Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 148
July 27, 2023
July 27, 2023
More good news today for Bidenomics, as the gross domestic product report for the second quarter showed annualized growth of 2.4%, higher than projected, and inflation rose at a slower pace of 2.6%, down from last quarter and well below projections. Economic analyst Steven Rattner noted that as of the second quarter, “the US economy is over 6% larger than it was before COVID (after adjusting for inflation). At this point in the recovery from the Great Recession, 2011, the economy was just 0.7% larger than it had been in 2007.”
Both consumer spending and business investment, which is up 7.7% in real annualized terms, drove this growth. Business spending makes up a much smaller share of gross domestic product, but it drives future jobs and growth, and much of this growth is in manufacturing facilities. In keeping with that trend, the nation’s largest solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, announced today that it will build a fifth factory in the U.S. as alternative energy technology takes off. This commitment brings to more than $2.8 billion the amount First Solar has invested in the U.S. to ramp up production.
While so-called Bidenomics is designed to rebuild the middle class, the administration is also trying to reestablish fair ground rules for corporate behavior. Yesterday, the Departments of Justice, Commerce, and Treasury invited American businesses to come forward voluntarily if they think they might have violated U.S. sanctions, export controls, or other national security laws by sharing sensitive technology or helping sanctioned individuals launder money. Coming forward “can provide significant mitigation of civil or criminal liability,” the note says.
It highlighted the anti–money laundering and sanctions whistleblower program in the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.
While many of us were watching the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., to see if an indictment was forthcoming against former president Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a different set of charges appeared tonight. Special counsel Jack Smith brought additional charges against Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents.
The new indictment alleges that Trump plotted to delete video from security cameras near the storage room where he had stored boxes containing classified documents, and did so after the Department of Justice subpoenaed that footage. That effort to delete the video involved a third co-conspirator, Carlos De Oliveira, who has been added to the case.
De Oliveira is a former valet at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property who became property manager there in January 2022. Allegedly, he told another Trump employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and that the conversation should stay between the two of them.
In the Washington Post, legal columnist Ruth Marcus wrote, “The alleged conduct—yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms—is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.” If the allegations hold up, “the former president is a common criminal—and an uncommonly stupid one.”
This superseding indictment reiterates the material from the original indictment, and as I reread it, it still blows my mind that Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence).
It sounds like he was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.
The Justice Department has asked again for a protective order to protect the classified information at the heart of this case. In their request, they explained that, among other things, Trump wanted to be able to discuss that classified information with his lawyers outside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room protected against electronic surveillance and data leakage.
Former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division Peter Strzok noted that there is “[n]o better demonstration of Trump’s abject lack of understanding of—and disregard for—classified info and national security. He is *asking the Court* to waive the requirements for classified info that EVERY OTHER SINGLE CLEARANCE HOLDER IN THE UNITED STATES must follow.”
The Senate today passed the $886 billion annual defense bill by a strong bipartisan margin of 86 to 11 after refusing to load it up with all the partisan measures Republican extremists added to the House bill. Now negotiators from the House and the Senate will try to hash out a compromise measure, but the bills are so far apart it is not clear they will be able to create a bipartisan compromise. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed on a bipartisan basis for more than 60 years.
The extremists in the House Republican conference continue to revolt against House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal with the administration to raise the debt ceiling. They insist the future cuts to which McCarthy agreed are not steep enough, and demand more. This has sparked fighting among House Republicans; Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s new willingness to consider impeaching President Biden might be an attempt to cut a deal with the extremists.
As the Senate is controlled by Democrats, the fight among the House Republicans threatens a much larger fight between the chambers because Democratic senators will not accept the demands of the extremist Republican representatives.
The House left for its August recess today without passing 11 of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government after September, setting up the conditions for a government shutdown this fall if they cannot pass the bills and negotiate with the Senate in the short time frame they’ve left. Far-right Republicans don’t much care, apparently. Representative Bob Good (R-VA) told reporters this week, “We should not fear a government shutdown… Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”
Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA), the second ranking Democrat in the House, disagreed. “The Republican conference is saying they are sending us home for six weeks without funding the government? That we have one bill…out of 12 completed because extremists are holding your conference hostage, and that’s not the full story: the extremists are holding the American people hostage. We will have twelve days…when we return to fund the government, to live up to the job the American people sent us here to do. This is a reckless march to a MAGA shutdown, and for what? In pursuit of a national abortion ban? Is that what we are doing here?
“The American people see through this. They know who is fighting for them, fighting for solutions…. Your time is coming. The American people are watching. They are going to demand accountability. We should be staying here, completing these appropriations bills, stripping out the toxic, divisive, bigoted riders that have been put on these bills and get[ting] back to work for freedom and for our economy and the American family.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/gdp-q2-2023-.html
https://www.bea.gov/news/2023/gross-domestic-product-second-quarter-2023-advance-estimate
https://www.justice.gov/media/1307601/dl
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23888943-us-v-trump-nauta-de-oliveira-7272354
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-charged-special-counsel-jack-smith-rcna96742
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/27/trump-new-indictment-watergate/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/us/politics/senate-passes-bipartisan-defense-bill.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/politics/congress-funding-fight-august-recess/index.html
Twitter:
JoyceWhiteVance/status/1684690487964286976
petestrzok/status/1684695438497120256
SteveRattner/status/1684574253759496194
July 26, 2023
July 26, 2023
Yesterday a team of international researchers confirmed that human-caused climate change is driving the life-threatening heat waves in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. has broken more than 2,000 high temperature records in the past month, and it looks like July will be the hottest month on Earth since scientists have kept records.
