agreed to embrace a regional approach to managing migration.
Today, on the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made protecting reproductive rights key to her portfolio, and President Joe Biden noted that thanks to the “extreme decision” of today’s Supreme Court to overturn that decision has left tens of millions of American women “in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans.”
“Because of Republican elected officials,” Biden said in a statement, “women’s health and lives are at risk…. Even as Americans…have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country.” He and Vice President Harris “are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom against Republicans officials’ dangerous, extreme, and out-of-touch agenda,” he said. “We stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose, and continue to call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe in federal law once and for all.”
This is a position embraced by 69% of Americans, and the Biden campaign has run videos with Trump bragging that he overturned Roe v. Wade and suggesting that women who obtain abortions should be punished.
Recently, the campaign released an ad in which a Texas woman who is herself an OBGYN talks about being unable to obtain an abortion for a planned pregnancy after a routine ultrasound revealed that the fetus could not survive. “Because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” she says, Texas “completely” took her choice away and put her life in danger. “It’s every woman’s worst nightmare and it was absolutely unbearable. We need leaders that will protect our rights and not take them away,” she says.
Finally, today, a historical moment: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an average of the value of 30 leading companies, passed 38,000 for the first time.
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Notes:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Declaration_on_Migration_and_Protection
https://www.state.gov/discussions-with-mexican-officials-on-migration-at-the-department-of-state/
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-mexico-china-us-trade-opportunity/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/18/us/texas-border-patrol-us-mexico-thursday/index.html
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/mexico-corruption-election-amlo/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blinken-mayorkas-mexico-migrant-crisis/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/11/trump-haley-immigration-gop/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/markets/dow-closes-above-38-000-for-first-time/index.html
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January 21, 2024
January 21, 2024
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. By a 7–2 vote, the Supreme Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the right of privacy under its “concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action.” This right to privacy, the court said, guarantees a pregnant woman the right to obtain an abortion without restriction in the first trimester of a pregnancy. After that point, the state can regulate abortion, it said, “except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.”
The right to privacy is a “fundamental right,” the court said, and could be regulated by the state only under a “compelling state interest.”
Abortion had always been a part of American life, but states began to criminalize the practice in the 1870s. By 1960, an observer estimated, there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal U.S. abortions a year, endangering women, primarily poor ones who could not afford a workaround.
To stem this public health crisis, doctors wanted to decriminalize abortion and keep it between a woman and her doctor. In the 1960s, states began to decriminalize abortion on this medical model, and support for abortion rights grew. The rising women's movement wanted women to have control over their lives. Its leaders were latecomers to the reproductive rights movement, but they came to see reproductive rights as key to self-determination.
By 1971, even the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention agreed that abortion should be legal in some cases, and by 1972, Gallup pollsters reported that 64% of Americans agreed that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans, who had always liked family planning, agreed, as did 59% of Democrats.
In keeping with that sentiment, the Supreme Court, under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a decision written by Republican Harry Blackmun, overrode state antiabortion legislation by recognizing the constitutional right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The common story is that Roe sparked a backlash. But legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel showed that opposition to the eventual Roe v. Wade decision began before the 1972 election in a deliberate attempt to polarize American politics. President Richard Nixon was up for reelection in that year, and with his popularity dropping, his advisor Pat Buchanan urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats over the issue of abortion. In 1970, Nixon had directed U.S. military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law, but in 1971, using Catholic language, he reversed course to split the Democrats, citing his personal belief "in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”
As Nixon split the U.S. in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for women's rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses but instead spoke about “women’s lib”—the women’s liberation movement—which she claimed was “a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society.”
A dozen years later, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish “pro-choice” women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother and were demanding rights they didn’t need or deserve.
By 1988, radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh demonized women's rights advocates as “feminazis” for whom “the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur.” The issue of abortion had become a way to denigrate the political opponents of the radicalizing Republican Party.
Such rhetoric turned out Republican voters, especially the white evangelical base, and Supreme Court justices nominated by Republicans began to chip away at Roe v. Wade.
But support for safe and legal abortion has always been strong, and Republican leaders almost certainly did not expect the decision to fall entirely. Then, to the surprise of party leaders, the white evangelical base in 2016 elected Donald Trump to the White House. To please that base, he nominated to the Supreme Court three extremists, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The three promised in their confirmation hearings to respect settled law, which senators chose to interpret as a promise to leave Roe v. Wade largely intact.
Even so, Trump’s right-wing nominees could not win confirmation to the Supreme Court until then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in 2017 ended the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, reducing the votes necessary for confirmation from 60 to as low as 50. Fifty-four senators confirmed Gorsuch; 50 confirmed Kavanaugh; 52 confirmed Barrett.
On June 24, 2022, by a vote of 6 to 3, in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Five of the justices said: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”
For the first time in American history, rather than expanding the nation’s recognition of constitutional rights, the Supreme Court took away the recognition of a constitutional right that had been honored for almost 50 years. Republican-dominated states immediately either passed antiabortion legislation or let stand the antiabortion measures already on the books that had been overruled by Roe v. Wade.
But the majority of Americans didn’t support either the attack on abortion rights or the end of a constitutional right. Support for abortion rights had consistently been over 60% even during the time Roe was under attack, but the Dobbs decision sent support for abortion as Roe v. Wade established it to 69%. Only 13% want it illegal in all circumstances. Since Dobbs, in every election where abortion was on the ballot, those protecting abortion rights won handily, including last week, when Tom Keen won a special election in Florida, flipping a seat in the state House from Republican to Democratic.
