Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 151
June 30, 2023
June 29, 2023
Today the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Students for Fair Admissions is an organization designed to fight against affirmative action in college admissions, and today it achieved its goal: the Supreme Court decided that policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that consider race as a factor in admissions are unconstitutional because they violate the guarantee of equal protection before the law, established by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The deciding votes were 6 to 2 in the case of Harvard—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself because she had been a member of Harvard’s board of overseers—and 6 to 3 in the case of the University of North Carolina.
In the case of the two schools at the center of this Supreme Court decision, admissions officers initially evaluated students on a number of categories. Harvard used six: academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support, personal, and overall. Then, after the officers identified an initial pool of applicants who were all qualified for admission, they cut down the list to a final class. At Harvard, those on the list to be cut were evaluated on four criteria: legacy status, recruited athlete status, financial aid eligibility, and race. Today, the Supreme Court ruled that considering race as a factor in that categorical fashion is unconstitutional.
The court did not rule that race could not be considered at all. In the majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
How much this will matter for colleges and universities is unclear. Journalist James Fallows pointed out that there are between 3,500 and 5,500 colleges in the U.S. and all but 100 of them admit more than 50% of the students who apply. Only about 70 admit fewer than a third of all applicants. That is, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, “the great majority of schools, where most Americans get their postsecondary education, admit most of the people who apply to them.”
The changing demographics of the country are also changing student populations. As an example, in 2022, more than 33% of the students at the University of Texas at Austin, which automatically admits any Texas high school student in the top 6% of their class, were from historically underrepresented populations. And universities that value diversity may continue to try to create a diverse student body.
But in the past, when schools have eliminated affirmative action, Black student numbers have dropped off, both because of changes in admission policies and because Black students have felt unwelcome in those schools. This matters to the larger pattern of American society. As Black and Brown students are cut off from elite universities, they are also cut off from the pipeline to elite graduate schools and jobs.
More is at stake in this case than affirmative action in university admissions. The decision involves the central question of whether the law is colorblind or whether it can be used to fix long-standing racial inequality. Does the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 to enable the federal government to overrule state laws that discriminated against Black Americans, allow the courts to enforce measures to address historic discrimination?
Those joining the majority in the decision say no. They insist that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War intended only that it would make men of all races equal before the law, and that considering race in college admissions undermines that principle by using race in a negative manner, involving racial stereotyping (by considering race by category), and lacking an endpoint. “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” the majority opinion reads.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that affirmative action actually made racial tensions worse because it “highlights our racial differences with pernicious effect,” prolonging “the asserted need for racial discrimination.” He wrote: “under our Constitution, race is irrelevant.” “The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny,” Thomas wrote. “And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments.”
Those justices who dissented—Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—pointed to the profound racial discrimination that continued after the Civil War and insist that the law has the power to address that discrimination in order to achieve the equality promised by the Fourteenth Amendment. “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality,” Sotomayor’s opinion begins. “The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.”
In her concurring opinion concerning the UNC case, Jackson noted that “[g]ulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations. Every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles—the ‘self-evident’ truth that all of us are created equal.”
If this fight sounds political, it should. It mirrors the current political climate in which right-wing activists reject the idea of systemic racism that the U.S. has acknowledged and addressed in the law since the 1950s. They do not believe that the Fourteenth Amendment supports the civil rights legislation that tries to guarantee equality for historically marginalized populations, and in today’s decision the current right-wing majority on the court demonstrated that it is willing to push that political agenda at the expense of settled law. As recently as 2016, the court reaffirmed that affirmative action, used since the 1960s, is constitutional. Today’s court just threw that out.
The split in the court focused on history, and the participants’ anger was palpable and personal. Thomas claimed that “[a]s [Jackson] sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today.” Her solution, he writes, “is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics…. I strongly disagree.”
Jackson responded that “Justice Thomas’s prolonged attack…responds to a dissent I did not write in order to assail an admissions program that is not the one UNC has crafted.”
She noted that Black Americans had always simply wanted the same right to take care of themselves that white Americans had enjoyed, but it had been denied them. She recounted the nation’s long history of racial discrimination and excoriated the majority for pretending it didn’t exist. “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
“Today, the Supreme Court upended decades of precedent that enabled America’s colleges and universities to build vibrant diverse environments where students are prepared to lead and learn from one another,” the Biden administration said in a statement, warning that “the Court’s decision threatens to move the country backwards.” In a speech to reporters, Biden called for new standards that take into consideration the adversity—including poverty—a student has overcome when selecting among qualified candidates, a system that would work “for everyone… from Appalachia to Atlanta and far beyond.”