Another study published yesterday warns that the Atlantic currents that transport warm water from the tropics north are in danger of collapsing as early as 2025 and as late as 2095, with a central estimate of 2050. As Arctic ice melts, the cold water that sinks and pulls the current northward is warming, slowing the mechanism that moves the currents. The collapse of that system would disrupt rain patterns in India, South America, and West Africa, endangering the food supplies for billions of people. It would also raise sea levels on the North American east coast and create storms and colder temperatures in Europe.
On Sunday and Monday, the ocean water off the tip of Florida reached temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius), the same temperature as an average hot tub. According to the Coral Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Florida’s Key Largo that works to protect coral reefs, the hot water has created “a severe and urgent crisis,” with mortality up to 100%. The Mediterranean Sea also hit a record high this week, reaching 83.1 degrees Fahrenheit (28.4 Celsius).
An op-ed by David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times today noted that more land burned in Quebec in June than in the previous 20 years combined; across Canada, more than 25 million acres burned. And most of Canada’s fire season is still ahead.
Professor Ian Lowe of Australia’s Griffith University told The Guardian that he recalled reading the 1985 report that identified the link between greenhouse gasses and climate change, and worked to draw public attention to it. “Now all the projected changes are happening,” he said. “I reflect on how much needless environmental damage and human suffering will result from the work of those politicians, business leaders and public figures who have prevented concerted action. History will judge them very harshly.”
Former vice president Mike Pence, who is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, today unveiled his economic proposal. It calls for eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Biden administration’s incentives designed to address climate change.
In that, he is in line with Republican lawmakers. Earlier this month, Mike Magner in Roll Call noted that at least four of the bills released so far by the House Appropriations Committee for 2024 include cutting funding to address climate change that Congress appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act. Project 2025, which has provided the blueprint for a Trump presidency, says “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” and calls for more use of fossil fuels.
A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Columbia University says that court cases related to climate change have more than doubled in five years. Thirty-four of the 2,180 lawsuits have been brought forward on behalf of children, teens, and young adults.
And therein lies a huge problem for today’s Republican Party. A recent poll of young voters shows they care deeply about gun violence, economic inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate change. All of those issues are only becoming more prominent.
And speaking of young people and the problems Republicans are having with that generation, I have only one other observation tonight, as I am spending this week reading the audiobook for the new book and am truly exhausted. It appears that the administration is pushing back on the attempts of states like Florida to whitewash our history by providing historical recaps in its press releases.
Today is the 75th anniversary of the desegregation of the armed forces by President Harry S. Truman in 1948, and the White House statement celebrating that anniversary did more than acknowledge it and praise today’s multicultural military. It recounted the history of Black service members from the American Revolution to the present.
It covered the Black regiments that fought in the Civil War to preserve the United States and defend their own freedom; the highly decorated Harlem Hellfighters of World War I who fought in France as part of the French army because American commanders would not have them alongside white units; the Tuskegee Airmen who flew 15,000 missions in World War II but returned home to discrimination and oppression.
It then went on to call out the women and men of color who have served in the U.S. military, including the Indigenous Code Talkers, who turned native languages into an unbroken code during World War II while their people were losing their lands; the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese Americans who fought in Europe even as their families were incarcerated in camps in the United States; the 65th Infantry Regiment of Puerto Rican soldiers in the Korean War, known as the Borinqueneers, who were court martialed as a group when their commander was replaced by a non-Hispanic officer.
Taken with yesterday’s quite comprehensive history of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Black child Emmett Till, it seems as if the White House has found a simple way to push back on the whitewashed history taught in places like Florida: making the country’s real history easily available.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/opinion/climate-canada-wildfires-emissions.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/26/politics/pence-economic-proposal/index.html
https://rollcall.com/2023/07/11/republicans-take-aim-at-climate-funds-in-spending-bills/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/25/voters-progressive-trump-harvard-youth-poll-gop/
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/25/florida-record-warm-ocean-climate/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/25/voters-progressive-trump-harvard-youth-poll-gop/
Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Institute, 2023).
July 25, 2023
July 25, 2023
President Biden’s determination to “build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up,” appears to be paying off. Last Friday the global financial services company Morgan Stanley credited Biden’s policies with driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure and manufacturing, a boom large enough that Morgan Stanley revised its gross domestic product growth projections upward to 1.9%, a projection almost four times higher than its original projection.
Analysts doubled their projections for the fourth quarter, and raised forecasts for next year, as well. “The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated,” Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. economist Ellen Zentner wrote.
Part of their reasoning comes from a surge in manufacturing construction across the country thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which invests in roads, bridges, and other “hard” infrastructure projects; the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests in addressing climate change; and the CHIPS and Science Act, which invests in science and semiconductor chip manufacturing. During the 2010s, manufacturing construction generally held at about $50–80 billion a year. Now it is at $189 billion, with private investment following the government investment.
In half of the U.S. states, job creation is strong and unemployment is at or near 50-year lows, while lowering inflation rates has helped U.S. consumer confidence to rise to its highest level in two years (an important marker because consumer spending makes up about 70% of U.S. economic activity).
Today, the Teamsters union announced it has reached an agreement with United Parcel Service to avoid a major strike of as many as 340,000 workers. The tentative five-year agreement increases wages, including those for part-time employees, which was a sticking point in negotiations. Teamsters members still need to approve this deal, but Biden applauded the two sides for reaching an agreement by negotiating in good faith.
The agreement, Biden said, is “a testament to the power of employers and employees coming together to work out their differences at the bargaining table in a manner that helps businesses succeed while helping workers secure pay and benefits they can raise a family on and retire with dignity and respect.”