But I wonder if there is more behind the fury over the Dobbs decision than just access to abortion, huge though that is.
In the 1850s, elite southern enslavers quietly took over first the Democratic Party, and then the Senate, the White House, and then the Supreme Court. Northerners didn’t pay much attention to the fact that their democracy was slipping away until suddenly, in 1854, Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure from the party’s southern wing and passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise, which had kept enslavement out of much of the West, and had stood since 1820, so long that northerners thought it would stand forever.
With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, human enslavement would become the law of the land, and the elite southern enslavers, with their concentration of wealth and power, would rule everyone else. It appeared that American democracy would die, replaced by an oligarchy.
But when the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed, northerners of all parties came together to stand against those trying to destroy American democracy. As Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln put it: “We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver,” to fight against the minority trying to impose its will on the majority. Within a decade, they had rededicated themselves to guaranteeing “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
I wonder if Dobbs, with its announcement that when Republicans are given power over our legal system they do not consider themselves obligated to recognize an established constitutional right, will turn out to be today’s version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
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Notes:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/350804/americans-opposed-overturning-roe-wade.aspx
Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash,” The Yale Law Journal, 120 (June 2011): 2028–2087, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41149586
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2016/02/02/whats-wrong-with-equal-rights-for-women-1972/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/21/us/abortion-ban-exceptions.html
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/15/abortion-history-founders-alito/
Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (University of California Press, 198).
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep410/usrep410113/usrep410113.pdf
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
https://news.gallup.com/poll/506759/broader-support-abortion-rights-continues-post I’ll-dobbs.aspx
January 20, 2024
January 20, 2024
Last night at a rally in New Hampshire, former president Trump repeatedly confused former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is running against him for the Republican presidential nomination, with Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former speaker of the House.
“By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th,” Trump told the audience. “You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it because of lots of things, like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people. Soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down.”
Observers have been saying for a while now that once Trump had to start appearing in public, his apparent cognitive decline would surprise those who haven’t been paying attention.
That certainly seemed to be true on Wednesday, January 17, when he told a New Hampshire audience: “We’re…going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your—you know, your political beliefs, what they do. They want to debank you, and we’re going to debank—think of this. They want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things they’re doing. All electric cars.”
His statement looks like word salad if you’re not steeped in MAGA world, but there are two stories behind Trump’s torrent of words. The first is that Trump always blurts out whatever is uppermost in his mind, suggesting he is worried by the fact that large banks will no longer lend to him. The Trump Organization’s auditor said during a fraud trial in 2022 that the past 10 years of the company’s financial statements could not be relied on, and Trump was forced to turn to smaller banks, likely on much worse terms. Now the legal case currently underway in Manhattan will likely make that financial problem larger. The judge has already decided that the Trump Organization, Trump, his two older sons, and two employees committed fraud, for which the judge is currently deciding appropriate penalties.
The second story behind his statement, though, is much larger than Trump.
Since 2023, right-wing organizations, backed by Republican state attorneys general, have argued that banks are discriminating against them on religious and political grounds. In March 2023, JPMorgan Chase closed an account opened by the National Committee for Religious Freedom after the organization did not provide information the bank needed to comply with regulatory requirements. Immediately, Republican officials claimed religious discrimination and demanded the bank explain its position on issues important to the right wing. JPMorgan Chase denied discrimination, noting that it serves 50,000 accounts with religious affiliations and saying, “We have never and would never exit a client relationship due to their political or religious affiliation.”
But the attack on banks stuck among MAGA Republicans, especially as other financial platforms like PayPal, Venmo, and GoFundMe have declined to accept business from right-wing figures who spout hate speech, thus cutting off their ability to raise money from their followers.
The attempt to create distrust of large financial institutions is part of a larger attempt to destabilize the institutions of democracy. Trump is the figurehead for that attempt, but it is larger than him, and it will outlast him.
The news media is often called the fourth branch of government because it provides the transparency and oversight that hold leaders accountable. But as soon as he began to campaign for office in 2015, Trump responded to the negative press about him by attacking the press, calling it the “fake news” media. In 2016, 70% of Republicans said they trusted national news media; by 2021 that number was 35%.
Once elected, Trump and MAGA Republicans started to undermine faith in the rule of law that underpins our democracy. Less than four months after he took office, Trump fired the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, for investigating the connections between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, and his attacks on the FBI and the Department of Justice under which the FBI operates have been relentless ever since.
Those attacks now involve the entire judicial system, which Trump and his loyalists attack whenever judges or juries oppose him, while judges like Aileen Cannon, who appears to be protecting Trump from the federal criminal case against him for mishandling classified documents, have escaped his wrath.
Trump and his supporters have also challenged the U.S. military, insisting that it is weak because it is “woke.” He has called its leaders “some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life.”
But it is not just the banking, justice, and military systems MAGA Republicans are undermining. They are sowing distrust of our educational system, claiming that it is not educating students but, rather, indoctrinating them to embrace left-wing ideology. Public education is central to democracy because, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, it enables a voter to “understand his duties to his neighbours, & country,…[t]o know his rights…[a]nd, in general, to observe with intelligence & faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.”
Extremists in Congress are undermining even that body, the centerpiece of our democratic system. They have ground business there to a halt, weakening the idea of Congress as a deliberative body that can pass legislation to represent the wishes of the American people.
