Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 145
June 25, 2023
June 25, 2023
Summer has finally arrived, and I left the laptop behind today so we could take advantage of it. Will be back on schedule tomorrow.
In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite pictures of Buddy headed to work himself. Can’t complain about the view from his office.
[Photo of Buddy Poland and Pete taken by Captain Frank Bedell]
June 24, 2023
June 24, 2023
Yesterday, forces from the private mercenary Wagner Group crossed from Ukraine back into Russia and took control of the city of Rostov-on-Don, a key staging area for the Russian war against Ukraine. As the mercenaries moved toward Moscow in the early hours of Saturday (EDT), Russian president Vladimir Putin called them and their leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, traitors. This morning, they were bearing down on Moscow when they suddenly stopped 125 miles (200 km) from the Russian capital. This afternoon the Russian government announced that Belarus president Aleksandr Lukashenko had brokered a deal with Prigozhin to end the mutiny: Prigozhin would go to Belarus, the criminal case against him for the uprising would be dropped, the Wagner fighters who did not participate in the march could sign on as soldiers for the Russian Ministry of Defense, and those who did participate would not be prosecuted.
Prigozhin said he turned around to avoid bloodshed.
U.S. observers don’t appear to know what to make of this development yet, although I have not read anyone who thinks this is the end of it (among other things, Putin has not been seen today). What is crystal clear, though, is that the ability of Prigozhin’s forces to move apparently effortlessly hundreds of miles through Russia toward Moscow without any significant resistance illustrates that Putin’s hold over Russia is no longer secure. This, along with the fact that the Wagner Group, which was a key fighting force for Russia, is now split and demoralized, is good news for Ukraine.
In the U.S. the same two-day period that covered Prigozhin’s escapade in Russia covered the anniversaries of two historic events. Yesterday was the 51st anniversary of what we know as “Title 9,” or more accurately Title IX, for the part of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 that prohibited any school or education program that receives federal funding from discriminating based on sex. This measure updated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and while people today tend to associate Title IX with sports, it actually covers all discrimination, including sexual assault and sexual harrassment. Republican president Richard Nixon signed the measure into law on June 23, 1972 (six days after the Watergate break-in, if anyone is counting).
Fifty years and one day later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman's constitutional right to abortion. That is, a year ago today, for the first time in our history, rather than expanding our recognition of constitutional rights, the court explicitly took a constitutional right away from the American people.
The voyage from Title IX to Dobbs began about the same time Nixon signed the Education Amendments Act. In 1972, Gallup polls showed that 64% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, agreed that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor—a belief that would underpin Roe v. Wade the next year—but Nixon and his people worried that he would lose the fall election. Nixon advisor Patrick Buchanan urged the president to pivot against abortion to woo antiabortion Catholics, who tended to vote for Democrats.
As right-wing activists like Phyllis Schlafly used the idea of abortion as shorthand for women calling for civil rights, Republicans began to attract voters opposed to abortion and the expansion of civil rights. In his campaign and presidency, Ronald Reagan actively courted right-wing evangelicals, and from then on, Republican politicians spurred evangelicals to the polls by promising to cut back abortion rights.
But while Republican-confirmed judges chipped away at Roe v. Wade, the decision itself seemed secure because of the concept of “settled law,” under which jurists try not to create legal uncertainty by abruptly overturning law that has been in place for a long time (or, if they do, to be very clear and public about why).
So Republicans could turn out voters by promising to get rid of Roe v. Wade while also being certain that it would stay in place. By 2016 those antiabortion voters made up the base of the Republican Party. (It is quite possible that then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to permit President Barack Obama to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court because he knew that evangelicals would be far more likely to turn out if there were a Supreme Court seat in the balance.)
But then Trump got the chance to put three justices on the court, and the equation changed. Although each promised during their Senate confirmation hearings to respect settled law, the court struck down Roe v. Wade on the principle that the federal expansion of civil rights under the Fourteenth Amendment incorrectly took power from the states and gave it to the federal government. In the Dobbs majority decision, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level.
Fourteen Republican-dominated states promptly banned abortion. Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas banned abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest; Mississippi banned it with an exception for rape but not incest; and North Dakota banned it except for a six-week window for rape or incest. West Virginia also has a ban with exceptions for rape and incest. In Wisconsin a law from 1849 went back into effect after Dobbs; it bans abortion unless a woman would die without one. Texas and Idaho allow private citizens to sue abortion providers. Other states have imposed new limits on abortion.
But antiabortion forces also tried to enforce their will federally. In April, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the Food and Drug Administration should not have approved mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug, more than 20 years ago. That decision would take effect nationally. It is being appealed.
When the federal government arranged to pay for transportation out of antiabortion states for service members needing reproductive health care, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) put a blanket hold on all military appointments—250 so far—until that policy is rescinded. For the first time in its history, the Marine Corps will not have a confirmed commandant after July 10. In the next few months, five members of the joint chiefs of staff, including General Mark Milley, its chair, are required by law to leave their positions. Tuberville says he will not back down.
On June 20, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chair of the House Republican conference, called for a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks, saying that the right to life “is fundamental to human rights and the American dream” and calling out the justices who decided Roe v. Wade as “radical judges who frankly took the voice away from the American people…. The people are the most important voices” on abortion, she said.
But, in fact, a majority of Americans supported abortion rights even before Dobbs, and those numbers have gone up since the decision, especially as untreated miscarriages have brought patients close to death before they could get medical care and girls as young as ten have had to cross state lines to obtain healthcare. Sixty-eight percent of OB-GYNs recently polled by KFF said Dobbs has made it harder to manage emergencies; 64% say it has increased patient deaths. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows that 80% of Americans—65% of Republicans and 83% of independents—oppose a nationwide ban on abortion while only 14% support one. Fifty-three percent of Americans want federal protection of abortion; 39% oppose it.