“While the Court can render a decision, it cannot change what America stands for.”
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Notes:
https://www.collegetransitions.com/college-selectivity/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/29/affirmative-action-scotus-decision-full-text-pdf/
Twitter:
AshaRangappa_/status/1674437450851049472
neal_katyal/status/1674422760519659520
June 29, 2023
June 28, 2023
In Chicago today, President Joe Biden gave a historic speech at the Old Post Office Building downtown. In it, he was crystal clear that he has launched a new economic vision for the United States to stand against that of today’s Republicans. As he has said since he took office, he intends to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up instead of just the top down.”
His vision, he said, “is a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now.”
That theory is “trickle-down economics,” the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations while shrinking public investment in infrastructure and public education will nurture the economy. Under that theory the most important metric was a company’s bottom line, Biden pointed out, so companies reduced costs by taking factories and supply chains overseas to find cheap labor, leaving “entire towns and communities…hollowed out.” It also meant cutting taxes, which led to dramatic cuts in public investments in infrastructure, research, social programs and so on, with the idea that concentrating money in a few hands would prompt private investment in the economy. That investment would, the theory went, provide more jobs and enable everyone to prosper.
This is the worldview that the Republicans have embraced since 1980 and that, Biden said, has “failed the middle class. It failed America. It blew up the deficit. It increased inequity. And it weakened…our infrastructure. It stripped the dignity, pride, and hope out of communities one after another…. People working as hard as ever couldn’t get ahead because it’s harder to buy a home, pay for a college education, start a business, retire with dignity. [For] the first time in a generation, the path of the middle class seemed out of reach,” Biden said.
Biden came into office determined to reverse this policy by investing in the American people rather than in tax cuts. With the help of a Democratic Congress, the president backed legislation that invests in infrastructure, repairing our long-neglected roads and bridges, and in supply chains and manufacturing. Rather than scaring off private investment, as the trickle-down theory argued, that public investment has attracted more than $490 billion of private money into new industries. Manufacturing is booming. Together, infrastructure and manufacturing have created new jobs that pay well.
Central to Biden’s vision is the idea that the prosperity of the United States rests on its working people, rather than its elites. In Chicago he emphasized his administration’s focus on training and education, as well as its emphasis on the trades and unions. He also emphasized economic competition, noting that business consolidation has stifled innovation, reduced wages, made supply chains vulnerable, and raised costs for consumers.
To reduce the deficit that has exploded in the past decades and to pay for new programs, Biden reiterated the need for fair taxes on the wealthy and corporations after decades of cuts. “Big Oil made $200 billion last year and got a…$30 billion tax break,” he said, while billionaires pay an average of 8% in taxes, less than “a schoolteacher, a firefighter, or a cop.” He called for “making the tax code fair for everyone, making the wealthy and the super-wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share, without raising taxes at all on the middle class.”
“We’re not going to continue down the trickle-down path as long as I’m president,” Biden said. “This is the moment we are finally going to make a break…. Here’s the simple truth about trickle-down economics: It didn’t represent the best of American capitalism, let alone America. It represented a moment where we walked away… from… how this country was built…. Bidenomics is just another way of saying: Restore the American Dream because it worked before. It’s rooted in what’s always worked best in this country: investing in America, investing in Americans. Because when we invest in our people, we strengthen the middle class, we see the economy grow. That benefits all Americans. That’s the American Dream.”
Biden often points to the New Deal of the 1930s as his inspiration. In that era, under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Congress responded to the economic crash spurred by unregulated capitalism by passing a wide range of laws that regulated business and protected workers, provided a basic social safety net including Social Security, and promoted infrastructure.
In his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, FDR condemned the policies of his predecessors that turned the government over to businessmen, declaring that “the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.” He pledged to give the American people a “new deal” to replace the one that had led them into the Depression, and to lead a “crusade to restore America to its own people.”