In addition, they are now trying, quite deliberately, to end the country’s traditional system of foreign policy that protects the nation’s national security. Instead, they are trying to politicize foreign policy, standing against further aid to Ukraine although it has strong bipartisan support, thus tipping the scales in favor of Russia’s authoritarian leader in opposition to U.S. national security.
Over all, of course, is the Big Lie that undermines the nation’s electoral system by insisting that the 2020 presidential vote was “rigged” against Trump. Although there has never been any evidence of such a thing, 30% of Americans think Biden won the presidency only through “voter fraud.”
This weakening of our institutions threatens the survival of democracy.
Tearing apart the fabric of democracy invites an authoritarian to convince his followers that democracy is weak and that only a strongman can govern.
Three years ago today, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oath of office, vowing to restore faith in our democratic institutions.
“This is a time of testing,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “We face an attack on democracy and on truth. A raging virus. Growing inequity. The sting of systemic racism. A climate in crisis. America’s role in the world. Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways. But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities.
“Now we must step up. All of us. It is a time for boldness, for there is so much to do. And, this is certain. We will be judged, you and I, for how we resolve the cascading crises of our era. Will we rise to the occasion? Will we master this rare and difficult hour? Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world for our children?”
“Let us add our own work and prayers to the unfolding story of our nation,” Biden said. “If we do this, then when our days are through, our children and our children’s children will say of us: They gave their best. They did their duty. They healed a broken land.”
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Notes:
https://www.meidastouch.com/news/confused-trump-blames-nikki-haley-for-jan-6-cognitive-decline
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/20/politics/nikki-haley-donald-trump-mental-fitness/index.html
https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/trump-speech-debank-extremists-jim-jordan-rcna134524
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/06/politics/trump-organization-fraud-trial-verdict/index.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/paypal-bans-anti-muslim-fanatic-laura-loomer-from-their-platform
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/30/politics/trump-legacy-fake-news/index.html
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-01-02-0289
https://newrepublic.com/post/176285/trump-trash-military-officials-dumbest-people
January 19, 2024
January 19, 2024
President Joe Biden today signed the continuing resolution that will keep the government operating into March.
Meanwhile, the stock market roared as two of the three major indexes hit new record highs. The S&P 500, which measures the value of 500 of the largest companies in the country, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which does the same for 30 companies considered to be industry leaders, both rose to all-time highs. The third major index, the Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward technology stocks, did not hit a record high, although its 1.7% jump was higher than that of the S&P 500 (1.2%) or the Dow (1.1%).
Investors appear to be buoyed by the fact the rate of inflation has come down in the U.S. and by news that consumers are feeling better about the economy. A report out today by Goldman Sachs Economics Research noted that consumer spending is strong and predicted that “job gains, positive real wage growth, will lead to around 3% real disposable income growth” and that “household balance sheets have strengthened.” It also noted that “[t]he US has led the way on disinflation,” and it predicted further drops in 2024. That will likely mean the sort of interest rate cuts the stock market likes.
The economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration have also benefited workers. The unemployment rate has been under 4% for more than two years, and wages have risen higher than inflation in that same period. Production is up as well, to 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023 (the U.S. growth rate under Trump even before the pandemic was 2.5%).
The administration has worked to end some of the most obvious financial inequities in the U.S., such as the unexpected “junk fees” tacked on to airline or concert tickets, or to car or apartment rentals. On Wednesday the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a proposed rule for bank overdraft fees at banks that have more than $10 billion in assets.
While banks now can charge what they wish if a customer’s balance falls below zero, the proposed rule would allow them to charge no more than what it cost them to break even on providing overdraft services or, alternatively, an industry-wide fee that reflects the amount it costs to deal with overdrafts: $3, $6, $7, or $14. The amount will be established after a public hearing period.
Ken Sweet and Cora Lewis of the Associated Press note that while the average overdraft is $26.61, some banks charge as much as $39 per overdraft. The CFPB estimates that in the past 20 years, banks have collected more than $280 billion in overdraft fees. (One bank’s chief executive officer named his boat “Overdraft.”) Over the past two years, pressure has made banks cut back on their fees and they now take in about $8 billion a year from those overdraft fees.
Bankers say regulation is unnecessary and will force them to end the overdraft service, pushing people out of the banking system. Biden said that the rule would save U.S. families $3.5 billion annually.
The administration has also addressed the student loan crisis by reexamining the loan histories of student borrowers. An NPR investigation led by Cory Turner revealed that banks mismanaged loans, denying borrowers the terms under which they had signed on to them. Rather than honoring the government’s promise that so long as a borrower paid what the government thought was reasonable on a loan for 20 or 25 years (undergrad or graduate), the debt would be forgiven, banks urged borrowers to put the loan into “forbearance,” under which payments paused but the debt continued to accrue interest, making the amount balloon.
The Education Department has been reexamining all those old loans to find this sort of mismanagement as well as other problems, like borrowers not getting credit for payments to count toward their 20 years of payments, or borrowers who chose public service not receiving the debt relief they were promised.
Today the administration announced $4.9 billion of student debt cancellation for almost 74,000 borrowers. That brings the total of borrowers whose debt has been canceled to 3.7 million Americans, with an erasure of $136.6 billion. Nearly 30,000 of today’s relieved borrowers had been in repayment for at least 20 years but never got the relief they should have; nearly 44,000 had earned debt forgiveness after 10 years of public service as teachers, nurses, and firefighters.
Biden has been traveling the country recently, touting how the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration have benefited ordinary Americans. In Emmaus, Pennsylvania, last Friday he visited a bicycle shop, a running shoe store, and a coffee shop to emphasize how small businesses are booming under his administration: in the three years since he took office, there have been 16 million applications to start new businesses, the highest number on record.