In politics, it seems the dog has caught the car. The end of Roe v. Wade has energized those in favor of abortion rights, with Democrat-dominated states protecting reproductive rights and the administration using executive power to protect them where it can. Republicans are now running away from the issue: the ad-tracking firm AdImpact found that only 1% of Republican ads in House races in 2022 mentioned abortion.
At the same time, antiabortion activists achieved their goal and stand to be less energized. This desperate need to whip up enthusiasm among their base is likely behind the Republicans’ sudden focus on transgender children. Right-wing media has linked the two in part thanks to the highly visible work of the American College of Pediatricians, which, despite its name, is a political action group of about 700 people, only 60% of whom have medical degrees. (They broke off from the 67,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics in 2002 after that medical organization backed same-sex parents.) They are prominent voices against both abortion and gender-affirming health care.
In Nebraska in May, a single law combined a ban on abortion after 12 weeks and on gender-affirming care for minors. “This bill is simply about protecting innocent life,” Republican state senator Tom Briese said.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made protecting reproductive rights central, traveling around the country to talk with people about abortion rights and pressing the administration to do more to protect them. At a rally in Washington, D.C., on Friday, she articulated the message of fifty years ago: “We stand for the freedom of every American, including the freedom of every person everywhere to make decisions—about their own body, their own health care and their own doctor,” she said. “So we fight for reproductive rights and legislation that restores the protections of Roe v. Wade. And here’s the thing. The majority of Americans are with us, they agree.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/24/world/russia-wagner-prigozhin-ukraine-news
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-21-2023
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/04/07/texas-abortion-drugs-fda-ruling/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/21/mifepristone-abortion-pill-access-supreme-court/
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4063373-military-holds-fifth-month-republicans-tuberville/
https://www.businessinsider.com/10-year-old-girl-travel-out-state-ohio-restricts-abortion-2022-7
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/06/15/abortion-transgender-christian-doctors/
https://news.yahoo.com/marines-face-no-confirmed-commandant-213315945.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/21/obgyn-abortion-poll/
https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/report/a-national-survey-of-obgyns-experiences-after-dobbs/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/24/politics/kamala-harris-abortion-rights/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/19/nebraska-abortion-transgender-bill-lb574/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-lean-abortion-flip-house-s-catch-rcna90755
Twitter:
AVindman/status/1672670393763758081
June 23, 2023
June 23, 2023 (Friday)
There’s something happening in Russia, but as of midnight tonight EDT, what is going on is not clear.
Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, has been increasingly critical of Russia’s military leaders over the past few months, and today he accused the Russian military of attacking his forces. He announced that he was leading his soldiers from Ukraine into Russia, where he promised to retaliate against the leaders of the Russian Ministry of Defense. In response, Russian generals accused him of “organizing an armed rebellion” against Russian president Vladimir Putin and said there was no basis for his accusations.
Rumors and unsubstantiated videos of tanks have circulated on social media ever since, with Prigozhin saying his forces crossed back into Russia’s Rostov oblast—more than 600 miles from Moscow—without any resistance by border guards. The Kremlin says that it has strengthened security measures in Moscow.
The Institute for the Study of War, which assesses such events, writes that Prigozhin likely intends for the Wagner group to remove the current leadership of the Ministry of Defense in Rostov-on-Don. Since that city houses the command center for the Russian Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine, the ISW writes, such a struggle would have “significant impacts” on the Ukraine war. The city also is home to what former director for European affairs for the U.S. National Security Council Alexander Vindman called “enormous stockpiles” of weapons that could fall into the hands of the Wagner Group.
As of midnight, Putin has not appeared on television to comment on events, which does not bode well for his control of the situation. The Kremlin did release a prerecorded video for young people on Youth Day in which he urged them to “dream bravely.”
There are no good guys in this struggle. Prigozhin is wanted by the FBI for his involvement in the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He funded the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which flooded social media with messages designed to help Trump win the presidency, and his mercenaries have been committing war crimes in Ukraine and African countries, where they often support dictators. And Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
What we can say with certainty is that this internal struggle shows that Putin’s hold over Russia is weak and that there are significant challenges to it before Russia’s next presidential election, which is supposed to be held on March 17, 2024. It is also certain that this internal fighting is a product of the war against Ukraine going badly for Russia and that it will hurt Russia’s war effort going forward.
As Yale professor Timothy Snyder put it: “wars end when the domestic political system is under pressure.”
While all eyes are on Russia tonight, there is news at home, too.
Today, special counsel Jack Smith asked Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case against Trump for keeping classified documents and showing them to others, endangering our national security, to set the trial for December 11, 2023. The date is far enough out that it should give defense lawyers time to get security clearances. The government also asked the judge for a pre-trial conference “to consider matters relating to classified information that may arise in connection with the prosecution,” and to prohibit Trump and his co-defendant Waltine Nauta from talking to 84 witnesses about the case.
An exclusive story tonight from CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Sara Murray, Zachary Cohen, and Casey Gannon revealed that special counsel Jack Smith has given limited immunity to at least two of the Republican fake electors who signed false election certificates in late 2020 claiming that Trump, rather than Biden, had won the election. The two have testified before the federal grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Also, Owen Shroyer, the sidekick of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is indeed cooperating with prosecutors, as his request on Tuesday to change his plea indicated. Shroyer was at the January 5 meeting in the “war room” in the Willard Hotel and was on an encrypted chat with several of the key players in the attempt to steal the election for Trump. The plea deal says that he will “allow law enforcement agents to review any social media accounts…for statements and postings in and around January 6, 2021, prior to sentencing.”