At the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan organization devoted to building a more dynamic U.S. economy, Daniel Newman reported yesterday that “[i]ndividuals filed nearly 2.7 million applications to start a business between January and June of this year, a 5 percent increase over 2022 and a staggering 52 percent increase over the same period in 2019.” He noted that “[t]he durability and growth of the startup surge is quite striking” and that nearly every major industry sector is participating in it.
Historically, Newman notes, “there is a tight correlation between the number of applications and true business formation.” “The sustained boost to entrepreneurship observed across much of the country since 2020 should produce a sense of optimism for a healthier, more dynamic economy in the coming years.”
Biden has always emphasized the importance of a healthy economy that gives workers breathing room and the ability to live with dignity.
But the administration’s reworking of the nation has not stopped there. Vice President Kamala Harris has stood firm on visibly honoring the nation’s commitment to equality before the law, and Biden has followed suit. Together, they have recalled the multicultural vision of the years from World War II to 1980, when the nation celebrated the power of its diversity.
On July 16, Harris spoke in Chicago at the retirement of the Reverend Jesse Jackson from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, a civil rights organization he founded in 1971. Celebrating Jackson’s storied career, from his years as a protege of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to creating Rainbow/PUSH, to running for president and critiquing the policies of the Republican Party, Harris noted that Jackson’s work rested on “the belief that the diversity of our nation is not a weakness or an afterthought, but instead, our greatest strength.”
“In his life’s work,” she said, Jackson “has reinforced that no matter who we are or where we come from, we have so much more in common than what separates us.” Jackson “has [brought] and continues to bring together people of all backgrounds: Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, farmers, LGBTQ+ Americans, Native Americans, women, labor union members, people with disabilities, our young leaders, and people around the world.”
He created “[a] coalition to push the values of democracy and liberty and equality and justice not from the top down, but from the bottom up and the outside in…. He has built coalitions that expanded who has a voice and a seat at the table. And in so doing, he has expanded our democracy—the democracy of our nation.”
But, Harris warned, extremists are threatening that expansion of democracy, seeking “to divide us as a nation,… to attack the importance of diversity and equity and inclusion.” “[I]n these dark moments,” she said, “history shines a light on our path.” “[O]ur ability to stand together is our strength. Our ability to unify as many peoples is our strength. And the heroes of this moment will be those who bring us together in coalition; those who know that one’s strength is not measured based on who you beat down, but who you lift up.”
Vice President Harris today opened an event to mark Biden’s designation of a national monument in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in a searing reminder of what those determined to make the United States a country defined by white supremacy can do. “We gather to remember an act of astonishing violence and hate and to honor the courage of those who called upon…our nation to look with open eyes at that horror and to act,” Harris said.
In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Black boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives in a small Mississippi town. After the wife of a white man named Roy Bryant accused the boy of flirting with her, Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till, brutally beat him, mutilated him, shot him in the back of the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. The county sheriff directed that the body be buried quickly, but his mother insisted that her son’s body be returned to Chicago.
There, she insisted on an open-casket funeral. “Let the world see what I have seen,” she said.
Till’s murder became a symbol of what would happen if men were not called to account for their actions and a rallying cry to make sure such a society of white supremacists could not survive.
In March 2022, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime. And he warned that “those who seek to ban books, bury history,” would not succeed. “[W]hile darkness and denialism can hide much,” he said, “they erase nothing.” And, he added, “only with truth comes healing, justice, repair, and another step forward toward forming a more perfect union.”
Today, on what would have been Emmett Till’s eighty-second birthday, Biden established the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. It covers three historic sites in Mississippi and Chicago: the site in Graball Landing, Mississippi, where Till’s body is believed to have been pulled from the Tallahatchie River; the Chicago church where mourners held Till’s funeral; and the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam.
“We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know” about our history, Biden said. “We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/21/bidenomics-spurred-stronger-gdp-growth-morgan-stanley.html
https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1683877423207657472
https://thehill.com/business/4045941-how-bidens-big-investments-spurred-a-factory-boom/
https://eig.org/2023-business-formation-midyear/
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/14/1187864773/jesse-jackson-rainbow-push-retiring
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/us/politics/emmett-till-national-monument-biden.html
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/23/1189664409/emmett-till-national-monuments-biden
July 24, 2023
July 24, 2023
Today, Israel’s parliament passed a law that increases the power of the country’s right wing, headed by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel does not have a written constitution, and the prime minister’s ruling coalition is in control of both the executive and the legislative branches of government. The only check on them was the courts, which could overturn extreme laws that did not pass a “reasonableness standard,” which means they were not made according to a basic standard of fair and just policymaking.
The new law aims to take away that judicial power, and it passed by a vote of 64–0 after opponents walked out in protest. Netanyahu’s coalition has indicated it intends to continue to weaken the institutions that can check it. “This is just the beginning,” said National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
For 13 of the last 14 years, Netanyahu, who is under indictment for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, has been Israel’s prime minister. Israeli democracy has weakened under him, in part because, as Zach Beauchamp of Vox explains, his support for Israeli settlement of the West Bank has fed an aggressive right-wing nationalist movement.
Netanyahu was turned out of the position briefly by a fragile coalition in 2021 but returned to power in December 2022 at the head of a coalition made up of ultranationalist and ultrareligious parties. That coalition commands just 64 out of 120 seats, a bare majority, in the Knesset, Israel’s unicameral legislature, which passes laws and runs the government.