Biden was in Raleigh, North Carolina, yesterday to announce another $82 million in support for broadband access, bringing the total of government infrastructure funding in North Carolina during the Biden administration to $3 billion.
On social media, the administration compared its investments in the American people to those of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, which were enormously popular.
They were popular, that is, until those opposed to business regulation convinced white voters that the government’s protection of civil rights, which came along with its protection of ordinary Americans through regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, and promotion of infrastructure, meant redistribution of white tax dollars to undeserving Black people.
The same effort to make sure that ordinary Americans don’t work together to restore basic fairness in the economy and rights in society is visible now in the attempt to attribute a recent Boeing airplane malfunction, in which a door panel blew off mid-flight, to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Tesnim Zekeria at Popular Information yesterday chronicled how that accusation spread across the right-wing ecosystem and onto the Fox News Channel, where Fox Business host Sean Duffy warned: “This is a dangerous business when you’re focused on DEI and maybe less focused on engineering and safety.”
As Zekeria explains, “this narrative has no basis in fact.” Neither Boeing nor its supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, is particularly diverse, either at the workforce level, where minorities make up 35% of Boeing employees and 26% of those at Spirit AeroSystems, or on the corporate ladder, where the overwhelming majority of executives are white men. Zekeria notes that right-wing media figures have also erroneously blamed last year’s train derailment in Ohio and the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank on DEI initiatives.
The real culprit at Boeing, Zekeria suggests, was the weakened regulations on Boeing and Spirit thanks to more than $65 million in lobbying efforts.
Perhaps an even more transparent attempt to keep ordinary Americans from working together is the attacks former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson has launched against Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “a member of the new master race” who “must be shown maximum respect at all times, no matter what she says or does.” Philip Bump of the Washington Post noted yesterday that this construction suggests that Harris, who identifies as both Black and Indian, represents all nonwhite Americans as a united force opposed to white Americans.
But Harris’s actions actually represent something else altogether. She has crossed the country since June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, talking about the right of all Americans to bodily autonomy. That the Supreme Court felt able to take away a constitutional right has worried many Americans about what they might do next, and people all over the country have been coming together in opposition to the small minority that appears to have taken over the levers of our democracy.
Driving the wedge of racism into that majority coalition seems to be a desperate attempt to stop ordinary Americans from taking back control of the country.
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Notes:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/legislation/2024/01/19/press-release-bill-signed-h-r-2872/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s-p-500-stock-market-record-high/
https://fortune.com/2023/12/12/wage-growth-exceeded-inflation-jec-democrats/
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product
Popular InformationLoose bolts open door to racismOn January 5th, a Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft operated by Alaska Airlines was forced to make an emergency landing after a door panel flew off mid-air. No deaths were reported, but multi…Read more2 days ago · 629 likes · 76 comments · Tesnim Zekeriahttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/17/tucker-carlson-kamala-harris-master-race/
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January 18, 2024
January 18, 2024
This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.
Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting.
In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.)
This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.
“I always tell people back home beware of bipartisanship," Representative Warren Davidson (R-OH) said on the House floor during the debate. “The most bipartisan thing in Washington, D.C., is bankrupting our country, if not financially, morally…. It’s not just the spending, it’s all the terrible policies that are attached to the spending.”
Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election.
A piece today in the Washington Post by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstadter about the difficulties of reestablishing democracy in Poland after eight years under a right-wing leader illuminates this moment in the U.S. Hockstadter’s description of the party of former Polish leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski sounds familiar: the party “jury-rigged systems, rules and institutions to its own partisan advantage, seeding its allies in the courts, prosecutors’ offices, state-owned media and central bank. Kaczynski’s administration erected an intricate legal obstacle course designed to leave the party with a stranglehold on key levers of power even if it were ousted in elections.”
Although voters in Poland last fall reelected former prime minister Donald Tusk to reestablish democracy, his ability to rebuild the democratic and judicial norms torched by his predecessor have been hamstrung by his opponents, who make up an “irreconcilable opposition” and are trying to retain control over Poland through their seizure of key levers of government.
The U.S. was in a similar situation during Reconstruction, when in 1879, former Confederates in the Democratic Party tried to end the government protection of Black rights altogether by refusing to fund the government until the president, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, withdrew all the U.S. troops from the South (it’s a myth that they left in 1877) and stopped trying to protect Black voting.
At the time, the president and House minority leader James A. Garfield refused to bow to the former Confederates. Five times, Hayes vetoed funding measures that carried the riders former Confederates wanted, writing that the Confederates’ policy was “radical, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” for it would allow a “bare majority” in the House to dictate its terms to the Senate and the President, thus destroying the balance of power in the American government.
In 1879, well aware of the stakes in the fight, newspapers made the case that the government was under assault. American voters listened, the former Confederates backed down, and Garfield somewhat unexpectedly was elected president in 1880 as a man who would champion the idea of the protection of Black rights and the country itself from those who wanted to establish that states were more powerful than the federal government.
Chastened, the leaders of the Democratic Party marginalized former Confederates and turned to northern cities to reestablish the party, beginning the transition to the party that would, fifty years later, usher in the New Deal.
—
Notes:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1182/vote_118_2_00012.htm
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202415
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/9/30/23897443/mike-quigley-no-vote-federal-shutdown-stopgap-bill
https://rollcall.com/2024/01/18/senate-passes-stopgap-funding-extension-into-march/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/18/poland-democracy-tusk-kaczynski/
Ari Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 75–78.