Today, the Justice Department announced that it has indicted four Chinese companies and eight individuals for selling to Mexican cartels the chemicals they needed to make street fentanyl. The administration is trying to undercut the manufacture of street fentanyl by stopping the flow of “precursor chemicals” from China to manufacturing centers in Latin America. Executives of one of the companies told an undercover agent they could supply three tons of precursor chemicals a month.
And finally, today the broken stretch of I-95 in Philadelphia reopened. “Thanks to the grit and determination of operating engineers, laborers, cement finishers, carpenters, teamsters, and so many other proud union workers doing shifts around the clock,” President Biden said in a statement, “I-95 is reopening. And it’s ahead of schedule.”
He thanked the workers and complimented Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, other key Pennsylvania lawmakers, and key federal officials, including Senior Advisor and Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitch Landrieu—who himself tweeted credit to Pennsylvania state officials and the specific labor unions that did the repairs—Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Federal Highway Administration Administrator Shailen Bhatt, and U.S. Department of Transportation officials who were at the site within hours of the accident that caused the closure. Biden pointed out that the emergency repair was “100% federally funded and all approvals were given as quickly as possible.”
“We are proving that when we work together, there is nothing we cannot do.”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/06/23/china-fentanyl-chemical-arrests/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23859156-32-usa-mf-cipa-pretrial-conf
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/world/europe/russia-prigozhin-putin-war-ukraine.html
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/wagner-group-rebellion-russia-rostov/
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-23-2023
Twitter:
kamilkazani/status/1672399934471954433
AVindman/status/1672416736958717954
TimothyDSnyder/status/1672419848314314756
AVindman/status/1672423716301557760
AWeissmann_/status/1672401104523460608
AnnaBower/status/1672384158557937664
MitchLandrieu46/status/1672344279153246211
petestrzok/status/1672387832013377537
alivelshi/status/1672406586227032069
June 22, 2023
June 22, 2023
“To rebuild I-95 on time, we need 12 hours of dry weather to complete the paving and striping process,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro tweeted. “With rain in the forecast, we reached out [to Pocono Raceway] for help—and they're bringing their jet dryer to Philly to help dry this section of I-95 and keep us on schedule.”
Pocono Raceway replied: “We are honored to be asked to lend a small hand if needed to assist in the reopening of I-95. It is inspiring to see the hard work that has went in by the men and women around the clock here in Philadelphia.”
On Sunday, June 11, an 8,500-gallon tanker truck on an off-ramp in Philadelphia flipped onto its side and crashed into a wall at a curve. The crash ignited the gasoline in the tank; the driver died and a stretch of I-95 over which an average of 160,000 vehicles a day travel collapsed. Two days later, authorities said fixing the road would take “months.”
Yesterday, Shapiro announced that six lanes of road—three in each direction— will reopen this weekend. Crews working around the clock have constructed a temporary road resting on a bed of aggregate made of recycled glass bottles. The fix will stay in place until a full reconstruction is complete. The governor had a camera set up to livestream the construction and has turned it into a source of pride.
“We haven’t always had a can-do attitude around here, that we can get big things done, that we can get it done quickly and safely,” Shapiro told reporters Tuesday. “I’m a governor who believes we can get things done again. We’re going to change that attitude of people being surprised to folks expecting excellence from us.”
Steven Ratner, economic analyst for Morning Joe, today noted that new manufacturing construction is growing fast and is on pace to be close to $190 billion this year. In the entire decade of the 2010s, it was less than $100 billion. This growth comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law), and the CHIPS and Science Act.
Today, the government announced a $9.2 billion loan to Ford Motor Company to support the construction of three battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee. The factories are already under construction through a collaboration between Ford and a leading South Korean battery company.
More than 100 battery and electric-vehicle plants, representing about $200 billion in investments, are planned or already under construction thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act that funds such projects in order to attract private investment. That government investment and growth in manufacturing are strongest in Republican-dominated states, notwithstanding that not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act that funds such investment, and that Republicans continue to try to gut that law. Republican-dominated states stand to get about $337 billion in investment, while Democratic-dominated states look to get about $183 billion.
Tonight the White House is holding its third state dinner, this one for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. State dinners are extravagant affairs: this one will have 400 guests who will be served the White House’s first entirely plant-based state dinner in honor of vegetarian Modi. They are intended to smooth differences and cement alliances, and this one is no exception. Along with other allies, the U.S. seeks to weaken China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific region, and India is a key partner. It is part of the informal Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad, made up of Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., and it is attracting western investment as China’s leaders react to their country’s contracting economy by favoring state-owned industries over foreign companies.
In their remarks together today, Biden and Modi emphasized their shared commitment to democracy and their collaboration on trade (which has doubled in the past decade to $191 billion), defense, climate solutions, and economic development in the global South.”The core philosophy of all of our collective efforts is to strengthen democracy and democratic values and democratic order,” Modi said. “Two of the world’s largest democracies, India and America, can together make an important contribution to global peace, stability, and prosperity.”
But this is a strategic balancing act for Biden. Modi’s government has rolled back political, press, and religious freedoms, especially against the Muslim minority in India. This week, 75 Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden, agreeing that they want a “close and friendly” relationship with India but asking him to raise concerns about human rights directly with Modi. White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters it is "commonplace" for Biden to raise such concerns, but that was not enough for at least six House Democrats to boycott Modi’s speech to Congress. “We must never sacrifice human rights at the altar of political expediency,” Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Cori Bush (D-MO), Ilhan Omar D-MN), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) wrote in a joint statement.
Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), himself of Indian descent, disagreed. “We need to engage,” he said. India’s leaders are “not going to be open and receptive to something that comes off as the West lecturing.” That appears to be Biden’s approach.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Georgia’s State Election Board officially cleared election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss of election fraud during the 2020 presidential election. Accused by both Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of passing USB drives to change vote totals—Moss explained to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that it was a ginger mint—the two women were so harassed by election deniers that Freeman had to flee her home out of concern for her safety. The board concludes that the fraud claims were “unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”
Also on Tuesday, disciplinary proceedings began against John Eastman, the law professor who pushed the idea that Trump could steal the 2020 presidential election from winner Joe Biden if loyalists in the states would create alternative slates of electors. Vice President Mike Pence could then claim those states’ votes were contested and refuse to count them, thus either making Trump president or throwing the count to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote and the Republican-dominated states would overrule the Democratic ones.
Eastman’s plan was never legal, and he admitted as much, suggesting that the Trump team should just follow it because courts would decline to get involved out of reluctance to interfere in elections. In California, where Eastman faces disbarment, bar authorities are giving that theory a thorough hearing, and their disdain is clear. One called the plan “baseless, completely unsupported by historic precedent or law and contrary to our values as a nation.”
Eastman will argue that his theories were “tenable” and he simply wanted to make sure the election was “properly and legally certified and votes were properly counted.”
Last night, Special Counsel Jack Smith began to produce evidence in the case against Trump for retaining secret documents and endangering national security. The list seems thorough, including more than one interview with Trump and grand jury transcripts.
And it seems to have concerned Trump, who promptly begged in all caps on social media for Congress to “investigate the political witch hunts against me….”
And yet, a study out today by Media Matters shows that cable news networks are “obsessed over Biden’s age while overwhelmingly ignoring Trump’s.” Biden is only three years older than Trump—80 and 77, respectively—and apparently in significantly better health, but in the week after Biden announced his reelection campaign, CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned his age 588 times, suggesting it is a negative attribute rather than a positive reflection on his experience, while mentioning Trump’s only 72 times.
—
Notes:
This doesn’t really matter for tonight's letter but it’s cool: https://stories.state.gov/dinner-is-served/
https://www.voanews.com/a/netherlands-soon-to-announce-controls-on-it-exports-to-china/7143015.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648654/gov.uscourts.flsd.648654.30.0.pdf
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-ford-ev-battery-plant-funding-biden-green-technology/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/20/eastman-disbarment-trial-trump-election-plan-00102784
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/21/politics/trump-evidence-documents-case-jack-smith/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/12/us/philadelphia-i95-collapse-fire-monday/index.html
https://www.inquirer.com/news/i95-collapse-philadelphia-repair-schedule-20230620.html
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/quad-indo-pacific-what-know
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/us/politics/modi-speech-biden-boycott.html
Twitter:
Delavegalaw/status/1671932711232061445
harrylitman/status/1671942592555286528
SteveRattner/status/1671836606343331842
SteveRattner/status/1671829338151321600
SteveRattner/status/1671837301041668099
GovernorShapiro/status/1671903593434083338
June 21, 2023
June 21, 2023
Just before midnight yesterday, ProPublica reporters Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski published a story reporting that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in 2008 flew on a private jet to a luxury fishing vacation in Alaska thanks to the hospitality of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, whose business was based on hard-hitting litigation. Since that trip, Singer has had that litigation before the Supreme Court at least ten times. Alito neither disclosed the gift of the flight on the private jet nor recused himself from ruling on those cases.
In the last decade, according to the authors, Singer has donated more than $80 million to Republican political groups. While in Alaska, Alito stayed as a guest at the lodge of another wealthy Republican donor, who had, in the past, entertained former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Lodging there cost $1000 a night.
This revelation adds to the many recently-revealed ties between the court’s right-wing justices and wealthy donors. In April, ProPublica, which is a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on abuses of power, began a series revealing that Justice Clarence Thomas had accepted lavish gifts from Texas billionaire and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, as well as private school tuition for a relative and real estate deals. Thomas did not disclose those gifts.
Then it turned out that the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts made more than $10 million in commissions over 8 years as she matched top lawyers with top law firms, including some that brought cases before the court. Roberts misleadingly disclosed the money as “salary” rather than commissions. Then news broke that nine days after Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the court, a property in which he held an interest sold after two years on the market. The buyer was the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm that routinely practices before the court. Gorsuch did not disclose the buyer’s identity.
Last night’s story got weirder, though, because Alito waded into it to attack ProPublica for their reporting. The reporters had reached out to the justice last week to get his side of the story. Yesterday, Alito’s office told the authors he had no comment and then several hours later—before the ProPublica story dropped—Alito published in the Wall Street Journal an op-ed “prebuttal” of what was to come. It was titled: “ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”
Alito didn’t deny that he had accepted the gifts, but claimed that he didn’t need to disclose the valuable flight because it was a “facility” and that the vacation did not involve $1,000 bottles of wine (remember that no one had yet read the ProPublica story, which quoted one of the lodge’s fishing guides as saying that a member of Alito’s party said the wine they were drinking cost $1,000 a bottle). He also said he did not know Singer was associated with the cases before the court.