As soon as the coalition formed, it announced its intention of reforming the judiciary to weaken it significantly. It also backed taking over the West Bank and limiting the rights of Palestinians, LGBTQ individuals, and secular Israelis. In early July the government launched a massive attack on the refugee camp in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank that killed at least 8 Palestinians and wounded 50 others, saying the camp contained a militant command center.
Secular and center-left Jewish Israelis flooded the streets to protest as soon as the coalition announced its attack on the judiciary, and they have continued to protest for 29 weeks. Last Saturday, military leaders wrote to Netanyahu, blaming him personally for the damage done to the military and to Israel’s national security, and demanding that he stop. “We, veterans of Israel’s wars,… are raising a blaring red stop sign for you and your government.” Thousands of Israeli military reservists warned they would not report for duty if the judicial overhaul plan passed, dramatically weakening the country’s national security.
If the far-right coalition destroys the independence of the judiciary, it will have kneecapped the courts that could convict Netanyahu. It could also rig future elections by, for example, barring Arab parties from participating, thus cementing its hold on power.
The United States was the first nation to recognize Israel 75 years ago and has been a staunch supporter ever since, to the tune of nearly $4 billion a year. But the country’s rightward lurch is testing the strength of that bond.
Netanyahu has politicized the two countries’ bonds, openly siding with Trump and Trump Republicans, who continue to offer him their support. President Joe Biden has staunchly supported Israel for 50 years but recently has warned Netanyahu personally against pushing court reform, and last week he took the extraordinary step of inviting New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman to the Oval Office to make his message clear. Biden told Friedman that Israel’s lawmakers should not make fundamental changes to the country’s government without a popular consensus. The White House called today’s vote “unfortunate.”
Nonetheless, the administration has repeatedly emphasized that the U.S.-Israel relationship is “ironclad,” although White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that “the core of that relationship is…on democratic values, the shared democratic values and interests.” In the Daily Beast today, David Rothkopf argued that Israel has abandoned those democratic values and thus has ended “America’s special relationship with Israel.” That damage “cannot be easily undone,” he writes. “A relationship built on shared values cannot be easily restored once it is clear those values are no longer shared.”
Two former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, Dan Kurtzer and Martin Indyk, have called for the U.S. to cut military aid to that country, saying it is time to develop a new approach to the relationship. At the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof points out that Israel is a wealthy country and that U.S. aid is essentially “a backdoor subsidy to American military contractors.”
In order to stay in power and avoid his legal trouble, Netanyahu must cater to his country’s hard right, no matter the cost to the nation. In the Washington Post today, columnist Max Boot noted that Netanyahu is undermining Israeli democracy, risking Israel’s relationship with the U.S., and threatening to spark a violent uprising among West Bank Palestinians.
In the U.S. today, after Texas governor Greg Abbott responded to the Justice Department’s letter warning him his buoys and razor wire in the Rio Grande were illegal by telling the government he would see it in court, the Department of Justice filed a civil complaint against the state of Texas on the same grounds it cited in the letter: the deployment of barriers breaks the Rivers and Harbors Act. It also threatens to damage U.S. foreign policy by breaking international treaties with Mexico, and foreign policy is exclusively the responsibility of the federal government.
Today the Department of Justice also agreed to permit U.S. attorney David Weiss to testify before the House Judiciary Committee…but with a twist. Weiss is the Trump-appointed official in charge of investigating President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. In response to Weiss’s decision to charge Biden with two misdemeanor tax offenses and permit a pretrial diversion agreement with regard to a firearms charge, Trump Republicans have spread widely the accusations of two Internal Revenue Service investigators that Attorney General Merrick Garland tied Weiss’s hands. (As far as I can tell, these witnesses are not official whistleblowers, a designation that would mean the inspector general has agreed their accusations have merit.)
Weiss has publicly denied that accusation twice, but committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO), and Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) have demanded that Weiss, as well as more than a dozen other officials, testify before their committees.
But while the committee chairs have asked for closed-door testimony, the Justice Department today said it will make Weiss available for a public hearing, writing: “The Department believes it is strongly in the public interest for the American people and for Congress to hear directly from U.S. Attorney Weiss on these assertions and questions about his authority at a public hearing.” The Justice Department has proposed a number of dates for that hearing immediately after the House comes back from its August recess.
Russia continues to bomb the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, targeting agricultural infrastructure. Putin seems to have decided that if he can’t have Odesa, neither can anyone else. On Friday, Russia destroyed 100 tons of peas and 20 tons of barley in Odesa. Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian grain facilities just as the wheat harvest begins have spiked global grain prices and threatened food exports to Africa, which Russia has suggested it could take over itself. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have badly damaged the country’s agricultural capacity, a blow to global food supplies. Today, Klaus Iohannis, the president of Romania, said he “strongly condemn[s]” Russian attacks on grain transit after Russians hit the port of Reni on the Romanian border.
Russia’s attacks on the city have also badly damaged famous cultural sites, earning condemnation in “the strongest terms” from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Such attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure and cultural treasures are another attempt to swing the war in Russia’s direction.
And on Friday, Russian officials announced they are raising the maximum age that men can be conscripted into military service from 27 to 30 years old.