January 17, 2023
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton responded this evening to the federal government’s demand that state troops give U.S. Border Patrol agents access to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, the site where three migrants died last week as they tried to cross the Rio Grande.
Aarón Torres and Joseph Morton of The Dallas Morning News reported that Paxton’s letter acknowledged that by law the federal government’s Border Patrol officers are allowed “warrantless access to land within 25 miles of the border, but only ‘for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.’” Paxton claimed that this law doesn’t apply because the current administration’s policies—the law, after all, is written by Congress—are not intended to stop undocumented immigration. “There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens,” he wrote.
Torres and Morton note that, in fact, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 142,000 migrants in 2023 and that Paxton presented no evidence for his claims.
Two weeks ago, House Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) demanded that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testify as part of the House’s impeachment proceedings against him. As Rebecca Beitsch points out in The Hill, testimony from a cabinet secretary is usually arranged several weeks or even months in advance, and Mayorkas said he could not make the date because he will be discussing immigration with a delegation from Mexico at that time but he asked to arrange another time. Mayorkas has testified before the House panel twice in the past year and before Congress 27 times since he took office.
In a letter obtained by Punchbowl News, Green wrote: “Since you continue to decline to come in person, I invite you to submit written testimony for the January 18th hearing record, so that our Committee Members may hear from you directly.”
This evening, an inadvertently circulated internal Republican memo obtained by Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill shows that Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee likely have switched their demand for live testimony to a demand for written answers because they have already committed to impeachment on a tight timeline and cannot wait for the live hearing to be rescheduled.
Green had previously suggested on the Fox News Channel that an impeachment document had already been written even though there had been no impeachment hearings. The memo appears to corroborate that suggestion, saying: “We have scheduled the markup for impeachment articles at 10:00 AM ET on Wednesday, January 31, 2024.”
Republicans argue that Mayorkas lied to Congress because he said the government has operational control over the border. They dispute this characterization because the Secure Fence Act defines operational control as one in which not a single person or object enters the country improperly. This perfect standard has never been met, and yet they apparently decided to impeach over it before even holding hearings.
Republicans are clearly hoping to use the issue of immigration against President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the upcoming election. After insisting in November that immigration was in such a crisis that there could be no more aid to Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan without it, Republicans in December rejected the idea of new legislation and said Biden must handle the issue himself. Then, in early January, 64 Republicans traveled to the border to demonstrate the importance of the issue.
But now that the Senate appears to have hammered out a bipartisan immigration reform measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said this morning: “It’s a complex issue. I don’t think now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform, because we know how complicated that is.” After a meeting at the White House today with President Biden, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and committee heads, Johnson still refused to put the proposed deal up for a vote in the House.
In today’s meeting, Biden emphasized the danger of leaving Ukraine’s defense unfunded. “He was clear,” the White House said, “Congress’s continued failure to act endangers the United States’ national security, the NATO Alliance, and the rest of the free world.”
Johnson is caught between U.S. national security and Trump. On the Fox News Channel tonight, Laura Ingraham told Johnson she had just gotten off a phone call with Trump and Trump had told her that he was against the immigration deal and had urged Johnson to oppose it. “He…was extremely adamant about it,” she said. Johnson agreed and said that he and Trump had been “talking about this pretty frequently.”
Trump needs the issue of immigration to whip up his base for the 2024 election.
Today the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chaired by James Comer (R-KY) held a hearing titled “The Biden Administration’s Regulatory and Policymaking Efforts to Undermine U.S. Immigration Law.” The administration has asked for additional funding for border patrol officers, immigration courts, and so on, but Comer said in his opening statement that the problem is not a lack of resources but rather an unwillingness to enforce the law.
Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) replied: “You know we have failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform up here for decades.” He noted that one of his colleagues had provided statistics showing that President Barack Obama deported more people in each term than Trump did, so “if the border wasn’t a problem until President Biden was elected, then how are we deporting all of these people in administrations before Trump was elected? It’s because this situation has been going on for decades. So stop lying to the American people that none of this happened until President Biden was elected.”
Comer has also used the House Oversight Committee to spread the idea that President Biden is corrupt, but while he has made many allegations on right-wing media channels, the committee has not, in fact, turned up any evidence linking the president to illegal activity. Instead, the investigations there appear to be a continuation of the technique Republicans have used since the 1990s to insinuate that a Democrat has engaged in wrongdoing simply by holding investigations.
Trump employed this technique effectively in 2016 in his constant refrain that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, had illegally deleted emails, and less effectively in 2019 when he tried to strong-arm Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden. It was central to the plan of convincing state legislatures that they could recast their 2020 electoral votes: lawyer Jeffrey Clark wanted to tell them (falsely) that there were voting irregularities that the Department of Justice was investigating.
But this technique has backfired so far in this Congress. After a year of hearing that Biden is corrupt, MAGA Republicans have expected to see him impeached. But Democrats have come to hearings exceedingly well prepared and have pushed back on MAGA talking points, turning the tables on the Republicans so thoroughly that Comer recently was forced to back down, saying, “My job was never to impeach.”
Creating a false reality to trick voters is central to undermining democracy, and it is no secret that autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and China are spreading disinformation in the U.S. But I have always wondered what would happen when the American people finally pushed back against suggestions and innuendo and instead demanded actual evidence and policies designed to address problems, as they did before American politics turned into entertainment.