Today Leonard Leo, the person who organized the 2008 fishing trip, also jumped in. In 2008, Leo was the head of the Federalist Society, which came together in 1982 to roll back the business regulations and the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II era by remaking the courts with judges who stood against what they called “judicial activism.” (Leo is now in charge of Marble Freedom Trust, a nonprofit organized in May 2020 with a $1.6 billion donation from donor Barre Seid to push right-wing politics at every level.)
Leo released a statement supporting Alito and warning: “We all should wonder whether this recent rash of ProPublica stories questioning the integrity of only conservative Supreme Court Justices is bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.” (Justice Elena Kagan, one of the justices Leo suggests is being unfairly given a pass by ProPublica, reportedly declined to accept a basket of bagels and lox from her high-school classmates out of concern about the ethics of accepting gifts.)
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed that Leo seems to have used his extensive network to set up relationships between judges and donors in a reinforcing ecosystem.
This is, of course, precisely why there is pressure on the Supreme Court to adopt ethics reform. In April, Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) introduced the Supreme Court Code of Conduct Act, which would simply ask the court to develop its own code of conduct and oversight, a system that, unlike every other state and federal court, it does not currently have. That measure remains in committee.
But the day had just begun. John Durham, appointed as special counsel by Trump attorney general William Barr on October 19, 2020, to investigate the behavior of federal investigators who examined the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives, testified for over six hours today before the House Judiciary Committee. While Trump and his loyalists repeatedly predicted Durham would find damning evidence against the investigators, in fact his 306-page report, released on May 15 after a four-year, $6.5 million investigation, simply said the FBI should have launched a preliminary investigation rather than a full investigation (a 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded the opposite).
There was little new information presented in the hearing, although Durham did answer a question from Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) about the report that when Durham and Barr had asked Italian officials for evidence in favor of Trump, they had instead passed on information that implicated Trump in financial crimes. Durham responded, “The question’s outside the scope of what I think I’m authorized to talk about—it’s not part of the report,” but added: “I can tell you this. That investigative steps were taken, grand jury subpoenas were issued and it came to nothing.”
The hearing served mostly to keep the Russia investigation in front of the public, which appears to be important to the former president and his allies as they continue to attack the FBI and the Justice Department. But Democrats on the committee pressed Durham on the facts of the Russia investigation itself, and he, seemingly somewhat reluctantly, agreed under oath in response to questions by Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) that the facts of the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report were correct: Russia interfered in the 2016 election for the benefit of Trump, Trump’s campaign welcomed the help and shared information and secret meetings with Russian operatives, and the FBI was justified in investigating that interference.
Also significant in the hearing was the prominence of Schiff, who was the House manager for Trump’s first impeachment trial. That effort earned him Trump’s fury, and Trump loyalists today demanded a vote on the motion by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) to censure Schiff.
Notwithstanding Durham’s sworn testimony, House Resolution 521 began: “Whereas the allegation that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 Presidential election has been revealed as false by numerous in-depth investigations, including the recent report by Special Counsel John Durham….”
The resolution was a red-meat pro-Trump document, insisting that the Trump campaign did not work with the Russians, that Schiff “misled the public” over Trump’s call asking for a “favor” from Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, and that, as then-chair of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff must be censured “for misleading the American public and for conduct unbecoming of an elected Member of the House of Representatives.” It also requires the Ethics Committee to “conduct an investigation into…Schiff’s falsehoods, misrepresentations, and abuses of sensitive information.”
On social media, Trump had called for primary challengers against any Republican who voted against the censure. The Republicans fell into line. During the debate, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said: “The other side has turned this chamber...into a puppet show. A puppet show, and you know what? The puppeteer, Donald Trump, is shining a light on the strings. You look miserable. Miserable.” The final vote was 213 to 209, with 6 representatives voting present. When the motion passed, the House Democrats erupted into chants of “Shame” and “Disgrace.”
Owen Tucker-Smith of the Los Angeles Times noted that in the past 40 years, the House has censured just five people: Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in 2021 for tweeting a video showing a character with his face killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and attacking President Biden, Charles Rangel (D-NY) in 2010 for finance violations, Gerry Studds (D-MA) and Dan Crane (R-IL) in 1983 for sexual misconduct with House pages, and now Schiff.
Earlier today, Schiff had his own take on his censure: “To my Republican colleagues who introduced this resolution, I thank you,’ he said. “You honor me with your enmity. You flatter me with this falsehood. You, who are the authors of a big lie about the last election, must condemn the truth-tellers and I stand proudly before you. Your words tell me that I have been effective in the defense of our democracy and I am grateful.”
—
Notes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-paul-singer-scotus-supreme-court
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/22/politics/dark-money-donation-conservative-group-invs/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/republican-dark-money.html
https://www.axios.com/2020/01/07/leonard-leo-crc-advisors-federalist-society
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-investigation-origins
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/neil-gorsuch-colorado-property-sale-00093579
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/leonard-leos-scotus-fedsoc-sponsor-family-program
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23854155-statement-from-leonard-leo-june-2023
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1290/text
https://forward.com/fast-forward/546201/elena-kagan-clarence-thomas-bagels-and-lox/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/us/politics/john-durham-special-counsel-russia.html
https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1671562659525689347
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1671652320621350915
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hres521/BILLS-118hres521ih.pdf
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-06-21/house-republicans-censure-adam-schiff-senate
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adam-schiff-censure-resolution-vote-house/
June 20, 2023
June 20, 2023
After years of accusations and rumors swirling around Hunter Biden, the 53-year-old son of President Joe Biden, the Department of Justice has reached a tentative deal with the younger Biden: He will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of failing to file income tax returns for 2017 and 2018 by the filing date, for which he owed more than $100,000 each year. Biden’s representatives say he has since paid the Internal Revenue Service what he owed. Prosecutors will ask for two years’ probation.