But FDR was not the first president to see ordinary Americans as the heart of the nation and to call for a government that protected them, rather than an economic elite. FDR’s distant relative Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, made a similar argument as president thirty years earlier. Responding to a world in which a few wealthy industrialists—nicknamed “robber barons”—monopolized politics and the economy, he called for a “square deal” for the American people.
“[W]hen I say that I am for the square deal,” TR said in 1910, “I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.” He called for conservation of natural resources, business regulation, higher wages, and “social” legislation to create a “new nationalism” that would rebuild the country. Overall, he wanted “a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.”
But TR didn’t invent the idea of government investment in and protection of ordinary Americans either. In his New Nationalism speech, TR pointed back to his revered predecessor, Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the government must serve the interests of ordinary people rather than those of elite southern enslavers. When South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate in 1858 that society was made up of “mudsills” overseen by their betters, who directed their labor and, gathering the wealth they produced, used it to advance the country, Lincoln was outraged.
Society moved forward not at the hands of a wealthy elite, he countered, but through the hard work of ordinary men who constantly innovated. A community based on the work and wisdom of farmers, he said in 1859, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” In office, Lincoln turned the government from protecting enslavers to advancing the interests of workingmen, including government support for higher education.
Biden has recently embraced the term “Bidenomics,” a term coined by his opponents who insist that their embrace of tax cuts is the only way to create a healthy economy. But Bidenomics is simply a new word for a time-honored American idea.
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Notes:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/joe-biden-tries-to-change-the-narrative-on-the-economy
https://www.americanantiquarian.org/Manuscripts/cottonisking.html
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm
June 28, 2023
How History Shapes the Present
The mechanics of finishing a book are a lot less interesting than it seems like they ought to be. The upshot of that grinding away is that since I finally wrapped the book I have been starving for new ideas. Not so much new facts— I get those every day— but new theories and new fields.
One of the first things I picked up was Mary Beard’s S. P. Q. R.: A H…
Some News from HCR
Hi Folks:
I have taken it easy for a couple of weeks as I recovered from the new book, and I am now feeling dangerously chipper.
Some of you have noticed that in the past I have occasionally snuck paywalled pieces onto the Letters from an American homepage under the heading “On My Mind,” but have not emailed them both because I loathed the idea of clutte…
June 27, 2023
June 27, 2023
Today, in Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court by a vote of 6–3 decided against the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine” that would have done away with the concept that the popular vote should decide elections.
People who embrace that doctrine argue that the elections clause of the U.S. Constitution turned over to the legislatures alone the power to arrange federal elections, even if their choices violate state constitutions. The clause reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
Those embracing the independent state legislature doctrine tend to ignore the part of the clause that comes after the semicolon, but they also like the clause in the Constitution that says, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.”
Their idea that state legislatures can do as they wish to organize federal elections flies in the face of what we know of the beliefs of the men who wrote the Constitution, but it caught on in 2015, when Republicans wanted to get rid of an independent redistricting commission in Arizona. The idea that legislatures can pick electors as they wish is the plan Trump and his allies pushed to keep him in power in 2020: they claimed that Republican state legislatures could throw out the will of the people and send electors for Trump to Congress rather than the Biden electors for whom the majority voted.
Moore v. Harper came from North Carolina, where the legislature drew a dramatically partisan gerrymander after the 2020 census. The state supreme court rejected the map, saying it violated the state constitution, and ordered it replaced. Republicans in the state legislature petitioned the Supreme Court, arguing that the state courts could not stop the legislature’s plan. The Supreme Court allowed the map to stand for the 2022 election, but today it said that the legislature is not solely in control of elections; it must follow the rules of the state’s courts, which are based on the state’s constitution.
Revered conservative judge J. Michael Luttig has been trying for months to sound the alarm that the independent state legislature doctrine would enable Republicans to steal the 2024 election. Today, he tweeted: “The Supreme Court's long-awaited decision in Moore v. Harper is a resounding, reverberating victory for American Democracy.”
On June 8 the Supreme Court decided another case involving gerrymandering, Allen v. Milligan, from Alabama. In that case, plaintiffs argued that the redistricting after the 2020 census, which showed about a 4% shift from white people to Black people in the state, discriminated against Black voters by “packing and cracking” (creating one majority Black district and diluting the rest of the Black vote by spreading it out). A district court agreed and ordered a new map with two majority-Black districts. Then the Supreme Court stepped in and left the discriminatory map in place.