—
Notes:
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/eoy/iceAnnualReportFY2023.pdf
https://punchbowl.news/article/alejandro-mayorkas-testimony-clashes-with-house-republicans/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4414805-mayorkas-impeachment-gop-memo/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4413501-mike-johnson-immigration-reform/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/politics/biden-ukraine-white-house-meeting/index.html
“Moskowitz: MAGA GOP Wants to Politicize the Border, Not Solve It,” on YouTube
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/14/politics/james-comer-impeachment-interview/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/business/media/election-disinformation-2024.html
Twitter (X):
brianstelter/status/1747787486951080048
January 16, 2024
January 16, 2024
[Warning: paragraphs 6–8 talk about rape.]
In yesterday’s Iowa caucus, 51% of Republican caucusgoers chose former president Donald Trump as their preferred candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Twenty-one percent of Republican caucusgoers chose Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Nineteen percent chose former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. Seven percent chose technology entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. These results mean that 20 of Iowa’s 40 delegates will go to Trump; 8 to DeSantis; 7 to Haley; and three to Ramaswamy. An apparent Trump surrogate in the primary debates, Ramaswamy suspended his campaign after the caucus and endorsed Trump.
Turnout was much lower than expected, with only about 110,000 people voting. That’s about 15% of Iowa’s three quarters of a million registered Republicans out of a population of just over 3 million people.
On Friday, January 12, in Des Moines, DeSantis blamed right-wing media for Trump’s continued popularity. “He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media—Fox News, the websites, all this stuff,” DeSantis said, referring to the elite unit of the Roman army that protected the emperor both physically and through intelligence collecting. “They just don’t hold him accountable, because they’re worried about losing viewers and they don’t want to have the ratings go down. And that’s just the reality.”
For his part, true to form, Trump has shared a story that Haley is not eligible to be president because her parents were not citizens when she was born in the U.S. in 1972. This reflects both his “birther” history and his promise to end the birthright citizenship established in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment. Also true to form, he made no accusations of voter fraud or rigged voting last night as he has done in the past when he lost elections; indeed, he told supporters this was his third win in Iowa. The truth is that in 2016 he lost Iowa’s caucus vote to Texas senator Ted Cruz.
The Iowa results pretty much told us what we already knew. Trump remains the dominant leader of the hard-right older Republicans who turn out for caucuses, but is so generally unpopular that 49% of Iowa caucusgoers—the party’s most dedicated supporters in a deeply Republican state—chose someone else. The Trump base is older—entry polls showed that only 27% of yesterday’s voters were under the age of 50—and Trump won most handily in the rural, white counties that look least like the rest of the country. His greatest increase in support since 2016 came among white evangelicals.
That support from those who claim fervent religious beliefs seems an odd fit with the candidate, who was in a federal courtroom in New York City today for the start of a trial to determine the additional damages he owes writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she said he raped her in the 1990s, claiming she was lying to sell books. Carroll sued him in 2019, but the case has been delayed as Trump argued that he had presidential immunity for his comments.
While it was delayed, in May 2023 a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse in a second civil trial known as Carroll II. The jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million. When Trump’s team countersued Carroll for defamation, saying the jury had found him liable not for rape, but for sexual abuse, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Carroll’s words were “substantially true.” Kaplan made it clear that New York law defines rape very narrowly. He said “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact…‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “The jury,” he wrote, “found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina.”
Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied Trump’s claim of presidential immunity for his defamation of Carroll and dismissed his argument that his comments weren’t defamatory.
Carroll II established guidelines for the previous case as it finally moved forward. In a pretrial judgment, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan determined that Trump is liable for defamation for his ridicule of Carroll. Trump remains undeterred. As he arrived at the courthouse this morning, Alex Woodward noted in The Independent, his social media account released a flood of “potentially defamatory statements” attacking Carroll.
In Politico, Erica Orden noted that today’s trial is just down the street from the Trump trial for civil fraud that ended last Thursday. In that case, Judge Arthur Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed business fraud. The trial was over fines, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and the Trump Organization’s continuing ability to do business in New York. Trump’s outburst at the end of the trial attacking the judge and New York attorney general Letitia James suggests that he has little faith that he is going to win that case and is instead turning it into a political pulpit as part of his attempt to undermine the American justice system. On Thursday morning, law enforcement officers showed up at Judge Engoron’s house in a “swatting” incident after someone falsely told police a violent crime was being committed there.
Attorney Joe Tacopina filed papers to withdraw himself and his two partners from Trump’s defense team yesterday.
White evangelicals heartily endorse a crook and a rapist apparently because they expect that he will put in place the world they envision, one controlled by white, patriarchal evangelical Christians.
But as even the Iowa caucuses indicated, the idea of replacing American democracy with an authoritarian who will enact Christian nationalism is not generally popular. In the Washington Post on January 11, Philip Bump explored a new poll by YouGov showing that when U.S. adult citizens are presented with 30 of Trump’s declared policies, majorities oppose 22 of them. A majority approved only four of them, and those were the ones the right wing has been hammering: banning hormonal or surgical treatment for transgender minors (57%), legally limiting recognized genders (53%), requiring immigrants to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims are being processed (56%), and—by a narrow majority of 51%—deporting immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
Some of Trump’s signature policies are deeply unpopular. Only 21% of Americans support getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service; only 18% support giving the president control over regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission. Only 31% support sending U.S. troops into U.S. cities to enforce order; only 33% support sending troops into Mexico to fight drug cartels. Only 23% support further cuts to taxes on corporations. Only 29% want to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (which has seen a record 20.5 million Americans enroll so far in the current enrollment period); only 28% support withdrawing from the World Health Organization. Only 38% want to end birthright citizenship, the same percentage as those who want to end U.S. aid to Ukraine.