Biden will also admit to the fact that he possessed a firearm as an addict, for which he and prosecutors have agreed he will enter a pretrial diversion agreement that will require that he stay clean for two more years, after which the charge will be removed from his record.
Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, promptly accused “the Bidens” of “corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery” and called the deal “a slap on the wrist.” Throughout the day, right-wing figures have insisted that the deal is proof that President Biden is using the Justice Department to shield his family and to persecute his enemies.
In fact, Biden worked hard to reestablish the independence of the Justice Department after Trump had used it for personal ends. Trump broke the tradition that FBI directors should serve out their ten-year term—a term chosen to emphasize that the position should not be political—by firing FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to stop the bureau’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives; Biden tried to reestablish the guardrails around the position when he declined to replace FBI director Christopher Wray, appointed by Trump.
Biden also left in place the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware—the person overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden that began in 2018—to make the independence of the investigation clear. That Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss, is responsible for the deal. Georgetown University policy professor Don Moynihan pointed out that Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years and “[b]est they could do is tax charges which rarely get this level of attention. If Comer has anything real, the prosecutor would have used it.”
Indeed, rather than going easy on Hunter Biden, there are signs that prosecutors treated him more harshly than is typical for similar crimes. Roger Sollenberger, a senior political writer for the Daily Beast, explained that “Roger Stone and his wife settled a $2 million unpaid taxes civil case with DOJ last year—they weren't charged criminally, unlike Hunter Biden, so they didn't even get probation.” Justice reporter for NBC News Ryan Reilly noted that it is very rare for prosecutors to bring the addict in possession of a weapon charge they used against Biden. In the past it has been used to find a charge that will stick or alongside charges concerning violent crime.
As right-wing leaders, including House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), nonetheless attacked the Justice Department for what they claimed was a “two-tiered justice system” that went easy on Biden, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post noted, "The right doesn’t seem to care about the legal process—they care about the results. Their aim is the destruction of the independence of federal law enforcement in favor of a weaponized justice system, and they will keep creating new pretexts until they get it."
Trump had his own reaction to the Biden charges, calling them “a massive INTERFERENCE COVERUP & FULL SCALE ELECTION ‘SCAM’ THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN IN OUR COUNTRY BEFORE. A ‘TRAFFIC TICKET,’ & JOE IS ALL CLEANED UP & READY TO GO INTO THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION - AND THIS AS CROOKED DOJ, STATE, & CITY PROSECUTORS, MARXISTS & COMMUNISTS ALL, HIT ME FROM ALL SIDES & ANGELS WITH BULL….! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” [sic]
Eric Lipton of the New York Times reported today on the Trump family’s ties to a multibillion-dollar project in Oman. The resort project is backed by the Omani government, which has put up the land for the project and is investing up to a billion dollars to upgrade the infrastructure near the project and to fund the project’s initial phase. It will also take a cut of the profits. A Saudi real estate firm closely allied with the Saudi government brought Trump into the deal. The Trump family will not put any money into the project, but the Omani government has paid the Trump Organization at least $5 million for the use of his name and will pay the Trump Organization to manage a hotel, golf course, and golf club for the next 30 years.
“There is a big wealth concentration in the world, which means that those people will more and more demand more exclusive products and more exclusive projects,” the chief executive of the London-based DarGlobal subsidiary of the Saudi real estate firm said earlier this year. The project is being constructed by migrants paid as little as $340 a month for ten hours a day of grueling work in heat above 100°F, or 38°C.
Tonight news broke that on Friday, Owen Shroyer, who worked alongside Alex Jones at the right-wing conspiracy media site InfoWars, will change his plea for charges associated with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to “guilty,” which might signal that he has flipped.
Shroyer was at the so-called “War Room” on January 5 with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, advisors Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, General Michael Flynn, and Christina Bobb, the lawyer who later signed off on Trump’s statement that he had returned all the classified documents in his possession (he had not). Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly expressed interest to his aide Cassidy Hutchinson in joining the people in that command center, but in the end was talked into calling the group rather than going over.
Shroyer was also part of the 47-member “Friends of Stone” encrypted chat group that organized in 2019 to support Trump in the upcoming election and then to keep him in office after he lost in 2020. If Shroyer has, indeed, flipped, he could provide an important window into the upper levels of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have recently reported that several months ago, officials in the Biden administration began indirect talks with Iran in hopes of stopping Iran’s proxy attacks on U.S. forces in Syria, bringing home three Iranian American business executives being held on charges the U.S. considers false—Emad Shargi (detained 2018), Morad Tahbaz (detained 2018), and Siamak Namazi (detained 2015)—and reining in that country’s nuclear weapons development program. In 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran that limited Iran’s nuclear research and development. Tehran quickly restarted its uranium enrichment, research and development of advanced centrifuges, and expansion of its stockpile of nuclear fuel. According to Colum Lynch of Foreign Policy, this cut in half the time Iran would need to produce enough weapons-grade fuel to build a nuclear weapon.