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/DanielSeidemann/status/1682749907499638784
https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/07-24-2023/weiss-dates-from-doj/
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-21-2023
https://www.vox.com/2023/7/24/23805532/israel-judicial-overhaul-reasonableness
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/24/biden-israel-netanyahu-judicial-change/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/opinion/biden-netanyahu-supreme-court-protests.html
https://twitter.com/FarnoushAmiri/status/1683607913380675589
https://twitter.com/KlausIohannis/status/1683404882319998978
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/03/palestinians-killed-israeli-strike-west-bank-jenin
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/world/middleeast/israel-reservists-resignations-judiciary.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/23/netanyahu-biden-israel-jenin-west-bank/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/24/global-food-prices-inflation-ukraine-00107864
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/21/ukraine-grain-harvest-00107212
https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-the-end-of-the-us-israel-special-relationship
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/19/israel-republican-democrat-partisan-racist-state/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/abbott-we-need-rio-grande-buoys-to-protect-from-invasion
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/opinion/israel-military-aid.html
July 23, 2023
July 23, 2023
“And it's root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win it’s a shame,”
And I went...
and...
took the night off
To go to a ball game!
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
July 22, 2023
July 22, 2023
The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.
But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.
Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).
The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.
In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.
This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.
Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.
Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.
Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).
It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).
That’s quite a tall order.
But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).
Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).
All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”
The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.
And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.
—
Notes:
July 21, 2023 (Friday)
On June 8 the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a lower court blocking the congressional districting map Alabama put into place after the 2020 census, agreeing that the map likely violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and ordering Alabama to redraw the map to include two majority-Black congressional districts.
Today the Alabama legislature passed a new congressional map that openly violates the Supreme Court’s order. By a vote of 75–28 in the House and 24–6 in the Senate, the legislature approved a map that includes only one Black-majority district.
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and many of the other members of Alabama’s congressional delegation had spoken to the Republicans in the state legislature about the map. Editor of the Alabama Reflector Brian Lyman reported that the map’s sponsor said he had spoken to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) too: “It was quite simple,” the sponsor said. McCarthy “said ‘I’m interested in keeping my majority.’ That was basically his conversation.”
Alabama governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed the bill into law.
Today, assistant U.S. attorney general Todd Kim and U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas Jaime Esparza wrote to Texas governor Greg Abbott and Texas interim attorney general Angela Colmenero warning that the actions of Texas in constructing a barrier in the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico “violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties.”
The floating barrier violates the Rivers and Harbors Act, which prohibits the construction of any obstructions to navigation in U.S. waters and requires permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before constructing any structure in such waters. Abbott ignored that law to construct a barrier that includes inflatable buoys and razor wire.
Mexico has also noted that barrier buoys that block the flow of water violate treaties between the U.S. and Mexico dating from 1944 and 1970, and has asked for the barriers to be removed. So has the owner of a Texas canoe and kayaking company, who says the buoys prevent him from conducting his business. And so have more than 80 House Democrats, who have noted Abbott’s “complete disregard for federal authority over immigration enforcement.”
Unless Texas promises by 2:00 Tuesday afternoon to remove the barrier immediately, the U.S. will sue.
Abbott has made fear of immigration central to his political messaging. He is now faced with the reality that Biden’s parole process for migrants at the southern border has dropped unlawful entries by almost 70% since it went into effect in early May, meaning that border agents have more time to patrol and are making it harder to enter the U.S. unlawfully.
Abbott’s barrier seems designed to keep his messaging amped up, accompanied as it is by allegations that troops from the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety have been ordered to push migrants, including children, back into the river and to withhold water from those suffering in the heat. There are also reports that migrants have been hurt by razor wire installed along the barrier.
Abbott responded to the DOJ’s letter: “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.”
Yesterday, on the same day that Shawn Boburg, Emma Brown, and Ann E. Marimow added to all the recent stories of Supreme Court corruption an exclusive story showing how then-leader of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo funded a “a coordinated and sophisticated public relations campaign to defend and celebrate” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to advance a bill that would require the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of ethics.
“We wouldn’t tolerate this [behavior] from a city council member or an alderman," committee chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) said. “It falls short of ethical standards we expect of any public servant in America. And yet the Supreme Court won't even acknowledge it’s a problem.” “The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act,” Durbin said, “would bring the Supreme Court Justices’ ethics requirement in line with every other federal judge and restore confidence in the Court.”
Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) disagreed that Congress could force the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code. “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” he said, although he agreed that the justices need “to get their house in order.”
Today, Dahlia Lithwick and Anat Shenker-Osorio noted in Slate that voters of both parties strongly support cleaning up the Supreme Court.
As signs of an indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election grow stronger, Trump has taken to threats. When asked about incarceration, Trump said earlier this week: “I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters, much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016. I think it would be very dangerous.”
His loyalists are working to undermine the law enforcement agencies that are supporting the rule of law. On July 11, 2023, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to chair of the Committee on Appropriations Kay Granger (R-TX) asking her to defund Biden’s immigration policies as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which investigates crime.
It is notable that, for all their talk about law and order, the Republican-dominated legislature of Alabama and the state’s Republican governor have just openly defied the U.S. Supreme Court, which is hardly an ideological enemy after Trump stacked it to swing to the far right.
The Republican governor of Texas is defying both federal law and international treaties. After rampant scandals, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court refuses to adopt an ethics system that might restore some confidence in their decisions. And, aided by his loyalists, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is threatening mob violence if he is held legally accountable for his behavior.
The genius of the American rebels in 1776 was their belief that a nation could be based not in the hereditary rights of a king but in a body of laws. “Where…is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. “I'll tell you Friend…that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
Democracy is based on the rule of law. Undermining the rule of law destroys the central feature of democracy and replaces that system of government with something else.