The YouGov study shows that only 30% of Americans support withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, and a December 2023 CNN poll showed that 73% want the government to do more to address climate change. And yet, today, Scott Waldman of Politico previewed the Trump team’s preparation for ending all efforts to address climate change. Complaining that the people in Trump’s first administration were “weak,” Trump advisor Steve Milloy told Waldman that “The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA.”
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, said last year. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power Day 1 and deconstruct the administrative state.”
Meanwhile, Politico’s roundup of Washington, D.C., news shows that President Joe Biden has invited top congressional leaders of both parties—Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)—and relevant committee chairs to a meeting at the White House tomorrow to discuss the stalled aid package to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the U.S. border. Also today, the Senate is considering the continuing resolution to fund the government before the current continuing resolution ends on Friday.
Speaker Johnson has pushed off House votes until Wednesday out of apparent concern about the snow in Washington today.
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/live/iowa-republican-caucuses-live-updates
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iowa-caucus-2024-updates/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-many-delegates-does-iowa-have-2024/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/16/trump-iowa-evangelical-vote/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump-rape-language-e-jean-carroll
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/11/trump-polling-unpopular-policies/
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-loses-three-lawyers-one-day-1860847
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lets-face-it-trumps-iowa-result-was-pretty-weak
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/12/trump-second-term-climate-science-2024-00132289
https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/payer/aca-enrollment-hits-204m-%E2-and-counting
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/01/16/congress/snow-means-no-house-votes-00135785
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/01/16/congress/bidens-invite-00135857
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/12/desantis-prepares-go-down-swinging-fox-news/
https://www.rawstory.com/trumpts-presidential-immunity-claim-slapped-down-by-d-c-appeals-court/
Twitter (X):
SimonWDC/status/1747117668987974079
Acyn/status/1747111021347512677
danpfeiffer/status/1747072463144718356
January 15, 2024
January 15, 2024
Last night, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced they have agreed to another continuing resolution that will fund the government until March 1 and March 8. Schumer said he will begin the process of passing the continuing resolution when the Senate reconvenes tomorrow.
The first part of the current continuing resolution that funds the government will run out Friday, and Schumer warned that “[t]o avoid a shutdown, it will take bipartisan cooperation in the Senate and the House to quickly pass the CR and send it to the President's desk before Friday's funding deadline.”
Schumer is sending a message to the House, since far-right Republican extremists there threw former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of the speakership for adhering to the budget spending agreement he made with President Joe Biden in June 2023. Now Johnson has agreed to what is essentially the same deal.
It is unclear what actions the funding measure will prompt in the House. According to Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell in the Washington Post yesterday, extremist Republicans remain angry enough at their inability to dictate terms to the government that they are, once again, threatening to halt the House’s business in protest, to challenge Johnson’s speakership, and/or to shut down the government. At the same time, other Republicans are angry that Johnson appears to be caving to the extremists, who have made the House a bit of a laughingstock as they made it almost impossible last year for the House to get anything done. More obstruction, another speakership fight, or a government shutdown would hurt the Republicans’ image even more.
Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that Johnson told the House conference that with Kentucky representative Hal Rogers hospitalized after a car accident on Wednesday, and Louisiana representative Steve Scalise out of Congress until February for a stem cell transplant to treat his blood cancer, the Republican majority is so slim there isn’t time for anything other than a continuing resolution.
Perhaps to appease the extremists, on the same call, Sherman reported, Johnson told the conference that the bipartisan immigration measure being negotiated in the Senate was “DOA in House.” House Republicans have insisted they will not pass additional funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan without a measure addressing the border. At the same time, they have also refused Biden’s offer to negotiate, clearly trying to preserve the immigration issue to whip up voters before the 2024 election. Johnson told his conference that Congress “can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected or a Republican is back in the White House.” In Iowa, Trump promised: “As soon as I take the oath of office, I’ll…begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”
We got a taste of what those policies will look like over the weekend when on Friday a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande and two other migrants were in distress after Texas soldiers prevented Border Patrol officers from entering Shelby Park, the area where the migrants were crossing. A lawyer for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on Sunday, demanding that Texas stop blocking Border Patrol officers.
Meanwhile, the image of the migrant woman and children drowning is so damaging that Texas troops claim they didn’t see any distressed migrants and Texas governor Greg Abbott today insisted that the migrants were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping, although that claim does not address the fact that the Texas troops had blocked the Border Patrol’s normal surveillance of the river and had assumed responsibility for it. Abbott tried to argue that the deaths were not his fault but rather Biden’s because, he said, Biden’s policies encouraged migrants to attempt the crossing.
For their part, Senate Republican negotiators pushed back on the news that Johnson was preemptively tanking the immigration measure, saying that rumors about what’s in it are inaccurate and that Republicans should withhold judgment until they see it. Members of the Senate are eager to pass aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Today, Nahal Toosi explored in Politico how the domestic political infighting in the United States is undermining faith in American democracy around the world. Toosi explained that current and former diplomats pointed to concerns that U.S. foreign policy will change based on the demands of a radical base, and they pointed to Trump’s abrupt exit in 2018 from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more popularly known as the Iran nuclear agreement, that significantly restricted Iran’s nuclear development. In the wake of that withdrawal, Iran resumed the previously prohibited uranium enrichment.