Biden yesterday announced a $600 million investment in addressing climate change, with that investment focused on coastal areas and communities around the Great Lakes. Funding for projects, including modernizing electrical grids to make them resilient to extreme weather events, national disasters, and wildfires, comes from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/2942b8c5-9b35-4ccd-a4fc-26b2980d9a2b.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/2c4e5203-5c3b-47bd-b0c2-565030806ce2.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/20/hunter-biden-plea-deal/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/politics/trump-real-estate-deal-oman.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/22/roger-stone-alex-jones-subpoenas-capitol-attack
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5022109/user-clip-willard-hotel-jan-5th-stone-flynn-meadows
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/us/politics/christina-bobb-trump-lawyer-investigation.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/infowars-host-owen-shroyer-to-plead-guilty-in-jan-6-capitol-riot-case
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/08/iran-advances-nuclear-program-withdrawal-jcpoa/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/20/iran-us-nuclear-talks-prisoners/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/us/politics/roger-stone-jan-6.html
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-r...
Twitter links:
SollenbergerRC/status/1671180412498878464
donmoyn/status/1671163439333650436
MuellerSheWrote/status/1671262234352451589
ThePlumLineGS/status/1671226546676170787
SykesCharlie/status/1671230641831129088
harrylitman/status/1671179022313865220
harrylitman/status/1671157442921791488
June 19, 2023
June 19, 2023
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China, where he has met in the past two days for a total of more than ten hours with China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, and with Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Today, he met for 35 minutes with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Blinken called the talks “candid, substantive, and constructive.“
The backdrop to the talks is that under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the United States has taken steps to bring supply chains back to the United States and has also limited the export to China of technology that can be used for the development of military weapons. Those actions have led Chinese leaders to accuse the U.S. of seeking to “decouple” from China and to contain China’s economic development. China’s economy is reeling after shutting down for the pandemic, raising concerns about a global economic slowdown.
In the past two and a half years, the U.S. has also worked hard to create and deepen alliances around the world. Those alliances, especially in the Indo-Pacific region and in Africa, have shifted the balance of global power at the same time that China’s support for Russia has tied China to an epic mess. As David Ignatius put it this week in the Washington Post, Biden is trying to create a more stable strategic balance between China, India, and Japan. “Rather than walking a bipolar tightrope between Washington and Beijing,” Ignatius notes, “the administration is trying to build a matrix of relationships, with the United States as a key interlocutor in each node.”
Those relationships include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—an international organization that includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—and an alliance with the Pacific Islands Forum, an 18-member organization, with which the U.S. held its first summit ever in September 2022. They also include AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom, designed to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable.”
For the U.S. these alliances have meant stronger military cooperation with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as with India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, will make a state visit to Washington, D.C., this week in a demonstration of India’s deepening ties to the U.S. just as both India and China have revoked the credentials of each other’s journalists. China has been building up its military presence on India’s border, pushing India toward the U.S.
While Blinken was in China, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was in Japan for a trilateral meeting with Japan and the Republic of Korea, and other meetings with the U.S., Japan, the ROK, and the Philippines.
Of his meetings in China, Blinken told reporters that he emphasized to his Chinese counterparts that the U.S. is interested in reducing the risk of economic cooperation, not in “decoupling.” The U.S. and China engaged in almost $700 billion in trade last year, he said, and that trade benefits both countries. But the U.S. is “investing in our own capacities and in secure, resilient supply chains; pushing for level playing fields for our workers and our companies; defending against harmful trade practice; and protecting our critical technologies so that they aren’t used against us.” Blinken also emphasized that the U.S. does “not support Taiwan independence” and opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo there, noting that if China provokes a crisis there, it could produce an economic crisis that affects the entire world. With 70% of the world’s semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan and 50% of commercial container traffic going through the Taiwan Strait, there is no room for a conflict there.
The U.S. is pushing China to stop violating human rights and to release the U.S. citizens it holds. It is also calling for China to cooperate on stopping its exportation of the precursor chemicals that enable drug lords to manufacture synthetic opioids and street fentanyl, which is the number one killer of Americans from ages 18 to 49.
Blinken told reporters that he had emphasized “direct engagement and sustained communication at senior levels,” to avoid conflict, but China has, so far, refused to reinstate communication between military leaders. Blinken also noted that China is in a unique position to play a constructive role in working toward a just peace in Ukraine, and in pressing North Korea to stop its nuclear program and to start engaging responsibly with the rest of the world.
When a reporter asked why the U.S. should continue to engage in talks when China won’t agree to military-to-military channels of communication, Blinken answered: “Because, as we’ve seen, we’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas—on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress and we are moving forward…. At the end of the day, the best way that we can advance our interests, stand up for our values, and make sure that we are very clear about our intent—the best way to do that is through direct engagement, through diplomacy.”
The other big news today was an eye-popping interview of former president Trump by Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel, in which Trump seemed to agree that he had broken the law by retaining documents, saying he had not handed over to the National Archives the documents he kept because he wanted to take his personal material out of the boxes and was “very busy.” Legal commentator and former U.S. acting solicitor general Neal Katyal tweeted: “The breaking news is that the Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, has a new addition to his legal team tonight. An unpaid new deputy Special Counsel. His name is Donald J. Trump.”
In the interview, Trump also denied that he had the secret document he claimed to have on a recorded tape, saying he is up against “dishonest…thugs.”
Today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered Trump’s lawyers not to disclose evidence to the public about the classified documents at the heart of the case involving Trump’s refusal to return those documents. He also limited Trump’s access to that material, saying he may review the materials only “under the direct supervision” of his lawyers and that he “shall not retain copies.”
—
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/07/biden-administration-tech-restrictions-china
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/15/blinken-china-trip-japan-india-asia-diplomacy/
https://www.state.gov/u-s-pacific-islands-forum-leaders-dialogue-in-papua-new-guinea/
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/18/1182941008/indian-prime-minister-modi-visits-the-u-s
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/16/india-china-journalism-reporters-diplomacy/
https://www.state.gov/secretary-of-state-antony-j-blinkens-press-availability/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/business/economy/china-economy-stimulus.html
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-interview-bret-baier-key-moments-1807742’
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1670919463837769729
June 18, 2023
June 18, 2023
Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it.