In Florida today, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set May 20, 2024, as the date for Trump’s trial for hiding and refusing to give up classified national security documents.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/08/us/texas-floating-barrier-migrants-lawsuit/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/07/12/us-mexico-border-migrant-crossings/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/21/abbott-doj-border-lawsuit-warning-00107650
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/07/20/leonard-leo-clarence-thomas-paoletta/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/key-takeaways-senate-hearing-supreme-court-ethics/story?id=99017432
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/07/supreme-court-ethics-reform-support-from-americans.html
https://www.ushistory.org/Paine/commonsense/sense4.htm
Twitter:
lyman_brian/status/1682482571567939584
July 20, 2023
July 20, 2023
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision not to attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, illustrates how fully his 2022 invasion of Ukraine has made him an international pariah. BRICS is an organization made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, all considered fast-growing economies that would dominate the global economy by 2050 at the time it began to organize in 2006.
A lot has changed since then.
Because the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes, specifically his regime’s deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, he was at risk of arrest and extradition if he went to South Africa. Although that country has maintained neutrality in the war, it signed on to the treaty governing the ICC and thus has an obligation to arrest and surrender those under indictment by the ICC.
After much speculation about whether he would attend the summit while he pressured South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to agree not to arrest him, yesterday Putin announced that by “mutual agreement” with Ramaphosa, he will not attend and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will go in his place. Alexandra Sharp of Foreign Policy noted that his inability to attend the summit shows how his position as an accused war criminal has isolated Putin and “highlights just how much the Russian leader’s global standing has changed thanks to his war on Ukraine.”
Also yesterday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced another security assistance package for Ukraine, worth $1.3 billion and including surface to air missile systems, mine-clearing equipment, fuel trucks, and tactical vehicles to tow, haul, and recover equipment. That matériel will take time to provide, but much of it signals an army retaking territory.
As if to demonstrate what power he has left, Putin’s forces attacked the key Ukrainian shipping ports of Mykolaiv and Odesa, destroying 60,000 tons of grain that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said was destined for Africa and Asia, including China. Then Putin announced that he was ending Russian participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative as of July 20 and would consider any ships that sailed to or from Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea a “Hostile Military Transport.” Putin’s declaration that he might target the civilian ships of foreign powers threatened to escalate the war, but he quickly backed down on that threat today. Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. said Russia is not preparing to attack civilian ships.
The Black Sea grain deal, which facilitates the export of Ukrainian grain to the world market so long as the ships travel in certain channels, already gave Russia more influence over international shipping than its 10% of the Black Sea coastline warranted. And, to maintain that control, Russia planted sea mines in the waters around Ukrainian ports outside the safe channels.
Now the White House has warned that U.S. officials have information that Russia has added more mines in those waters with the intention of blaming Ukraine if those mines cause damage to foreign ships.
There are (at least) three key aspects of this announcement. First, Putin is threatening vulnerable countries with starvation and trying to jack up grain prices around the world, which will hit all countries but primarily poorer ones. The United Kingdom’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Barbara Woodward, pointed out that 33 million tons of grain have been exported under the grain deal, and that the primary beneficiaries have been Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia.
Second, he was daring the other countries on the Black Sea, three of which belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to call his bluff.
Third, he is trying to destroy Ukrainian shipping infrastructure to hamstring its post-war future. Odesa is a historic and fabled city; it is also the key to shipping grain out of Ukraine. Capturing it, with its symbolic and practical value, was likely Putin’s primary goal in the first place. His willingness to destroy the city seems to indicate that he has given up on claiming it.
In response, Ukrainian forces began to use the so-called cluster munitions the U.S. provided earlier this month, firing the weapons at the Russian troops in Ukraine. Cluster munitions explode over a target, blanketing a large area with deadly smaller munitions. They are banned in more than 120 countries because those smaller munitions often hit the ground unexploded and lie there until civilians run across them, with deadly results.
Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. have not banned the weapons, and Ukraine asked the U.S. to provide them for use within Ukraine, against Russian troops. Biden did so, after months of debate within the White House and strong disagreement from those who want the weapons banned altogether. President Biden eventually decided to send the cluster munitions, apparently in part because the areas of Ukraine where they would be deployed are already uninhabitable because of Russian mines and in part because Ukrainians themselves requested the weapons to throw out the Russian invaders, who have been using cluster munitions against Ukrainian civilians.
“Of course it’s a tragedy, but everything right now is a tragedy,” former defense minister of Ukraine Andriy Zagorodnyuk told Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo about using the munitions. “So the question is how to end the tragedy and, unfortunately, the only way so far to get peace is to win the peace.”
The U.S. Treasury and the U.S. State Department today announced additional sanctions on companies that have given Russia access to products that feed the war, provide revenue from minerals and mining, give it access to the international financial system, or provide military technology.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/19/world/putin-brics-summit-south-africa-intl/index.html
https://link.foreignpolicy.com/view/64427b421a7f1f1e29e10678j4o8k.11ju/b0aa6a9e
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1636
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/world/europe/odesa-ukraine-putin-russia.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/world/europe/odesa-ukraine-war-russia.html
https://cepa.org/article/time-to-end-russias-black-sea-piracy/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/20/cluster-munitions-ukraine-war-russia/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/cluster-bombs-what-the-us-debate-looks-like-from-ukraine
Twitter:
komadovsky/status/1681711912935882762
JuliaDavisNews/status/1681704224504135680
NSC_Spox/status/1680961375164682242
sentdefender/status/1681704119654858752
July 19, 2023
A little more than two years ago, on July 9, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order to promote competition in the U.S. economy. Echoing the language of his predecessors, he said, “competition keeps the economy moving and keeps it growing. Fair competition is why capitalism has been the world’s greatest force for prosperity and growth…. But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back.”