On June 8, by a 5–4 vote, the court agreed that the map probably violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protects the right to vote by trying to make sure eligible voters aren’t denied access to the vote on account of race. The map will have to be redrawn.
Marc Elias of Democracy Docket notes that there are currently 28 active state court cases challenging congressional maps and state laws concerning federal elections, including 7 that involve state constitutional challenges to congressional maps in which charges of partisan gerrymandering are central. Madeleine Greenberg and Rachel Selzer, also of Democracy Docket, note that as of June 12, there were 32 active lawsuits in 10 states under Section 2 of the VRA.
These recent decisions are a significant step toward stopping extremist legislatures from deciding our elections, but it is worth noting that the cases came up before the 2022 election. Court stays on the challenges to the now-rejected maps meant that those maps were in place during the election, quite possibly swinging the House of Representatives to the Republicans.
In other news, the shocking tape of former president Trump showing unauthorized people a secret national security document, released last night by CNN, has horrified listeners and rattled Trump enough that he first called on supporters to “EXPLAIN TO THE DERANGED, TRUMP HATING JACK SMITH, HIS FAMILY, AND HIS FRIENDS” that he had not committed a crime, a statement that many interpreted as a threat against special counsel Jack Smith, his family, and his associates.
Trump’s tone changed today as he claimed that he didn’t have a secret document in his hands when he said he did. “I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado. I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.” Instead, he said, when he used the word “plans” with the people in his office, he meant “plans of buildings…plans of a golf course.”
While Trump’s immediate concern appears to be about the documents case, the investigation of the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election is still underway. We learned today that Special Counsel Smith will interview Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger tomorrow. Trump called Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, to cajole him into changing the election results to say that Trump won in Georgia, rather than losing by more than 11,000 votes. Raffensperger recorded the call. We learned as well that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has also been interviewed in the investigation.
Trump’s troubles are growing serious enough that House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested on CNBC this morning that Trump might not be the best candidate for the Republican Party in 2024. But then, revealing Trump’s continuing support in the party, he promptly backtracked to say that Trump is the “strongest political opponent” against President Biden.
Meanwhile, the picture of just what is happening in Russia remains unclear, although observers almost universally say the rapid advance of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner forces toward Moscow this weekend before they turned aside voluntarily illustrated Putin’s weakness. What is crystal clear, though, is that those governments that have cast their fortunes with Putin are now concerned.
Countries near Russia are reevaluating Putin’s power; countries in Africa, too, are recalculating. The Wagner Group has been supporting African strongmen, and Philip Obaji Jr. in the Daily Beast reported Sunday that cabinet officers in the Central African Republic (CAR), whose leadership depends on the Wagner group, were calling each other over the weekend with concern. An advisor to CAR president Faustin-Archange Touadéra told Obaji, “The Russians play a very important role in the security architecture of our country and if they are forced to pull out completely, things could become messy…. The last thing the government [in CAR] wants to see at the moment is the exit of Russia from the country.”
The Wagner Group manages a CAR shell company known as Diamville, and today the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on it and Midas Ressources, another CAR firm associated with Prigozhin. It also sanctioned Industrial Resources General Trading, a Dubai-based company that has funded Prigozhin, as well as a Russian firm and a Russian national working in Mali to force those standing against the Wagner Group out of Africa. “The Wagner Group exploits insecurity around the world, committing atrocities and criminal acts that threaten the safety, good governance, prosperity, and human rights of nations, as well as exploiting their natural resources,” the Treasury said. The sanctions are designed to cut off the illicit gold trade and thus stop the flow of money to the Wagner Group.
China, too, has reason to be concerned about Putin’s apparent weakness. As Daniel B. Baer noted in Foreign Policy, Putin’s political power has centered around his own personal power, an approach Chinese president Xi Jinping has also favored. Baer points out that “Xi generally does not want Russia to put on display, for all the world to see, the risks of building a centralized authoritarian regime on an autocrat’s highly personalized power.”
When President Biden gave his first speech to the State Department in February 2021, he made it clear that he intended “to rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back the authoritarianism’s advance.” And, he said, such an effort depended on the successful defense of democracy at home.