So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their hatred of the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the postwar United States.
The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States. But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds.
On Friday, June 16, 2023, the Department of Justice—created in 1870 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—released the report of its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and the City of Minneapolis in the wake of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The 19-page document found systemic “conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” discriminating against Black and Native American people, people with behavioral health disabilities, and protesters. Those systemic problems in the MPD’s institutional culture enabled Floyd’s killing.
Minneapolis police performed 22% more searches, 27% more vehicle searches, and 24% more uses of force on Black people than on white residents behaving in similar ways. They conducted 23% more searches and used force 20% more on Indigenous Americans.
The Justice Department’s press release specified that the city and the police department “cooperated fully.” The two parties have “agreed in principle” to fix the problem with sweeping reforms based on community input, with an independent monitor rather than litigation.
While the Senate unanimously approved the measure creating the Juneteenth holiday last year, fourteen far-right Republicans voted against it, many of them complaining that such a holiday would be divisive.
How we remember our history matters.
[General Order No. 3, National Records and Archives Administration, public domain.]
—
Notes:
https://www.archives.gov/news/articles/juneteenth-original-document
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/475
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html
J. Evetts Haley, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (1949; rpt. University of Oklahoma Press, 1981).
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1587661/download
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/juneteenth
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/juneteenth
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1587666/download
June 17, 2023
June 17, 2023
It’s not officially summer yet, but it sure feels like the seasons are changing. And it doesn’t matter how long these late spring days are, they are never, never, never long enough.
Going to hit bed early and be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
June 16, 2023
June 16, 2023
In one of the quirky coincidences that history deals out, Daniel Ellsberg died today at age 92 on the eve of the fifty-first anniversary of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Ellsberg was a military analyst in the 1960s, disturbed by the gulf between what the government was telling the public about the war in Vietnam and what he was seeing behind the scenes.
After serving as a Marine, Ellsberg earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined the RAND Corporation, where he learned to apply game theory to warfare. By 1964 he was an advisor to Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1967, Ellsberg was part of the team tapped by McNamara to compile a history of the conflict in Vietnam to evaluate the success of different programs.
Ellsberg was concerned by investigators’ conclusions. The 7,000-page secret government study detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Harry Truman’s presidency to Lyndon Johnson’s. It outlined how successive presidents had lied to the American people, expanding the war with promises of victory even as the costs of the war mounted and the chances of victory moved farther and farther away.
Ellsberg copied the secret study and shared it with congressmen, who buried it. Finally, Ellsberg shared the report with a New York Times correspondent on the condition the reporter would only take notes and would not copy the pages. But the correspondent broke the agreement, believing the documents were “the property of the people” who had paid for them with “the blood of their sons.”
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, showing how presidents had lied to the American people about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warned the New York Times that the publication was jeopardizing national security and warned that the government would prosecute. The editors decided to continue publication—the Supreme Court later agreed that the newspaper had the right to publish the information—while Ellsberg leaked the report to other newspapers.
The study ended before the Nixon administration, but the president was deeply concerned about it. The report showed that presidents had lied to the American people for years, and Nixon worried that the story would hurt his administration by souring the public on his approach to the Vietnam War. Worse, if anyone looked at his own administration, they might well find evidence of his own secret actions in the Vietnam arena: the Chennault affair, in which a Nixon ally undermined peace talks before the 1968 presidential election in order to undercut Johnson’s reelection campaign, and what was then the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia.
News of either could, at the very least, destroy Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Nixon became obsessed with the idea that the Pentagon Papers proved that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection.
Frustrated when the FBI did not seem to be taking an investigation into Ellsberg seriously enough, in July 1971, Nixon put together in the White House a special investigations unit to stop leaks. And who stops leaks?
Plumbers.
Officially known as the White House Special Investigations Unit, Nixon’s “plumbers” burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on September 9, 1971, hoping to find damaging information about him that would discredit the Pentagon Papers. (Their burglary, showing gross governmental misconduct, was later key to the dismissal of charges against Ellsberg for leaking the report.)
Some of the plumbers began to work with the Committee to Reelect the President (aptly called “CREEP” as its methods came to light) to sabotage Nixon’s Democratic opponents by “ratf*cking” them, as they called it, planting fake letters in newspapers, hiring vendors for Democratic rallies and then running out on the unpaid bills, and planting spies in Democrats’ campaigns.
Finally, CREEP turned back to the plumbers.
Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The White House denied all knowledge of what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and most of the press took the denial at face value. But two young reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the sloppy money trail behind the burglars directly to the White House.
The fallout from the burglary gained no traction before the election, which Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7 percent of the vote. But the scandal erupted in March 1973, when one of the burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing, saying that he had lied at his trial, under pressure to protect government officials. McCord had been the head of security for CREEP, and Sirica, known by reporters as “Maximum John,” later said, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”
Sirica made the letter public, White House counsel John Dean promptly began cooperating with prosecutors, and the Watergate scandal was in full swing. On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.
Ellsberg decided to release the Pentagon Papers to alert the American people to the fact that their government was lying to them about the Vietnam War. But he helped set in motion a series of events that determined the shape of the political world we live in today.
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/siricaobit.htm
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/418/683
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/us/daniel-ellsberg-dead.html
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/505/new-york-times-co-v-united-states
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/2011_PENTAGON_PAPERS.html?_r=1
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