In that speech, Biden deliberately positioned himself in our country’s long history of opposing economic consolidation. Calling out both Roosevelt presidents—Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw part of the Progressive Era, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who oversaw the New Deal—Biden celebrated their attempt to rein in the power of big business, first by focusing on the abuses of those businesses, and then by championing competition.
Biden promised to enforce antitrust laws, interpreting them in the way they had been understood traditionally. Like his progressive predecessors, he believed antitrust laws should prevent large entities from swallowing up markets, consolidating their power so they could raise prices and undercut workers’ rights. Traditionally, those advocating antitrust legislation wanted to protect economic competition, believing that such competition would promote innovation, protect workers, and keep consumer prices down.
In the 1980s, government officials threw out that understanding and replaced it with a new line of thinking advanced by former solicitor general of the United States Robert Bork. He claimed that the traditional understanding of antitrust legislation was economically inefficient because it restricted the ways businesses could operate. Instead, he said, consolidation of industries was fine so long as it promoted economic efficiencies that, at least in the short term, cut costs for consumers. While antitrust legislation remained on the books, the understanding of what it meant changed dramatically.
Reagan and his people advanced Bork’s position, abandoning the idea that capitalism fundamentally depends on competition. Industries consolidated, and by the time Biden took office his people estimated the lack of competition was costing a median U.S. household as much as $5000 a year. Two years ago, Biden called the turn toward Bork’s ideas “the wrong path,” and vowed to restore competition in an increasingly consolidated marketplace. With his executive order in July 2021, he established a White House Competition Council to direct a whole-of-government approach to promoting competition in the economy.
This shift gained momentum in part because of what appeared to be price gouging as the shutdowns of the pandemic eased. The five largest ocean container shipping companies, for example, made $300 billion in profits in 2022, compared to $64 billion the year before, which itself was a higher number than in the past. Those higher prices helped to drive inflation.
The baby formula shortage that began in February 2022 also highlighted the problems of concentration in an industry. Just four companies controlled 90% of the baby formula market in the U.S., and when one of them shut down production at a plant that appeared to be contaminated, supplies fell dramatically across the country. The administration had to start flying millions of bottles of formula in from other countries under Operation Fly Formula, a solution that suggested something was badly out of whack.
The administration’s focus on restoring competition had some immediate effects. It worked to get a bipartisan reform to ocean shipping through Congress, permitting greater oversight of the shipping industry by the Federal Maritime Commission. That law was part of the solution that brought ocean-going shipping prices down 80% from their peak. It worked with the Food and Drug Administration to make hearing aids available over the counter, cutting costs for American families. It also has worked to get rid of the non-compete clauses which made it hard for about 30 million workers to change jobs. And it began cracking down on junk fees, add-ons to rental car contracts, ticket sales, banking services, and so on, getting those fees down an estimated $5 billion a year.
“Folks are tired of being played for suckers,” Biden said. “[I]t’s about basic fairness.”
Today, the administration announced new measures to promote competition in the economy. The Department of Agriculture will work with attorneys general in 31 states and Washington, D.C. to enforce antitrust and consumer protection laws in food and agriculture. They will make sure that large corporations can’t fix food prices or price gouge in stores in areas where they have a monopoly. They will work to expand the nation’s processing capacity for meat and poultry, and are also promoting better access to markets for all agricultural producers and keeping seeds open-source.
Having cracked down on junk fees in consumer products, the administration is now turning to junk fees in rental housing, fees like those required just to file a rental application or fees to be able to pay your rent online.
The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission today released new merger guidelines to protect the country from mass layoffs, higher prices, and fewer options for consumers and workers. Biden used the example of hospital mergers, which have led to extraordinary price hikes, to explain why new guidelines are necessary.
The agencies reached out for public comment to construct 13 guidelines that seek to prevent mergers that threaten competition or tend to create monopolies. They declare that agencies must address the effect of proposed mergers on “all market participants and any dimension of competition, including for workers.”
Now that the guidelines are proposed, officials are asking the public to provide comments on them. The comment period will end on September 18.
One of the reporters on the press call about the new initiatives noted that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has accused the Biden administration of regulatory overreach, exactly as Bork outlined in a famous 1978 book introducing his revision of U.S. antitrust policy. An answer by a senior administration official highlighted a key element of the struggle over business consolidation that is rarely discussed and has been key to demands to end such consolidation since the 1870s.
The official noted that small businesses, especially those in rural areas, are quite happy to see consolidation broken up, because it gives them an opportunity to get into fields that previously had been closed to them. In fact, small businesses have boomed under this administration; there were 10.5 million small business applications in its first two years and those numbers continue strong.
This is the same pattern the U.S. saw during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century and during the New Deal of the 1930s. In both of those eras, established business leaders insisted that government regulation was bad for the economy and that any attempts to limit their power came from workers who were at least flirting with socialism. But in fact entrepreneurs and small businesses were always part of the coalition that wanted such regulation. They needed it to level the playing field enough to let them participate.
The effects of this turnaround in the government’s approach to economic consolidation is a big deal. It is already having real effects on our lives, and offers to do more: saving consumers money, protecting workers’ wages and safety, and promoting small businesses, especially in rural areas. It’s another part of this administration’s rejection of the top-down economy that has shaped the country since 1981.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/business/shipping-container-shortage.html
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-ftc-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines
https://www.justice.gov/atr/d9/2023-draft-merger-guidelines
July 18, 2023
July 18, 2023
“I approve this message.”
Joe Biden’s Twitter account put that line over an ad using the words of Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Turning Points Action Conference speech from last weekend, in which she set out to tear down the president’s policies but ended up making him sound terrific.