“Foreign relations is very much based on trust, and when you know that the person that is in front of you may not be there or might be followed by somebody that feels exactly the opposite way, what is your incentive to do long-term deals?” a former Latin American diplomat asked of Toosi. A former Mexican ambassador told Toosi that if a Republican takes the White House in 2024, countries will not be able to trust the U.S. as a partner but will instead operate transactionally.
“The world does not have time for the U.S. to rebound back,” a former Asian ambassador told Toosi. “We’ve gone from a unipolar world that we’re familiar with from the 1990s into a multipolar world, but the key pole is still the United States. And if that key pole is not playing the role that we want the U.S. to do, you’ll see alternative forces coming up.” Toosi noted that Russian diplomats were “among those delighting in the U.S. chaos (and fanning it).”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/29/us/politics/debt-ceiling-agreement.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-deal-continuing-resolution-government-shutdown/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/14/house-republicans-government-funding-shutdown/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/13/politics/kentucky-rep-hal-rogers-dc-car-accident/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/05/steve-scalise-house-republicans/
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-iran-nuclear-deal
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/14/politics/immigration-texas-border-dhs-letter-ken-paxton/index.html
Twitter (X):
JakeSherman/status/1746706618362769566
January 14, 2024
January 14, 2024
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024.
[Image of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Buddy Poland.]
–-
Notes:
Dr. King’s final speech:
January 13, 2024
January 13, 2024
Last night a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande that marks the border between the U.S. and Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas.
U.S. Border Patrol agents knew that a group of six migrants were in distress in the river but could not try to save them, as they normally would, because troops from the Texas National Guard and the Texas Military Department prevented the Border Patrol agents from entering the area where they were struggling: Shelby Park, a 47-acre public park that offers access to a frequently traveled part of the river and is a place where Border Patrol agents often encounter migrants crossing the border illegally.
They could not enter because two days ago, on Thursday, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent armed Texas National Guard soldiers and soldiers from the Texas Military Department to take control of Shelby Park. Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Pass, posted a video on Facebook showing the troops and saying that a state official had told him that state troops were taking “full control” over Shelby Park “indefinitely.” Salinas made it clear that “[t]his is not something that we wanted. This is not something that we asked for as a city.”
The Texas forces have denied United States Border Patrol officials entry into the park to perform their duties, asserting that Texas officials have power over U.S. officials.
On December 18, Abbott signed into law S.B. 4, a measure that attempts to take into state hands the power over immigration the Constitution gives to the federal government. Courts have repeatedly reinforced that immigration is the responsibility of federal, not state, government, but now, according to Uriel J. García of the Texas Tribune, “some Texas Republicans have said they hope the new law will push the issue back before a U.S. Supreme Court that is more conservative since three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined it.”
On January 3 the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the new law, saying: “Texas cannot run its own immigration system. Its efforts, through S.B. 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations.”
Abbott and MAGA Republicans are teeing up the issue of immigration as a key line of attack on President Joe Biden in 2024, but while they are insisting the issue is so important they will not agree to fund Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion until it is solved, they are also unwilling to participate in discussions to fund more border officers or immigration courts. Today, once again, Biden reminded reporters that he has asked Congress to pass new border measures since he took office, but rather than pass new laws, Republicans appear to be doubling down on pushing the idea that migrants threaten American society and that an individual state—Texas, in this case—can override federal authority.
Abbott has spent more than $100 million of Texas tax dollars to send migrants to cities led by Democrats. These migrants have applied for asylum and are waiting for a hearing; they are in the U.S. legally. In September 2023, Texas stopped coordinating with nonprofits in those cities that prepared for migrant arrivals.
Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote to Abbott, calling him out for choosing “to sow chaos in an attempt to score political points.” Pritzker noted that Abbott is “sending asylum seekers from Texas to the Upper Midwest in the middle of winter—many without coats, without shoes to protect them from the snow—to a city whose shelters are already overfilled with migrants you sent here.” Chicago’s temperatures are set to drop below zero this weekend, Pritzker wrote, and he “strongly urge[d]” Abbott to stop sending people to Illinois in these conditions. “You are dropping off asylum seekers without alerting us to their arrivals, at improper locations at all hours of the night.”
Pritzker wrote that he supports bipartisan immigration reform but “[w]hile action is pending at the federal level, I plead with you for mercy for the thousands of people who are powerless to speak for themselves. Please, while winter is threatening vulnerable people’s lives, suspend your transports and do not send more people to our state. We are asking you to help prevent additional deaths. We should be able to come together in a bipartisan fashion to urge Congress to act. But right now, we are talking about human beings and their survival. I hope we can at least agree on saving lives right now.”
Speaking on the right-wing Dana Loesch Show last week, Abbott said, “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
On January 13, 1833, President Andrew Jackson wrote to Vice President–elect Martin van Buren to explain his position on South Carolina’s recent assertion that sovereign states could overrule federal laws. “Was this to be permitted the government would lose the confidence of its citizens and it would induce disunion everywhere. No my friend, the crisis must be now met with firmness, our citizens protected, and the modern doctrine of nullification and secession put down forever…. [N]othing must be permitted to weaken our government at home or abroad,” he wrote.
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4404134-abbott-texas-border-shooting-migrants/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1330861/dl
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/20/texas-plane-immigrants-chicago-greg-abbott-busing/
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/11/texas-border-migrants-greg-abbott-interview-shoot/
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mcc.050/?sp=4&st=image&r=0.025,0.022,1.048,0.612,0
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