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/27/opinions/gop-blueprint-to-steal-the-2024-election-luttig/index.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/pennsylvania-act-77-mail-in-voting-challenge/
https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/a-dangerous-legal-theory-is-rejected/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf
https://twitter.com/judgeluttig/status/1673726425072013312
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/us/politics/mccarthy-trump-candidacy.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-jack-smith-family-attacks_n_649b57ace4b0cd6f7df0aea3
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1581
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/politics/rudy-giuliani-special-counsel-meeting/index.html
June 26, 2023
June 26, 2023
Today the Biden administration launched its “Investing in America” tour with the announcement of a $40 billion investment to make sure everyone in the United States has access to affordable, reliable high-speed internet by the end of the decade. Comparing the effort to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act during the New Deal, the White House noted today that 8.5 million households and small businesses live in areas without the infrastructure for high-speed internet, while millions more have limited or unreliable options (like me!). High-speed internet is no longer a luxury, the administration points out; it is not possible to participate equally in jobs, school, or healthcare, or to stay connected to family and friends without it (they didn’t mention shopping, but that’s an issue, now, too).
The Rural Electrification Act, which connected almost all Americans to the electrical grid, was the federal government’s demonstration that all Americans should move together into the modern world. In the 1930s that meant access to the infrastructure that could power refrigerators, radios, and, for farmers, technologies like milking machines. It also meant jobs, and lots of them, for the people running the wires and installing new outlets and fixtures in homes across the country.
The new internet investment mirrors that effort. It will provide more than $107 million to every state, with the top ten allocations going to Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington. It will also support both service jobs and manufacturing jobs, since the materials for the project will come from the United States.
For the next three weeks, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, members of the cabinet, and other senior administration officials will cross the country to talk about Biden’s economic agenda. On Wednesday, President Biden will be in Chicago to talk about “Bidenomics,” his plan to boost the middle class by investing directly in measures that will rebuild it, a vision that echoes FDR rather than the modern Republicans, who argue that cutting taxes will enable investors to amass wealth that they will then reinvest in the economy.
Bidenomics has strong numbers behind it. The U.S. has enjoyed the strongest post-pandemic recovery of any other major economy, with the highest level of growth and the lowest inflation. In early 2021 the Congressional Budget Office projected that it would take until 2026 for unemployment to fall below 4%, a number the U.S. actually achieved in 2021. The economy has added more than 13 million jobs since Biden took office, including almost 800,000 manufacturing jobs.
And, Biden’s people argue, the American people like this agenda. Polling from late last year says that 76% of voters like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law rebuilding our roads and bridges, and 72% of voters support the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen supply chains and promote domestic manufacture of semiconductors.
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said of the internet investment today: “Whether it’s connecting people to the digital economy, manufacturing fiber-optic cable in America, or creating good paying jobs building Internet infrastructure in the states, the investments we’re announcing will increase our competitiveness and spur economic growth across the country for years to come.”
President Biden has been very clear that the U.S. and its allies had nothing to do with Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion against Russian military leaders over the weekend, “[W]e had to make sure we gave Putin no excuse — let me emphasize, we gave Putin no excuse — to blame this on the West, to blame this on NATO,” he said. “We made clear that we were not involved. We had nothing to do with it. This was part of a struggle within the Russian system.”
While what, exactly, is going on in Russia remains unclear, there is no doubt that the events of the weekend have left Russian president Vladimir Putin badly weakened.
And then, as if in another timeline, CNN tonight published the audiotape of former president Trump talking in July 2021 about a classified document concerning Iran with a writer and others working on a biography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows who did not have security clearances. In it, Trump says he cannot declassify the document since he is no longer president– undercutting his argument that he could declassify anything he wished at any time— and made it clear he knew he should not be showing the document to the people in the room, telling them it was “off the record” and “highly confidential.”
Journalist Garrett Graff, who wrote a history of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the one that led Nixon to resign under threat of impeachment and conviction, listened to the tape and tweeted: “Speaking as a Watergate historian, there’s nowhere on thousands of hours of Nixon tapes where Nixon makes any comment as clear, as clearly illegal, and as clearly self-aware as this Trump tape.”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/09/biden-world-debt-ceiling-salesmanship-00101116
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000188-f52b-d32e-ada8-f5bf90ca0000
https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1673487276708331521
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/26/politics/trump-classified-documents-audio/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/26/politics/trump-classified-documents-audio/index.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-wagner-group-russia-mutiny/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/putin-projects-nothing-but-weakness
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:
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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:
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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:
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