The description she intended to be derogatory—that Biden “had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on”—was such an argument in Biden’s favor that the Biden-Harris campaign used it to advertise what the Democratic administration stands for: “[p]rograms to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions.”
Generally, Biden and Harris have so far made the case for their reelection by meeting with voters in their home districts, emphasizing job growth and infrastructure investment in those districts, seemingly trying to demonstrate—without fanfare—that a well-run Democratic government can help ordinary Americans. But Greene’s misfire was just too good not to highlight. The programs she was denigrating are, in fact, enormously popular.
Biden has generally stayed out of the headlines that involve the 2024 election, giving Republicans free rein to define themselves for the American people.
That definition became clearer this morning, when former president Trump wrote on the right-wing Truth Social network that the Department of Justice’s special counsel Jack Smith has issued him a target letter associated with the investigation into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A target letter usually means that prosecutors have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime. It offered Trump four days to appear before the grand jury to tell his side of the story, an offer Trump is expected to refuse.
Then, it is likely that he will be indicted.
Trump reacted exactly as one would expect, called Smith “deranged,” and claiming his own legal troubles were political: an attempt on the part of President Biden to eliminate his chief 2024 rival. (There is no sign that Biden has touched the investigation, but of course Trump tried to eliminate Biden in 2020 by pushing Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s work with Ukrainian company Burisma.)
Trump harped on the idea that the investigation into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election is “A COMPLETE AND TOTAL WEAPONIZATION OF LAW ENFORCEMENT,” an accusation echoed by Trump loyalists Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom were also involved in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) also echoed the accusation that the target letter is a sign of political “weaponization” of government, prompting Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) to respond: “As Speaker, you are expected to uphold the rule of law. A target letter does not reveal what evidence the grand jury saw, nor what all the charges might be. Attacking a potential indictment before seeing the evidence and charges is irresponsible.”
But if Trump received the target letter on Sunday, why did he complain about it only today?
That delay might have had something to do with another legal issue: today’s hearing about the national security documents case, overseen by Judge Aileen Cannon. One of the issues to be discussed at that hearing was setting a date for the trial. The Department of Justice wants to go to trial in December; Trump wants to delay it until after the 2024 election.
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that today’s target letter changes the calculations for the documents trial because no matter what Cannon decides, it seems likely that Trump will face another federal trial in Washington, D.C., over the events surrounding January 6, 2021. The Washington, D.C., trials for those involved in the events of January 6, 2021, have moved forward with few delays.
This week’s bad legal news for Trump did not end there.
On Friday of last week, Trump’s lawyers tried to stop Georgia’s probe into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state. They asked the court to disqualify Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, who has been investigating that attempt, and to stop Willis from using any of the material gathered by the grand jury investigating the case. Yesterday, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously rejected his petition, allowing the probe to go forward.
Then, today, Michigan’s attorney general Dana Nessel charged sixteen fake electors who signed fake certificates claiming that Trump had won Michigan’s electoral votes in 2020 with felonies: forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, election law forgery, conspiracy to commit election law forgery, publishing a counterfeit record, and conspiring to publish a counterfeit record.
The sixteen Republicans met in the basement of the state Republican Party’s headquarters and signed fake documents claiming that they were the state’s legitimate electors and that Trump had won the state. Their actions were part of a plan to claim that the electoral votes of certain states were “contested,” allowing then–vice president Mike Pence to reject the votes of those states and throw the election to Trump.
The fake electors attested they were “the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president of the United States of America for the state of Michigan,” Nessel said. “That was a lie. They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it.” “The false electors' actions undermine the public's faith in the integrity of our elections and not only violated the spirit of the laws enshrining and defending our democracy, but we believe also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan and peaceably transfer power in America,” Nessel said. “This plan, to reject the will of the voters and undermine democracy, was fraudulent and legally baseless.”
Text messages at the time show that the sixteen were “all asked to keep silent [so] as to not draw attention to what the other states were doing similar to ours!” One of those charged was former co-chair of the state Republican committee, Meshawn Maddock, who called the charges “political persecution.”
Legal analyst Renato Mariotti noted that the charges against the sixteen fake electors send a powerful message for those at the state level who might consider abetting Trump in the future. Those fake electors aren’t part of Trump’s inner circle who might get some kind of a reward for their trouble. They are just party operatives who are facing an expensive, stressful, and humiliating experience that could lead to hefty fines or imprisonment. Their example might well make others think carefully before they sign on to similar plans.
Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today that the lines of the 2024 election are coming clearer. Trump’s many legal troubles simply strengthen the loyalty of his base, making his nomination for the Republican presidential candidacy even more likely. But voters in the general election are unlikely to rally to someone facing multiple indictments in several different cases, especially ones related to the attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, which horrified most Americans.
The Republican Party is now “handcuffed to Donald Trump,” Marshall writes.
President Biden’s policy of focusing on his job while letting the Republicans define themselves might be a smart strategy.
—
Notes:
https://www.rawstory.com/georgia-supreme-court-rejects-trump/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/14/politics/donald-trump-fani-willis-georgia-grand-jury/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/18/politics/michigan-fake-electors
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/michigan-ag-hits-16-fake-electors-with-felony-charges
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-full-2024-picture-finally-comes-into-view
Twitter:
joebiden/status/1681424737384435713
RonFilipkowski/status/1681325293779275778
AWeissmann_/status/1681305658187223040
lawofruby/status/1681313655558914049
tedlieu/status/1681312292464660482
renato_mariotti/status/1681466573754703874
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1332 followers
